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Good Morning. My grandfather was a chaplain in the German Army on the Western Front for the duration of World War One. He never dreamt that scarcely twenty years later he’d be a refugee in London, owing his life to the very country against which he had fought. That’s why I was so moved to read about The Western Front Way, a thousand-kilometre ‘Path for Peace, Wellbeing and Remembrance’ following what was once no man’s land, from Belgium to the French-Swiss border. The historian Sir Anthony Seldon helped establish it, inspired by discovering a letter home written by a British officer, Alexander Gillespie. Such a path would make a fitting memorial, Gillespie suggested. Soon afterwards, he was killed. The route is described as Via Pax and Sacra, a sacred pilgrimage to peace for all nations. It reminds me of Wilfred Owen’s poem Strange Meeting, in which he imagines an after-death encounter with the enemy he killed. ‘Here is no cause to mourn,’ he tells his former adversary: “None,” said that other, “save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also…” It’s fine to have a memorial. But if the new path can teach us to treasure all life, before we turn to hate, it will realise an even greater purpose. We’ve entered Elul, the Jewish month of reconciliation. The rabbis, loving word-plays, read the name as an acronym for ‘each to their neighbour.’ They had in mind Rabbi Akiva’s declaration that love of our neighbour is the heart of Torah. But his colleague Ben Azzai challenged Rabbi Akiva: Isn’t everyone created in God’s image? ‘Neighbour’ is too restrictive. Maybe we treat only people of our own nationality or faith as ‘neighbours’? What about everyone else? Humanity has paid for these distinctions with immeasurable blood. Now more than ever, we cannot afford such cruel waste. The philosopher Hans Jonas, who escaped the Holocaust, was expected to speak about race-hate in what proved to be his final address. He didn’t. Rather, he said, we must together face a challenge which shows up racism and war as the mad distractions they are: ‘the outcry of mute things’, the uprising of nature itself against its treatment at our hands. In Elul, we blow the shofar, the ram’s horn, every morning. Raw and piercing, it is the cry of life itself. One day I shall blow it on the Western Front Way, my grandfather’s spirit next to me.