On the fourth stage of the 2002 Tour de France the peloton was wending its way from Metz towards Rheims when the television cameras picked up a haunting sight. The cyclists were riding in front of a curious background, what appeared to be a vast field of crops, unnaturally large and regular in shape. Seen closer to, this strange fruit was in a grim sense man-made: we were close to Verdun, and the backdrop to the riders was the enormous military cemetery of Verdun-Bevaux, one of very many in these parts. The dead of the Great War – Frenchmen in this case, although there are plenty of British and German cemeteries also – are laid out in immense, awful rows, the lone and level stones stretching far away.
For centuries this was the corner of the continent where Europe let its blood. To the north, the Low Countries were traditionally the ‘Cockpit of Europe’, but they scarcely had a less sanguinary history than the old provinces on the French side of the border, Picardy, the Île de France, Champagne and Lorraine. If anything the names of the modern departments are still more poignantly eloquent: Marne, Somme, Ardennes, all ferocious battles during the past century. The Marne was the first great battle on the Western Front, fought in 1914 only after the end of that year’s Tour.
Within those weeks France had held the German army, but had suffered horrible and devastating losses. The English think in terms of the carnage of 1916 and 1917, the Somme and Passchendaele, as they think in terms of their own losses, three-quarters of a million dead, and there are plenty of reminders of those Tommies in the cemeteries of Picardy, so well tended by the War Graves Commission whose work is one of the notable British achievements of the last century. But in the fifty-one months from August 1914 to November 1918 the French lost almost twice as many men killed, from a smaller population than the British, and their casualties were appalling not only at Verdun but much earlier, in the first months, weeks, or even days of the war, while the French army pursued its suicidal doctrine of attack à outrance, to the bitter end, great waves of men still in their vivid blue-and-red uniforms throwing themselves at machine guns and barbed wire. French losses in the first four months of fighting exceeded British losses in four months on the Somme; and the awful figure of 19,000 British killed on 1 July 1916, the first day of that battle, is more awfully surpassed by the 27,000 French soldiers killed on 23 August 1914. Even now one cannot follow the Tour through north-western France without being conscious of that carnage.
Not all here is grim, although this north-eastern corner of the hexagone, where Flanders and Flemish spill over from northern Belgium, has a sort of unspoken reputation for dourness, and its virtues are reputed stolid rather than romantic. As Michelet says, ‘the genius of our stout and worthy Flanders is neither subtle nor sterile, but positive and real, resting on solid foundation.’ For the English, Flanders, Picardy and the neighbouring provinces form in some ways the best-travelled and the least-known part of France, past whose bleak farms and mills countless visitors have for centuries sped from Calais by carriage, train and car, on their way to the fleshpots of Paris or to the warm south. The few dedicated pilgrims who choose to come here nowadays are often battlefield tourists, looking to see where so many fell in 1815, 1916 or 1944. But Picardy and its neighbours are worth visiting apart from those morbid memories, though admittedly not for culinary reasons. The map of ‘Les Étoiles’ in the Michelin guide illustrates one most interesting aspect of France: the unequal distribution of culinary riches. Thick clusters of starred restaurants are found in Burgundy, Provence and above all Alsace, in sharp contrast with the near-emptiness of the north-east, broken only by the odd decent restaurant like the Meurin at Béthune which makes its nearest shot at Picard regional cuisine with Somme eels and pigs’ trotters.
Such visual beauties as the region has are still impaired by war. Plenty of larger and smaller towns which found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time were so badly shelled and fought over as to be little recognizable as their former selves. Even there not everything has gone: Cambrai, scene of epic fighting in 1917, has the splendid tomb of Rubens, and St-Quentin, another name which appears in countless memoirs of the Western Front, has fine pictures. Theirs are among the names that a visitor associates with that characteristic sight of France between Seine and Rhine, the city seen from afar, its spires and towers rising out of featureless plains, islands shimmering in the haze of the sun, or more often in the mist.
Start off in the east at Metz, very often visited by the Tour over the years since 1907, with its St-Étienne cathedral, unusually tall and light thanks to an acre and a half of stained-glass windows ranging from the twelfth century to Chagall. Directly south, and another staging place from 1905 to 1988, Nancy is one of the most beautiful eighteenth-century cities in Europe. Its exquisite assemblage of buildings, breathing the air of the Enlightenment, inappropriately saw the upbringing of that very unenlightened author Maurice Barrès, Catholic reactionary, mystical nationalist, bitter anti-Dreyfusard, and exponent of revanchism after 1871. In his book La Colline inspirée the inspired hill of the title is Mont Sion twenty miles south of Nancy, where a Catholic community springs up and whither, in 1873, a pilgrimage journeys to mourn the loss of Alsace and most of Lorraine; a cardinal and seven bishops bless the pilgrims ‘waving their banners amongst which the crowd piously acclaimed those of Strasbourg and Metz in mourning’.
West by north-west is Verdun, visited by the Tour in 1993 when none other than Lance Armstrong won his first ever stage. It was little heard of before the Great War, and its literary memorials since then are entirely military, from Valéry’s exalted salute to the ‘supreme consecration’ of those who died to Jules Romains’s documentary novels Prélude à Verdun and Verdun with their bitter indictment of the war and the commanders who sent hundreds of thousands of poilus to their deaths. Directly west, and very often visited by the Tour, Rheims is a shadow of the days when the kings of France were crowned in its cathedral, the last such coronation commemorated in Rossini’s frivolous and jolly opera Il viaggio à Reims. Alas, most of its buildings were flattened in the Great War. The cathedral itself survives, including the spire at which a German artilleryman, a cousin of the English poet Robert Graves, to whom he told the story, once took potshots. Thirty miles to the north-west, Laon is less well known, though for some reason it absorbed Hitler when he mused on the antiquities of France, and should be much better known, an enchanting little hill city which – or whose Bannière de France near the cathedral – provides an ideal place to stay when the Tour’s own voyage to Rheims fills that city’s hotels.
Most parts of France have at least some happy historic and literary memories, but when we reach the farthest northern corner, every other name carries Undertones of War, the name of Edmund Blunden’s book, one of several classic accounts of the Western Front that shaped English consciousness of the Great War. There are also overtones of another kind of strife: the ville-étape of Valenciennes, and neighbouring Anzin and Denain all close to the Belgian border, are where Zola set Germinal, his harshest novel of class conflict.
It would be pleasant to write about a bike race without mentioning politics or war, and it would be perfectly possible, but it would also be artificial. To call the bicycle the most beneficial of inventions and cycling the most harmless of pastimes is true, but not the only truth. In 1895 a man whose name epitomizes not only literary genius but ethical high-mindedness was presented with a bicycle by the Moscow Society of Velocipede Lovers. The 67-year-old Tolstoy dismayed his more pompous disciples by his sheer zest for the new machine: ‘I feel that I am entitled to my share of natural light-heartedness, that the opinion of others has no importance, and that there is nothing wrong with enjoying oneself quite simply, like a boy.’ It was a touching tribute from the spirit of noble humanity to a lovely new creation; and yet there was more to cycling than boyish light-heartedness and plain living, even in Tolstoy’s time.
As cycling became the passion of the age, it was linked with more than one of the new species of mass politics that were also sweeping Europe, predominantly the progressive sort. Before cycling had acquired any definite radical tinge in France, it had done so in England, closely associated with the first generation of Fabian socialists, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and the Webbs. Shaw was a remarkably clumsy cyclist, who recorded ‘the stiffness, the blisters, the bruises, the pains in every twisted muscle,’ though vowing that ‘I will not be beaten by that hellish machine’. His friend Bertrand Russell sardonically recorded how Shaw and he had collided with a vehemence worthy of two Tour riders, ‘with such force that he was hurled through the air and landed on his back twenty feet from the place of collision. However he got up completely unhurt and continued his ride; whereas my bicycle was smashed.’ Shaw jeered at him all the way home, Russell said: ‘I suspect that he regarded the whole incident as proof of the virtues of vegetarianism.’ And Wells, their fellow progressive, looked back forty years later on the early cyclist’s sense ‘of masterful adventure, that has gone from him altogether now’.
In Yorkshire, Lancashire and London, cycling was a particular enthusiasm of the cheerful young socialist clerks and artisans who read William Morris and Daniel George, as well as Robert Blatchford’s magazine Clarion and his book Merry England. A Clarion Cycling Club founded for these ardent spirits was celebrated in touchingly fusty Merry English:
Knights of the whirring wheel are we
And whither are ye wending, pray?
We are on the road to Arcady.
So deep did the love of the whirring wheel run among London socialists that Sidney Webb had to suggest in his sour and unsmiling way that ‘Readers of the Clarion may or may not care to give up a few bicycle rides to help canvass for the LCC elections’. A generation later, cycling was one of the pastimes Left News intended when it told its readers that ‘even games, songs and recreation can, and indeed should, reflect and awaken a left-wing attitude to things,’ a simple sport that can be ‘quite different when your companions are “comrades of the left”’.
But it wasn’t only a left-wing attitude that cycling could awaken; the wheel also whirred on the other political side. It is chilling to record that, as a new tide of anti-Semitism flowed through central Europe in the 1890s, the very first body or association to have excluded Jews from membership was an Austrian cycling club. This was a dark intimation of what was to come, and of the way that sport would be relentlessly politicized and exploited by the new nationalism. Morally pleasing as the bike can often seem, it wasn’t quite untainted even in its early days. Those young idealists of the Clarion were, like all other cyclists at the turn of the century, riding on tyres of rubber gathered in one of the worst places of its or any other age, the heart of darkness that was the Congo ‘Free State’.
A different kind of idealist hoped that sport would provide a means of uniting mankind in brotherly love, a hope not always fulfilled. In England playing games had been specifically identified, not with nationalism in a continental sense, but with team spirit, and thus with the duties of an imperial caste; a process inevitably associated with the public schools that so rapidly expanded in size and number during the century before 1914. Schoolmasters were explicit about this. Edward Lyttelton of Eton thought that ‘a boy is disciplined by athletics by being free to put the welfare of the common cause before selfish interests and to obey implicitly the word of command and act in concert with the heterogeneous elements in the company he belongs to’, a most dubious description of team games as played at English schools, or anywhere else, but a significant one. Another master made a still more telling contrast: ‘You may think that games occupy a disproportionate share of the boy’s mind. You may be thankful that it is so. What do French boys talk about?’ to which one answer might have been that at least some of the time they thought about football and bicycles, as well as all that horrible manner of things intended by that master, who could not have known of James Thurber and ‘Six-Day Bicycle Racing as a Sex Substitute’.
More explicitly still, J. E. Welldon, the headmaster of Harrow, saw sport not merely as a sex substitute or a means of making a common cause but a way of building a warrior elite: ‘The pluck, the energy, the perseverance, the good temper, the self-control, the discipline, the co-operation, the esprit de corps, which merit success in cricket and football, are the very qualities which win the day in peace or war.’ In the history of the British Empire, he believed, England had owed her strength to her sports. This will be smiled at today, and it wasn’t a sentiment universally shared even at the time. Radicals pointed out that the British Empire had not, in fact, been won by ‘playing up and playing the game’.
On the other hand, the greatest bard of empire himself angrily claimed that his countrymen had been softened by ‘trinkets’, and allowed their souls to be contented by ‘the flanelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals’. At the time, Kipling’s words were bitterly resented. ‘The unmanly envy and immoral calumnies of Continental slander’ were bad enough, one critic indignantly wrote; they had now been provided ‘with fresh materials for insidious and cowardly campaign of aspersion of England and the British Empire’. And the headmaster of Loretto, the most sporting of Edinburgh public schools, said just as angrily that three-quarters of his old boys who had volunteered to fight in the Boer War had previously played for the school rugby XV.
Nor was this cult of sporting, civic and military virtue by any means purely English. In 1883, on his way to the epiphany that would see him create the modern Olympics, the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin visited Rugby school and fell on his knees before the tomb of Dr Arnold, creator of the school as it now was. Although he had not, in fact, been an uncritical admirer of the religion of games, Arnold stood in Coubertin’s eyes for the athletic ideal. Here, in the ‘régime arnoldien’, was a model for France, by which Coubertin’s fallen country could be ‘rebronzed’ after the humiliation of defeat by Prussia in 1871, to which end he thought that French schools should take up cricket and rugby. And another unlikely convert was Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism, who hoped that in the Jewish State of his dreams the boys would likewise be brought up on English manly sports. Like those schoolmasters, the sporting Anglophiles are easy to scoff at, but they won victories of a kind. Despite M. Godart of the École Monge in Paris, whom Coubertin persuaded to teach his boys cricket; and despite a few cricket clubs even now in Haifa and Tel Aviv, the game of Dr Grace did not catch on as they had hoped. But both the French and the Israelis play soccer fanatically, and the French play rugby too.
In reply to his critics, Kipling said that it wasn’t sport in itself he objected to when he wrote of flannelled fools and muddied oafs, so much as professionalism, the jumped-up members of the lower classes who were now paid too much to hit or kick a ball, and, what was worse, the loafers who paid to watch them. This was a prejudice he shared with Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, who thought that games were grand ‘for developing a lad physically and morally’, teaching him to play with unselfishness, ‘to play in his place and “play the game”’, but that ‘games were vicious’ when drawing crowds ‘to be merely onlookers at a few paid performers . . . Thousands of boys and young men, pale, narrow-chested, hunched up, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes, numbers of them betting, all of them learning to be hysterical as they groan and cheer and panic in unison.’
That was a description he would doubtless have applied to the men in any café in France when the Tour was being run, and a comparable prejudice against proletarian professional sportsmen could be found in France also, though mitigated by the republican traditions of equality and fraternity. Rugby had been introduced to south-western France by English businessmen, notably in the wine trade, to become the national sport of Gascony, and France joined the ‘home countries’ in an international championship, though the players of Brive and Dax and Pau were artisans and farmers rather than the public-school men who played for Blackheath and Harlequins. The question of professionalism simmered quietly away, to come to the boil in the 1930s. But no one expected all cyclists to be amateurs; for all those aristocrats or prosperous bourgeois who were seen racing earlier, a distinction between ‘Gentlemen and Players’ would have seemed far-fetched on the Tour.
In 1914 gentlemen and players alike, amateurs and pros, muddied oafs and flannelled fools, footballers and cyclists, all gave a dramatic answer to their detractors, entirely confirming what Welldon and Herzl alike had believed. Across Europe football players and football fans joined up, while officers were told to learn news of their men’s home teams, something cheerful to talk about when a soldier lay mortally wounded. Sport provided a higher form of comradeship across the battlefield: at Christmas 1914 an unofficial truce saw British and German soldiers come out of their trenches to play football together. Rugby football justified every hope that sporting patriots had ever reposed in its manly qualities, to an extraordinary degree. From among those who had played for the four home countries of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, no fewer than seventy-nine former internationals were killed in the Great War, thirty of them Scots.
And the Tour de France had its own roll of honour, in its way statistically remarkable, which likewise showed that heroes in the field of athletic contest could be heroes on the field of battle also. When the war began, Desgrange had himself joined up, though at fifty he was too old for active service, and in his pages he violently beat the drum for ‘le grand match’ to be played on the battlefield:
My lads! My dearest lads! My lads of France. Listen to me! In the fourteen years that the Auto has appeared daily, it has never given you bad advice. Well, listen to me! Believe me, it isn’t possible for a Frenchman to succumb to a German. You have a big match to play . . . Go without pity. The Prussians are bastards . . . When your bayonet is in their chest, they will beg for mercy. Don’t give it to them. Drive it home without pity!
Whether or not influenced by these histrionics, extreme even by the standards of August 1914, the cyclists of the Tour did rally to the colours to fight and to fall. Of the ten men who had won the Tour from 1903 to 1914, three died in the war. François Faber was the first to go. The Luxembourger, whose little country had been overrun by the Germans at the beginning of the war, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and was killed carrying a wounded comrade at Carency in May 1915. The ‘Little Breton’ from the Argentine, Lucien Petit-Breton, was serving at the front when he died in an automobile accident in June 1917. Octave Lapize became an airman, flew with the same dash and bravery that he had once shown on a bike, and was killed in combat over Verdun in the same month. They were only the most illustrious names. Among other riders who died, not all of whom have been traced, were several old sweats of the Tour, the young rider Georges Cadolle, and the brilliant Emile Engel, who had come tenth in 1910 and had won the Cherbourg–Brest stage in 1914.
In Ringmer church, near Glyndebourne in Sussex, there is a little memorial to the men of the local cricket club who fell in the Great War. There are their three names, and the words, ‘They played the game.’ Those men of the Tour had also played le match as Desgrange had hoped.
All were part of the great blood sacrifice that Europe offered up. Peace would return, and the Tour with it, but no bike racing ever run in this part of France would ever be quite so innocent again, amid the blasted earth, the ossuaries, the vast memorials of Picardy and Lorraine. Nor would France be the same, a country that ninety-five years later is still scarred by the catastrophe of those years.