In 2014, the centenary of the start of the First World War forced people to remember the fallen, and reflect on the futility of war.
The First World War was also responsible for the deaths of three Tour de France winners – Lucien Petit-Breton, François Faber and Octave Lapize – while countless other champion cyclists were also to lose their lives while fighting for their countries.
Brendan Gallagher recounts some of their stories, and takes a closer look at the role the bicycle played during the war.
HISTORIANS BROADLY ACCEPT that approximately 10 million soldiers and 7 million civilians died in the First World War, while there were a further 20 million soldiers and civilians injured: appalling statistics that take no account of the estimated 20 million exhausted souls who then perished in the Spanish flu pandemic that swept the globe at the end of hostilities.
Against such a tidal wave of death and destruction, some may consider it a frivolous exercise to examine the contribution of one small sector of society – cyclists – to such a scene of devastation, and they may well be correct.
I take the view, however, that systematically looking at the smaller picture – in fact, hundreds upon hundreds of smaller pictures – offers perhaps the only real chance of glimpsing the bigger picture, which is impossible to take in at first glance.
The year 2014 has been nothing if not a monumental and sobering learning experience for those generations fortunate enough never to be touched by a world war. How blessed we are. I am sitting down to pen this early in August – on the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War – and, even as a history graduate, I am appalled at my ignorance of that war. I have sat and passed exams on the subject, but learned next to nothing. I had no idea, until I came across a brilliant BBC2 documentary about the massive role played by African and Asian conscripts from the various empires – British, French and Belgian, in particular – who were thrown into the worst excesses of the Western Front from day one. Cannon fodder, literally.
Equally, I was ignorant of the fact that, for the majority of the war, British Forces snootily turned their backs on volunteer women nurses from these islands looking to treat our ‘brave boys’ behind the trenches, and that many ended up caring instead for the French, Belgian and other allied troops. They never taught us that at school. In a real sense, many of us are only truly discovering the First World War now, and in that respect you can never have too much investigation and knowledge. We can’t change a damned thing, but we can remember and commemorate and that process should never stop.
Until this ‘summer of learning’, I still only had the vaguest idea of how many big-name cyclists were involved in the First World War. Some fought and perished – no fewer than three Tour de France winners were killed, while others ‘survived’, although the quality of life they were left with was often nearly as bad as death itself. The most robust of them were back racing just months after the madness ended, finding solace in the familiarity of old haunts and the rhythms of a daily routine that did not involve death and maiming.
I had never realised the important role of the cycling regiments, with their couriers, scouts, messengers and highly mobile combatants, especially early in the war, before mechanisation took a grip. Flicking through one of the many superb coffee-table publications that have heralded the centenary, I noticed a striking picture with a pile of five bikes hastily thrown to one side of a field in the mud, as you would before a pick-up football match down the park on a summer’s evening, which puzzled me until my eyes tracked right and there were five British soldiers crouched in a thick hedgerow, their rifles aimed in the general direction of the Germans. To my inexpert eyes, they looked like the conventional civilian roadsters those same youngsters might have ridden doing their butchers’ or grocers’ rounds back in Britain five or six months earlier. It was a strangely haunting image – that close proximity between normality and insanity.
Having educated myself a little more on the subject, I would make no particular grandiose claims for cyclists during the First World War. Men go to war, do their bit, behave well or not so well, and either enjoy good luck or bad. The fact remains, however, that the military battlegrounds of Flanders and beyond were bloody arenas populated largely by males between the ages of sixteen and forty, where physical fitness, durability, courage, initiative, selfless teamwork, a facility with machinery and often sheer bloody-mindedness counted for much. And in that hell-hole, cyclists of all ages and abilities generally proved good soldiers with interesting stories to tell, a few of which we should tarry over: minuscule parts of the mosaic that make up the bigger picture.
Where to begin? I think we had better get the awkward bit out of the way first and recognise that in the very early days of the First World War, one of cycling’s most-celebrated figures was something of a gung-ho warmonger, although, as ever, words and actions need to be placed in the context of time and place.
The celebrated Henri Desgrange, the editor of the sports newspaper L’Auto, and credited as the founder of the Tour de France in 1903 after a suggestion from his humble minion Géo Lefèvre, was a hard man on and off a bike. The former holder of twelve world records on the track, he famously insisted that the physical challenge posed by the Tour de France needed to be so severe that ideally only one rider would finish or survive.
Where did this fanaticism come from? Some attribute it to the spirit of exploration that then prevailed, pushing the body to extremes as exemplified by the race to both Poles, and the emerging sport of mountaineering. Driving the body to the point of death in some noble pursuit was to be celebrated rather than feared. Perhaps there was an element of that but, within French society in particular, the mania for extreme physical fitness, the Olympian state of body and mind sought by the International Olympic Committee’s founder, Baron de Coubertin, and the extremism demanded by Desgrange, was more the result of the humiliations of the Franco–Prussian war which ended in 1871 and the urgent need to bolster French manhood against the ever-present Germanic threat. The French were going as soft as their cheese.
Within days of war being declared, Desgrange was exhorting the readers of L’Auto – the pick of the crop physically in France, the young bucks the nation desperately needed to fight the impending war – to take up arms against the Germans with a glad heart. I am indebted to Graham Healy, author of The Shattered Peloton, who unearthed the following remarkable extract from an editorial Desgrange wrote on the eve of the Great War. To heighten its impact, the piece was printed in red ink, although frankly little embellishment was required.
My little fellas, my darling little fellas, my darling little French fellas [Desgrange always addressed his readers in this rather flowery fashion]. The Prussians are bastards, I use this word not to mean ‘lucky’ but in the literal sense. Listen to me very carefully, you have to go and get those bastards. Believe it. It is impossible for a French man to fall in front of what is a German man. It is a big match to fight, use all your tricks. But watch out. When your rifle is on their chest they will ask for forgiveness but don’t let them trick you, pull the trigger without pity. We have to get rid of these evil imbeciles. It’s all down to you my little fellas, my darling little fellas, my darling little French fellas.
Extraordinary, inflammatory, racist stuff from a man of extremes in the midst of heightened times. But also the words of a clever, much-read, commercially astute editor who knew his audience of fit young sportsmen – mainly cyclists, although the paper was still giving space to other sports at this time. It should also be conceded that Desgrange, on this occasion, put his money where his mouth was. After setting up a number of fitness camps to train young military recruits, he then, at the age of fifty, enlisted in 1917 and served as a poilu – an ordinary soldier – in which capacity he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. All the time he continued to file a column for L’Auto under the by-line of Desgrenier.
Cycling – as a cog within the vastly complicated war machine – was already well established within various militia before the outbreak of the war. Prior to 1914, there were already fifteen cycling battalions in the 15,000-strong British Army Cyclist Corps – the Huntingdon and Highland Cycling Battalions were among the most celebrated – and they were promptly absorbed into frontline regiments and were right to the fore in the opening months of hostilities. Among those were the Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, East Yorkshire and London Regiments, the Royal Scots, the Isle of Wight Rifles, the Hampshire Regiment, the Welsh Regiment and the Devonshire Regiment.
Additionally, nineteen new cycling battalions were quickly established, and even those regiments that didn’t incorporate cycling battalions would designate soldiers to undertake cycling duties. In all, it’s estimated that 100,000 British soldiers saw active service on a bike at some stage between 1914 and 1918. Among the French and Belgian armies, the figure was closer to 150,000, while the use of bikes was commonplace in German infantry battalions, which all included cycling sections, or Radfahr-Kompanie. Indeed, after the war, the Germans even published a report, entitled Die Radfahrertruppe, about the effectiveness of the bike in war.
What exactly did these cycling regiments and detachments do? An admittedly rather gushing and not unbiased article in Cycling Weekly in October 1914 explained it thus:
The reasons of the success of the soldier-cyclist are not far to seek. In the first place it must be realised that his mount, unlike that of the cavalryman, is silent in progress. This gives him an enormous advantage over his noisy foe, whose horse betrays his presence even when galloping over grassland. In short, the cyclist can hear and not be heard. He can approach speedily and noiselessly, and without warning can attack the enemy, who, all unconscious of his presence, often falls an easy prey.
But silence is by no means the cyclist’s sole advantage. He has a good turn of speed, which is a factor useful alike in attack and retreat. A cyclist in warfare is really a mounted infantryman, and, generally speaking, he is superior in point of speed to the heavily accoutred cavalryman, while, of course, the ordinary infantryman is snail-like by comparison. Should his attack fail for the time being, or receive an unexpected or momentary check, the cyclist can easily beat a retreat, and by a circuitous route come upon his foe again at another point, where, perhaps, he is least expected. Thus he can be said to possess to a marked degree the power to ‘cut and come again’ which faculty is eminently useful in war. Again, the ability to take cover often spells the difference between victory and defeat, and here the cyclist scores distinctly. He has but to lay his mount down flat upon the ground and it is practically invisible.
There were essentially three sorts of bikes used in the First World War by British troops. There was the common roadster, adapted with front carriers and clips to carry rifles, while the sturdier military roadster – constructed by either BSA, Phillips, Royal Enfield or Raleigh – would be fitted with rear and front carriers, rifle clips, machine-gun placements and other attachments so that stretchers could be slung between two or sometimes three bikes, and casualties raced to a field hospital. Finally, there was the innovative Dursley-Pedersen Detachable Military Cycle, which could be folded up and carried on your back when the terrain got too rough.
* * *
It was actually a reconnaissance cyclist, John Henry Parr – a private in the 4th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment – who is commonly accepted as the first British military casualty of the Great War. Over 700,000 were to follow. Parr was on patrol, on his push bike, with a small detachment north of Mons in southern Belgium on 21 August 1914, trying to determine the location of German forces who were advancing much more quickly than had been anticipated. They were intercepted and attacked, and it appears Parr climbed off his bike and offered covering fire from a ditch to allow his colleagues to escape on their bikes before he was shot and killed.
Such was the confusion and chaos in the early stages of the war that the full details of Parr’s death only emerged four years later. Parr’s mother, Alice, back home in Finchley, had been worried by the lack of contact from her son during September and October, and contacted his regiment to ask after him.
In January 1915, his regiment still erroneously thought he was alive and serving, and wrote back to that effect, but Alice, in her heart, knew differently having received a letter from a prisoner of war saying he had seen her son shot in action near Mons in August.
The regiment double-checked, and eventually confirmed the date and rough location of his death, although it wasn’t until after the war that a fellow officer, one of those who had made his escape by bike, filled in a few of the details of their patrol outside the village of Bettignies.
Young John Parr had just turned seventeen when he died, although his headstone at the nearby St Symphorien cemetery lists him as twenty. Like many others, Parr, whose only other employment had been as a golf caddy at North Middlesex Golf Club, had falsified his age when he had signed up in 1913 well ahead of hostilities. On enlisting, the barrack-room wags immediately christened their youngest colleague ‘Old Par’ – a reference to Old Tom Parr, the mythical Englishman who reputedly lived to the age of 152 and fathered a child at the age of one hundred.
Parr’s grave at St Symphorien, one of the few cemeteries on the Western Front that houses both Allied and German soldiers, is situated just seven yards away from the grave of the last British soldier to die in the First World War: George Edwin Ellison, who was shot by a sniper just ninety minutes before the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918.
Objectively, did the cyclists and their bikes fulfil a valid military role? We should probably leave that assessment to Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, whose comments to the House of Lords were quoted in The War Illustrated in November 1915.
I am anxious in this despatch to bring to your Lordship’s special notice the splendid work that has been done throughout the campaign by the Cyclists of the Signal Corps. Carrying despatches and messages at all hours of the day and night in every kind of weather, and often traversing bad roads blocked with transport, they have been conspicuously successful in maintaining an extraordinary degree of efficiency in the service of communications. Many casualties have occurred in their ranks, but no amount of difficulty or danger has ever checked the energy and ardour which has distinguished this corps.
Their contribution certainly seemed to strike a chord with the public. To mark the contribution of British cyclists to the Great War, a memorial was unveiled on 21 May 1921 on the village green at Meriden – the only dedicated memorial to the fallen of a specific sport, rather than a specific team, in Britain that I know of. Situated in the very heart of England, contemporary reports claim that 20,000 cyclists travelled to Meriden for the unveiling ceremony and associated events that weekend.
* * *
As mentioned, three Tour de France winners lost their lives in the Great War: Octave Lapize, Lucien Petit-Breton and François Faber. When normal service was resumed in 1919, the Tour organisers ordered a three-minute silence before the start of the first stage to mark their passing. These were arguably the three biggest names in the sport, so their deaths had an impact and poignancy beyond the norm.
The demise of the dashing Lapize hit particularly hard. Lapize had unhesitatingly joined the French Air Corps the moment war was declared, training as a fighter pilot, but he was lost in the skies above Pont-à-Mousson in north-east France when attacked by two enemy aircraft. The Parisian was one of cycling’s great all-rounders – a deft bike handler and an athlete of immense versatility and panache, and so it was perhaps unsurprising that he opted to join the fledgling Air Corps. Ironically, his love affair with aeroplanes began on a rest day in Caen during his successful 1910 Tour when he was treated to a flight in a Blériot piloted by celebrated aviator Léon Morane. From that moment on, Lapize was hooked.
Lapize was also a Six-Day champion on the track, and in 1907 was both the French cyclo-cross champion and the national road-race champion. He also won the Paris–Roubaix and Paris–Brussels one-day races three times each.
Known as Le Frisé thanks to his curly hair, Lapize is probably best remembered in the modern era as the rider who accused the Tour organisers – headed by Desgrange – of being ‘assassins’ during the first-ever epic mountain stage in the Pyrenees in 1910, after he had conquered the Col du Tourmalet but then struggled mightily on the Col d’Aubisque. Having vented his feelings, he descended like a madman to make good a fifteen-minute deficit on François Lafourcade – another to join the French air force and lose his life – to win the stage and, ultimately, the race that year.
Desgrange, despite his well-documented demands for courage and displays of virility from his French countrymen, was already safely installed in the first-class luxury of a train bound for Paris, having correctly sensed the imminent outrage of the peloton after they had been asked to scale the Pyrenees. It was his underlings who had to deal with the widespread displeasure among the peloton.
Today, riders who conquer the Tourmalet will find a memorial to Lapize at its summit.
A perennial rival of Lapize’s was François Faber – the so-called ‘Giant of Colombes’ on account of his imposing six foot two, fourteen-stone physique, which made him look more like a French flanker than a champion cyclist. Faber, of dual French and Luxembourg nationality, won the 1909 Tour, which was raced in particularly bad weather, and in all won nineteen Tour stages, with the last coming in 1914 when the Tour started on the day that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was fatefully assassinated in Sarajevo.
Faber had no doubts when war was declared the following month that it was his duty to volunteer, and decided to join the French Foreign Legion in August 1914, which operated mainly at home. Not only did he look the part, but he quickly became an efficient and much admired corporal in the legion. For many years, a widely reported story persisted that he died when shot by a sniper near Arras on 9 May 1915 when jumping for joy after receiving a telegram announcing the news that his wife had just given birth to their baby daughter.
Other reports, however, state he was shot, nevertheless on the same day, while carrying a wounded colleague back from no-man’s-land between Carency and Mont-Saint-Eloi. The fact that he was posthumously awarded the Médaille Militaire surely gives greater credence to the latter. Whatever the truth, Faber fell in a firestorm of a battle, his regiment losing 1,950 out of 2,900 personnel in their attack. Today his life is commemorated with the GP François Faber – a one-day bike race in Luxembourg – and there is a plaque in his memory in the Notre Dame de Lorette church in the French National War Cemetery near Arras.
The third great Tour hero killed in the war was the suave, Argentinian-reared Frenchman Lucien Petit-Breton – a great crowd favourite, especially with the ladies. A rather exotic individual, Petit-Breton was born in France but brought up in Buenos Aires where, after winning a bike as a lottery prize, he took to cycling with aplomb, learning to ride on the track before moving back to France where he enjoyed a first brief spell in the French army before concentrating on his cycling. Petit-Breton won the first-ever Milan–San Remo in 1907, and went on to win the Tour de France that year, and again the following year for good measure. Nothing would ever really top those glory years, although in 1911 he also added a stage win at the Tour of Italy to his palmarès.
At the outbreak of war, Petit-Breton joined the Army Driving Corps and was heavily involved in the famous taxis de la Marne episode early in the war, when every available driver and vehicle, including the Paris taxi fleet, were pressed into action to transport French troops to the First Battle of the Marne as the Germans closed in on the French capital.
Petit-Breton served extensively close to the front, but he was actually twenty miles behind the lines when he was killed on 20 December 1917, reportedly swerving in the middle of the night to avoid a horse and cart being driven erratically by its drunken owner.
The French Air Corps tended to be a popular option for adventurous members of the peloton. Albert Delrieu and Emile Quaissard were both killed in action, while Henri Alavoine – brother of the more famous Jean – joined up but was killed in a training-flight accident near Pau in 1916. Another to meet that fate was the Swiss rider Emile Guyon who also died in an accident near Pau in 1918, just a month before hostilities ceased.
On the Italian front, probably the most celebrated cyclist to see service was Ottavio Bottecchia, although at the time his prowess as a cyclist was not evident. Bottecchia, a bricklayer from Colle Umberto in the Veneto, joined the Bersaglieri – Italy’s light-infantry corps – when war was declared and, using a bike, proved an outstanding scout and message-runner in the Veneto region, which he knew like the back of his hand. In particular, he earned praise for transporting rifles and small machine guns to the front on his bike, and for his bravery under fire. So adept and strong was he on a bike that an officer suggested he became a cyclist after the war, which is exactly what he did, winning the Tour de France in 1924 and 1925.
Bottecchia met a strange and still unexplained death in June 1927 when his battered and cut body was found on the roadside near his home after a training ride. His nearby bike was undamaged, and the generally accepted, but unproven, explanation is that he was assassinated for his outspoken anti-Fascist comments.
Elsewhere, Belgian champion Paul Deman narrowly avoided execution by the Germans for his work in the Belgian resistance when he hid messages in a specially adapted gold tooth. The declaration of peace came just in time for Deman, who clearly recovered his poise quickly, because just over a year later he enjoyed another of his finest moments, winning the 1920 Paris–Roubaix, having already won the first edition of the Tour of Flanders prior to the war in 1913.
Not every cyclist enjoyed a ‘good war’. Henri Pélissier finished second in the 1917 running of the Tour of Lombardy, which was held throughout the war, but then managed to engineer an unlikely discharge from the French army soon afterwards due to his ‘incredibly weak constitution’. The stricken Pélissier then recovered sufficiently to win the 1919 Paris–Roubaix, which caused a raised eyebrow or two. But in 1935 he was killed by his lover after he attacked her wielding a knife – shot dead with the same gun that Pélissier’s wife had used to kill herself in 1933.
Nobody has yet been able to accurately calculate the number of casualties from the peloton during the First World War due to important records having been destroyed during World War II, but the official book of the history of the centenary Tour de France insists it is well over fifty. 145 riders lined up in Paris for the start of the 1914 Tour, while only sixty-seven started the 1919 race, which tells its own story in graphic fashion.
As Bertrand Russell famously commented, ‘War does not determine who is right – only who is left.’
Brendan Gallagher has been a sports journalist for thirty years, serving his apprenticeship in South Wales and as a director of Hayters Sports Agency before a twenty-year stint at the coalface with the Daily Telegraph, proudly writing on any sport except football. He has ghosted Irish rugby union player Brian O’Driscoll’s autobiography as well as In Pursuit of Glory and On Tour for Bradley Wiggins. He also wrote the official LOCOG history of Great Britain and the Olympics ahead of the 2012 Games. In a lighter vein, he indulged his love of comic-book heroes by compiling biographical histories of Wilson of the Wizard, Alf Tupper – the Tough of the Track, and Roy of the Rovers in Sporting Supermen.
Brendan is currently working for The Rugby Paper, the Tour of Britain website and is completing a history of the rugby World Cup.