Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  Politically, Italy was moving closer and closer to the great powers of central Europe. In 1882 it would sign the Triple Alliance with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a secret alliance that promised non-aggression and also mutual support in the face of attacks from any other major power. To the east, beyond the Vosges and the Alps, were massing unknown numbers of enemies, all malignly plotting against France. What France needed was not improved east–west roads. Far from it: Napoleon Bonaparte’s mountain highways now led directly towards an increasingly capable and acquisitive foe. They were something France could do without. What it now needed was a backbone of routes stratégiques running through the Alps from north to south, as close as possible to the high ridges near the border, to help it defend and mobilise against Italy if – or, as seemed more likely when – the time came.

  The most northerly of the really famous cycling cols to owe its existence to the construction of these routes stratégiques is the Col du Galibier, which marks the border of the Hautes Alpes and the Savoie. Long a passage for travellers, merchants and animal herders, it was improved and opened as the catchily titled ‘Route de Grande Communication no. 14’ in 1879. In the mid-1880s, work began on a tunnel at 2,556 metres, to make the passage easier.fn4 The work was overseen by General Baron Berge, an army man who had distinguished himself in the Crimea and been a prisoner of war of the Germans. As the military governor of Lyon and commander of the Army of the Alps, his vision was to ‘open on the Alpine border a number of strategic routes, so that heavy convoys of the modern army are no longer the prisoners of the valleys and can climb into the mountains, crossing the cols.’

  After Galibier, the general turned to the Col d’Izoard, the Col des Aravis, Col de Vars, Col du Parpaillon (don’t know it? We’ll come back to this …), Col d’Allos, Col des Champs and Col de la Cayolle – creating an Alpine spine along which the military could easily move. Though some of the contractors were civilian, the majority of the work was carried out by the Alpine infantry, who would eventually be christened the Chasseurs Alpins, the ‘Alpine Hunters’. These were elite French mountain infantry brigades, which had been created in response to Italy’s Alpini – 45,000 specialist troops highly trained in the art of mountain warfare, the majority of whom were installed just the other side of the border. Even though traces of their presence can still be seen, on both sides, it is difficult to imagine them all up there, festooning the peaks. It must have been difficult to move without bumping into a soldier or two. Building roads gave the Chasseurs Alpins something to do, and helped give them pride in the remote places where they were stationed and which they would be called upon to defend. They wore short breeches and short jackets, for ease of movement on the slopes, and an oversized beret with a trumpet logo on it. Apart from the trumpet, which was yellow, everything else was blue. And that was how they got their nickname, les Diables Bleus – the Blue Devils.

  Most of our famous Alpine roadways, those repositories of cycling legends and receptacles of sweat and swearwords, have a Blue Devil in their history somewhere. They toiled with spades, picks and explosives to widen and flatten the goat tracks, and build the bridges and retaining walls so that heavy artillery could pass. While the north–south route is surprisingly similar to what we know today, asphalting wasn’t part of the Blue Devils’ work. That didn’t come until later. The cutting edge of road engineering at the time consisted of crushed stone of various sizes layered to provide good drainage and a smoothish surface. Tour riders in the early days might have expected, in more cosmopolitan areas, a fast-rolling raised roadway of crushed stone, and maybe even a camber for drainage. Stray from well-peopled areas and things were different – and the mountains, as we already know, were another world.

  Today, most major passes in the French and Italian mountains have enviably smooth surfaces as if, despite the battering they take during the months of snow, it is a point of honour (and indeed public safety) that cyclists can whizz down them free of worry.fn5 Even the Col de la Bonette, which for many years had a terrible surface (and even for a while had an illegal tollbooth at its foot, in a desperate attempt to raise funds for its maintenance) is now pretty flawless.

  You can still find the Blue Devils’ work in its natural state, here and there, if you go looking hard enough, and a good place to start is the Col du Parpaillon. Parpaillon is a secret col much cherished by French cyclotouristes and Audaxers, those hardy socks-and-sandals tourers and long-distance cyclists who tend to be a little wider of tyre and baggier of clothing than your average road cycling fan, and yet are still able to smash out incredible distances without a second thought. It lies south of the Col d’Izoard, somewhere in the folds of the high mountains between the Queyras and the Ubaye valleys, above the ski resort of Risoul (which was favoured with a Tour finish just a few years ago and will be the Giro’s summit finish the day before the Bonette). The top of the Parpaillon is at 2,637 metres and it was modernised by the Blue Devils essentially as emergency back-up for the Col de Vars, which is very near the border and was considered especially vulnerable. For many years the Parpaillon was the highest road in France, but eventually, being higher and steeper and more problematic than the Vars, and yet connecting the same two valleys, the decision was taken not to modernise it further and asphalt it, and so it fell into disuse. Today it is still a registered ‘D’ road on the national road network, but it is a very rough track, the preserve of 4 × 4 enthusiasts, adventure motorcyclists and, one day, of me and a couple of my friends.

  Some rides that you take on are safe and predictable: you switch on your GPS device, switch off your brain, count the lamp posts as they pass and let your stomach think about what you’ll have for lunch. Some of them, well … I think we knew that day that we were potentially biting off more than we could chew. The plan had been to climb the Parpaillon, about 17 kilometres at 7 per cent, descend the other side and then loop around via the Col de Vars. Up via history’s dead end, you might say, and back along the path of progress. To make the task even more difficult the previous day had delivered a large storm, which had soaked us to the bone in freezing rain, and furnished the peaks around the pretty town of Barcelonette with a dusting of fresh snow in late June.

  Heading up a back road to a mud-and-gravel track after a snowstorm did not seem propitious, but we had a goal: we wanted to see the tunnel in the sky. At the top of the Parpaillon, marooned in a landscape of nothing like the lamp post in the Narnian wood, is a perfect, painstakingly constructed brick tunnel, big enough for a single vehicle to drive through, with large iron doors that are closed in winter – to keep what in, and what out, I’m not quite sure. It was built by Berge’s Blue Devils using pickaxes alone, and wheelbarrows to transport out the quarried rock. At 466 metres long, was a considerable engineering feat for the day. It took 10 years to build and opened in 1901, and for many years there was a refuge at the tunnel’s mouth, but the several hundred troops stationed on both sides chose to site their encampments further down, as the weather at 2,600 metres could be bitter, even in summer. There is an old postcard showing the entrance to the tunnel one July under – it is claimed – five metres of snow. It is, actually, rather a small dump of fresh snow on top of some very large drifts, but still the tunnel is obscured, men are passing with difficulty and the white canvas bell tents disappear into the blanket.

  We were hoping for less than five metres, and a weak sun was shining through the mist as we pedalled up the main valley road and turned off to begin the climb. Quickly the asphalt became broken and rutted and then, past a spring and a small chapel, it turned into a dirt track shaded by dark pines. The first few tightly pinned switchbacks led us deeper into the forest, the air thick and warm with moisture and the trees bearing down upon us, crowding our vision so that we could not tell if the forest simply went on and on without end. But then we rounded a corner and it opened out into a stunning glacial valley with acid-green grass, guarded by a hikers’ refuge, a small stream and a bridge.

  Ahead, t
he path narrowed and climbed steadily up and the brightness of the Alpine meadows shaded into white. Beyond the bridge the track steepened and the stones grew larger, and the combination suddenly made the going tough. Mud began to stick to our tyres and brake callipers, making every turn of the pedals a huge effort whose reward was only a few centimetres progress, dizziness and a darkening of vision from oxygen depletion. At 2,300 metres, fresh snow began to impinge on the track, which had become a muddy meltwater stream tacking up the valley side. I stopped several times to clear the clinging mud from my bike frame and stop the grit scoring circles into my wheel rims. At about 2,400 metres there were wolf tracks in the snow that now covered the path, and we were forced to dismount definitively, pushing our bikes towards the top of the col like the racers in the earliest days of the Tour. You may recall that only Gustave Garrigou made it to the top of the Tourmalet in 1910 without putting his foot down, and it was easy to see why. Though his bike would have had much thicker tyres, and so be more adapted to the rougher surfaces prevalent in 1910, it would also have been heavier – by a factor of two, maybe three – and it would only have had one so-called ‘climbing’ gear. The marmots that were playing with increasing insouciance all around us seemed to think that this valley belonged to them but, in the silence of the clouds on that wet stony track, it felt as if those heroes of bygone days might still be out there on the road. That the mud and spray raised by their passing had just settled and that they were just out of sight around the corner, or over the col diving down towards the finish in the valley far below.

  Around 80 metres below the col, just underneath the final switchback, a sort of muffled, anaesthetised calm descended. Our everything shrank into whiteness and it began to snow gently. Although we had hoped to pass through the tunnel, really we had climbed just to see it, fully aware the iron doors would probably be stuck shut. And, for an hour or two, we had believed we would get there. But now, as the temperature dropped in the grey clouds, we accepted we were not going to make it, and turned around and walked and freewheeled down again. Not victorious but, somehow not defeated. We had ridden up a track as if riding back in time, into one of the most beautiful valleys on earth and, finally, that was enough. Confronting the tunnel would have been an exercise in ‘pataphysics: an imaginary solution to a problem that did not exist.

  One of my companions that day has since gone back, but later in the year, and he tells me just how close we were to making it. He also tells me that the journey through the iron doors into the icy blackness and towards the pinprick of faraway light was just as dark and thrilling as we’d hoped. An ocean without a monster lurking in the deep would be like sleep without dreams – and without dreams we would be but cows in a field. I am sure that tunnel is there, I will go back. I know that I will see it one day.

  Napoleon III never got round to fulfilling his pledge to build his route impériale over the Col de Restefond, aka de la Bonette. Even from very far away – which is mainly where Napoleon III was – it would have been a self-evidently big and expensive job, and one that could be punted down the list of priorities until a later date. And before he could get round to it he had his ass handed to him by the Prussians, and that was that. It was only later, during the Blue Devil dynasty, that anything got done, and they didn’t, as I mentioned before, join the two valleys up completely. It was judged simply too difficult a route to defend from an Italian attack, and the Tinée valley on the south side was too difficult to supply and defend (the French were keen not to make that mistake again). Had the Restefond road been built, the Alpini could have come streaming in from the north, over the top and on a direct march to the coast. That would have been game over, and Nice would have become known as Nizza once again. So the Blue Devils took the road up to the main garrison, the imposing Caserne de Restefond, and then to the huddle of stone huts and bell tents of the Camp des Fourches barracks down the other side.

  And that’s where they stopped. The army lost interest. That’s because, after more than 40 years of fortification and militarisation of the French–Italian border, the wind began to blow the other way, and the wider geopolitical situation changed. Remember the Triple Alliance, the secret non-aggression and cooperation pact between the Germans, Italians and the Austro-Hungarian Empire? It was maintained and renewed periodically every few years after 1882, but in 1902, only five months after signing up to the Alliance once more, Italy made another secret deal. This time it was an understanding with France that both countries would remain neutral in the event of an attack on the other. Both pacts seemed clear cut, but the growing tensions that would lead to the First World War also meant that both things could not simultaneously be true. Either Italy had to side with the British, Russians and French, therefore breaking its pact with Germany and Austria-Hungary; or it had to side with them, and support aggression against France.

  Would France once again be at odds with its transalpine neighbour? When war broke out in 1914, Italy pledged to support Germany and Austria-Hungary, but months passed and it did not show its hand. Finally, in May 1915, Italy entered the war and sided with the Allies, and at a stroke all those barracks on Bonette, and at countless other positions the length of the border, were rendered irrelevant.

  The other great force behind improving the roads was a happier one: tourism. As we saw, the bicycle can claim to have played a large role in this in the Pyrenees, but in the Alps the motorcar gave back to the bike. From as early as 1904 the Touring Club de France (a motoring organisation of the waxed-moustaches-and-dashing-tweeds ilk if ever there was one) had been pushing for a ‘Route des Alpes’ from Evian to Nice, linking the two biggest spa towns in France in summer and winter respectively. The project was born in the spirit of adventure and discovery, and out of a patriotic desire to show anyone who cared that France was the most beautiful country in the world. The Touring Club wrote that it would be higher and more spectacular than any other routes, and that it would ‘skirt glaciers and precipices, wind along snowfields and surprise gushing rivers at their source’. Given the strategic aspects, the state poured in funds and the Blue Devils were again put to work. A caravan of vehicles carrying dignitaries assembled in Nice on 3 July 1911 for the inaugural voyage along the Route des Alpes. The itinerary took in quite a few cols that are now unknown or have fallen out of favour, but the Izoard and Galibier were there (just before the Galibier’s first Tour de France appearance on 10 July that year) and gradually others came into service as they were modernised and deemed ready for motor traffic. By the time the Col de la Croix de Fer was added, in 1912, thousands of people were travelling the Route on a regular open-topped bus service. On 10 August 1914 – long after war had broken out in the Balkans, but before France’s involvement – French President Raymond Poincaré took part in the inaugural voyage over the Col de la Cayolle.

  The First World War stopped all this, of course; and afterwards, with the military impetus to defend against Italy gone, it took longer to get anything done. The 2,764-metre Col de l’Iseran wasn’t opened until 1937, demoting the Passo dello Stelvio from its title of highest pass in the Alps. In 1970 the Cormet de Roseland road opened, and from then on the route was exactly that which many Alpine bicycle tours favour today. Finally, the whole thing was relaunched as the Route des Grandes Alpes in 1992.

  You’ll gather from the pictures and the descriptions that, Hannibal aside, it doesn’t take long when you’re cycling in the Alps to see evidence of the military history. In valleys and on ridges from north to south are medieval walled citadels, castles, lookout points, garrisons and forts, each one corresponding to the latest challenges thrown up by the evolution of war. The barracks on Bonette, the Fort du Télégraphe near the Galibier and the ring of forts around Briançon, to name just a few of the Third Republic forts from the late 19th century, were cutting edge for their time. Artillery had advanced so much in range, accuracy and frequency of fire that, rather than build a wall about a town and hide everyone inside, which was the classic medieval gambit
, the best way to defend the civilian population was to engage the enemy several kilometres away, and draw the fire elsewhere. Some Alpine forts were even constructed from reinforced concrete, the first in all France to use this new technology. Still, defending a pass in the mountains is different from defending the flatlands – the pass funnels the enemy through one narrow point, and many of the forts you see standing duty in the mountains look recognisably like the sort of castles you might draw standing atop a hill.

  And then there are the bunkers.

  ‘Everybody will be entrenched in the next war. It will be a great war of entrenchments,’ wrote Jan Bloch, a banker who devoted his private life to the study of modern warfare, in 1901. ‘The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle. The first thing every man will have to do, if he cares for his life at all, will be to dig a hole in the ground.’ His book was called Is War Now Impossible?, and if the title was rather hopeful, then his prognostication, 15 years before the Somme, was only too accurate. However, even he failed to see the next logical step – or at least a next logical step – which was to bury the forts in the ground, an idea that would become the cornerstone of France’s defensive strategy in the years leading up to the Second World War.

  Its actual manifestation was championed by two French ministers, Paul Painlevé and André Maginot, in the 1920s and implemented by the latter. They proposed a line of concrete fortifications and artillery installations to extend the length of the borders of Switzerland, Luxembourg and Germany, and some of Belgium too. It would be called the Maginot Line and it would protect France from any further aggressions from the east. André Maginot himself called his Line a ‘subterranean fleet’; the rest of the French called them forts or ouvrages (‘works’), but in English we would call them bunkers because, like an iceberg, the vast majority of their bulk is unseen. Below ground out of sight are vast galleries, bunkrooms, kitchens and ammunition stores, sometimes requiring lift shafts up to five storeys deep and miniature underground railways to shift stores around. Hundreds of men lived inside, but up top all that typically could be seen were a few squat concrete cubes, soft geometric curves, the cyclopean glare of a gun position peering at you from a cupola. Years after the war, J. G. Ballard described his encounter with derelict bunkers (Nazi this time) on a beach in western France: ‘Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one,’ he wrote, ‘left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.’ Nowhere do his words ring more true than in the mountains where the concrete and steel structures, so different from the graceful peaks around them, resemble UFOs, alien craft that could take off again at any time.