Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  The Alpine Extension of the Maginot Line is the last chapter in France’s long history of recurrent paranoia, enmity and conflict with Italy in these mountains, and it stretches from near Bourg Saint Maurice to Roquebrune, right by the Italian border on the Mediterranean Sea.fn6 They are surprisingly little known and undocumented, and even their construction was not initially a priority. In the 1920s the French were convinced (rightly, it would turn out) that the main future battlegrounds would be in the north-east. However, as Mussolini grew in power, he began to threaten, if only verbally, the Savoie region, Corsica and Nice. And so the schedule in the south was accelerated. It must have been hard work. On the flatlands, the bunker plans were fairly standardised, but in the mountains each had to respond to the particular properties of the steep terrain it was sited on, leading their architects to create some extravagant forms. Each of the cloches – the cast iron observation or gun emplacements – weighed more than a ton and sometimes had to be transported by horse and cart. Concrete was mixed on site with local aggregate, meaning that each bunker blended into its surroundings, and for the highest bunkers construction could only take place during the brief Alpine summers when the snow had melted. Many sites were unfinished when war broke out, others were downgraded to cut costs, but the scale of what was achieved, in some of the most isolated and remote corners of Europe, remains impressive.

  I discovered the bunkers over years of cycling the high roads of the southern Alps. The further I went, the more I realised how numerous they are and how they litter the landscape (there are four or five separate complexes on the main Col de la Bonette road alone, and a similar number on the Col de la Madone, just to pick a couple of examples). They helped me realise, after stumbling across a few bunkers and then researching their history, just how much these mountains are a military conundrum as well as a sporting playground. Whereas a road wraps like a ribbon around the contours of the hill, the bunkers are arranged according to other principles. Looking for them means approaching the terrain more laterally, thinking of axes and channels, weak points and redoubts, and sightlines to the passes, and when you come across one it is like an ambush. You are cycling along enjoying the view or concentrating on the climb and then, suddenly, you glimpse an incongruous shape. Above you, always above, a series of soft, regular curves on the prow of a hill (the rounded corners were designed not to cast stark shadows for observers looking from afar). A presence betrayed. And then you realise that you are under surveillance across time. There are dead eyes looking down, tracking you with murderous intent, and this road you are cycling is no longer innocent. It was originally built by the military and it too has played a part in this long-ago drama. Simply by being there you have been drawn into the conspiracy.

  Mainly, though, what I have taken from these bunkers is a feeling of a great misplaced energy, and of waste, because the onslaught they were built to defend against never came. With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to wonder if Mussolini sending troops through the Alps was ever a serious threat to France’s territorial integrity. One could charitably say that these sentinels standing watch over the passes were a crucial psychological deterrent, but, then again, nobody has successfully invaded over the Alps since Hannibal. It does seem, at best, like a 2,000-year-old tactic. It’s just not modern warfare. The closest I can reach for is during the First World War, when Italy was forced to defend its borders against Austria-Hungary in the Dolomites, fighting from ice trenches and shelling enemy positions at 3,000 metres altitude, encampments and positions that are now being revealed for the first time in a hundred years as the glaciers recede and the ice melts. This so called Guerra Bianca or White War seems like a terrible, primitive throwback, and the figures bear this out: more than 150,000 men died fighting for this lonely high border, and it is estimated that a third of them perished from the cold, or ill health not directly attributable to the fighting.

  Modern warfare happened in the Ardennes, far to the north of the Alps. In May 1940 a Blitzkrieg of German tanks came through the thick Belgian forests where there were no Maginot defences, circumventing and neutering the static defensive positions. Italy did not declare war on France until 10 June, and the Alpine front was very quiet until 21 June. The Italians attacked only after the French had signed an armistice with the Germans (but before it came into force on 25 June). That seems sneaky, but all’s fair in love and war, I suppose. Even then, the attacks were localised, and though the Italians took some towns and villages, none of the Alpine Maginot defences was breached. Thousands of men had been stationed here through harsh winters and glorious summers, waiting in these remote corners of the world for the actions of great men far away to have a catastrophic effect. Finally the decisive action took place, but elsewhere, and though a few of them fought valiantly, they had mainly waited in vain.

  I became somewhat obsessed with these bunkers over the course of several years riding in these mountains. Over many separate rides I travelled further and wider, even as my targets became more focused, narrowed down to precise GPS coordinates, until I was carrying my bike over snowdrifts on unpaved tracks towards forts defending a border that no longer existed – Italian bunkers stranded in France thanks to a shift in the borders after 1945. And I thought I had seen enough to imagine, at least imagine, the bare outlines of the misery of living under the constant threat of bombardment, of fighting and dying in these holes; and to feel the contrast between the dark discomfort within and the glorious views without. But I never expected to find anyone alive who had lived within, or any testimony of what it was like. Then a shepherd led me to a time capsule, buried under a rock in the beautiful, peaceful meadow just where his sheep were grazing above the Camp des Fourches.

  Like many of the old fortifications, the Camp des Fourches had been reoccupied during the Second World War. Its inhabitants, I can only suppose, emulated their predecessors, and during the winter months laid planks between the roofs of the barracks, creating a platform to hold the heavy snowfall and safe, dry walkways below. Above the old stone-built barracks a reinforced concrete bunker complex, the Avant Poste du Col des Fourches, was built. In all, 42 men and an officer were stationed there. The time capsule’s creator, Jean-Marie Joseph Deroux, was one and, as an old man, he came back to the battleground to leave his testimony, written on paper and laminated and put in a preserving jar, where he served. On 23 June 1940, he writes:

  At three in the morning a shell exploded close to my hut. In the blink of an eye we went back to our holes (three in each), but it was still night and the weather is set in … a fine mix of rain and snow, and by the end there must have been 20cm of snow covering us. With no shelter and in a dreadful din of shells, we lay there, our teeth chattering. Soaked in the snow that melted on our backs we stood guard so that the enemy couldn’t take advantage of the bad weather and advance quickly. Towards the middle of the day, when it got brighter, the Italians were still a long way off. And this was their worst hour, because we massacred them. If we didn’t get badly hit ourselves, it’s because we didn’t obey our captain, who had asked us to dig our holes 100m further to the left, when we’d already dug these ones! When he’d left we’d said, ‘What’s done is done!’ Quite a few shells passed only a few metres above us, and lots of shells hit where we should have been! A few shot too short even fell on their soldiers (the Alpinis), increasing the destruction. There were about 250 dead or injured at this spot, not counting the prisoners.

  Monday 24 June. The snow melts. The Italians take away their dead and injured, and we let them, as ceasefire is being called at 00h35 tomorrow. If we’d wanted, we could have shot all of them.

  Tuesday 25 June. We went down to where we’d been shooting … and we felt sorry for the Italians who had been sent into this butcher’s shop to attack us. We found a body lying on the path, searched it and saw that he was a husband and father. No words. So as not to leave any weapons for the enemy we destroyed them all.fn7

  The message in a bottle is there still in the hole D
eroux had dug and where he lay. If you’re on Bonette, I can give you directions. Or pay attention, instead, to the bunkers themselves, which, though forlorn and crumbling into the landscape, stray facts from a future passed, keep vigil and are also a testimony of sorts – guilty reminders of these things we’d probably rather forget. Ask yourself, how, precisely, does one remove from the side of a mountain a structure with concrete walls almost three metres thick, which was literally designed to withstand massive explosions, and you’ll realise that they’ll be there much longer than us.

  It is said that Gino Bartali helped to avoid a war, or at least a popular revolt. During the 1948 Tour de France, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, was shot in the neck as he was leaving the chamber of deputies in Rome. By a miracle, he survived, but the situation in post-fascist Cold War Italy became very tense. A general strike was called, Communists occupied factories and radio and TV stations, and an angry row in parliament almost came to blows. The Italian premier, recognising the danger, rang Bartali at his hotel and appealed to him to restore national unity by putting on a show. Bartali won three Alpine stages in a row, soloing over the Izoard, fighting on the Galibier and leading on the Croix de Fer. After that, he led the Tour by 14 minutes, an unassailable margin. With immaculate timing, Togliatti woke from his coma, received the news of Bartali and asked for the general strike to be called off.

  In 1950, to return to where we started, rather than helping to avoid a war his actions almost caused one. I was going to make an analogy here, but it would be hyperbole, and writing even that makes me uneasy. To paraphrase one of the speakers in Don DeLillo’s great sports novel End Game, I reject the notion of cycling as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don’t need substitutes because we’ve got the real thing. Too much of it, everywhere, and what we live with is the aftermath. The infrastructure and cockeyed logic of war. The roads, the crumbling concrete in the meadows, the forcing people to take sides, the scuffles on the ground between Bartali and Robic. Cycling is not warfare; it is a highly regulated form of competition in which tensions are played out and small supremacies established in ritualised and usually entirely safe ways. Cycling is where teammates and countrymen can stab each other in the back (metaphorically), and even the Swiss get hit – as Ferdi Kübler was, in the scuffles around Bartali and Robic that day. And yet at the end of the day – most days at least – everyone goes to bed, next to each other in the same hotels, and gets up to ride their bikes and tear chunks out of each other again in the morning.

  However. Do not forget that in 1950 France had only been liberated for five years. And though the Italians had played no part in the fascist aggression after 1943, they had nevertheless been an occupying power. Many of the French standing on the sides of the road during the 1950 Tour would undoubtedly have fought against them. It’s conceivable that some of the riders might have found themselves facing each other in combat. Now they were lining up with their bicycles. It was more than simply a bike race. Remembering this shadow play of history – the Tour and all that’s beyond it – is part of the richness of riding in the mountains. These are not simply battles between riders, or internalised struggles between a rider, gravity and the mountain: the ground beneath our wheels has been won and lost, defended and fought over fiercely.

  As for the main players in that bike race, it is surprising that Gino Bartali, known for his courage and strength, felt himself in physical danger and could not continue. There might well have been something else going on (one theory being that he couldn’t bear to see Magni win). On the French side, everyone was very apologetic and conciliatory. Robic blamed Louison Bobet, as far as there was blame: all three of them had been hampered by a motorcycle that had been slowed in the dense crowds. Bobet tried to profit from it and jump away, there was a touch of wheels and down everyone went. Bobet explained that Bartali wasn’t really working in the break, and so he had attacked. ‘And for this I ask you to apologise to Robic, who might believe there was an ill-meaning gesture on my part,’ Bobet said.

  And with that, peace broke out; but the Italians were gone.

  Chapter 8

  GETTING HIGH

  Or, sublime altitude and switchback aesthetics, why altitude camps are not simple things to understand, and the hotel at the beginning of the world …

  This was not specifically my intention but I’m on my way back to the first mountain I ever climbed, and I find a sort of serendipity in the idea that said mountain has now become a top destination (no pun intended), a secret Mecca even, for bike racers. I was probably five or six and my brother was a toddler, and I wasn’t on a bicycle, not even close. We were on holiday with our mum on Tenerife, staying in a resort on the south side of the island. Coincidentally, my grandparents were staying on the north side; in between us, the 3,718-metre-tall El Teide. I don’t remember much else about the holiday, but I do remember driving over to see them and the hire car breaking down somewhere near the top of Teide. I remember the hairdryer wind and standing there on the side of a tiny winding road next to a duff Fiat Panda. My mum, in her twenties, and two young kids; no mobile phones, no GPS, helpless. Pine trees and pink rocks, sunlight and the warm, warm wind. We were saved by a local who, in my memory at least, wore Ray-Bans and looked like Freddie Mercury. He drove us down in his Mini, forcing the little car into the bends, my eyeline no higher than the low retaining wall that would not stop us if, as seemed inevitable, he lost control, overshot a hairpin and we careened down the scree slopes into the cacti below. But we did not die, and almost 30 years later I am in a hire car on my way back up this mountain, cuing little flashbacks of that little Mini – as well as a few surprises, because Teide is like no other place I remember.

  To take a short diversion into geology and plate tectonics, a long, long time ago all the continents were a single supercontinent, Pangaea. In the Jurassic era this began to fragment, and the rift created by America and Africa drifting apart began to form the Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of millions of years, in fact, the African continental plate moved almost 1,000 kilometres to the north-east, forcing the oceanic crust downwards and causing whole oceans to disappear. Then, shortly before the dinosaurs died out (shortly in geological terms at least), the African continental plate collided with the Eurasian continental plate, a colossal pile-up that lifted rocks into gigantic ruches. All the great mountain ranges from the Atlas and the Rif in the west to the Hindu Kush and the Himalaya in the east are, broadly speaking, the product of tectonic collisions like this between the Eurasian plate and the neighbouring plates to the south; this great vertical push of matter towards the sky is why you can find, if you know what you’re looking for, material from the seabed of the long-disappeared Piemont-Liguria Ocean high in the southern Alps. Essentially, these mountains are folds.fn1

  El Teide, on the other hand, is a volcano – a great upwards splurge of molten rock, gas and ashes from a fissure in the earth’s crust that cooled and solidified to make land. The whole of Tenerife, in fact, is a volcano,fn2 and not even an extinct one. Teide is still erupting, cooling and solidifying (most recently in 1909, and it is currently running behind schedule with its next), and the roads immediately south-west of the summit pass through black, spiky, barren lava fields that look like ancient landscapes but which are actually fresh apocalypse. And stranded in the caldera at 2,150 metres there is a hotel. Lower down, the red-rocked scenery resembles Arizona as you’d picture it in an old cowboy film. A little higher, it tends towards the extraterrestrial, and this desolate landscape is often isolated above a sea of clouds. The hotel at the end of the world, you might say; or, since this just-cooled-lava land is some of the newest rock on the planet, at its beginning.

  The Parador Las Cañadas del Teide is a squat stucco building next to a squat stucco chapel, almost at the road’s highest point but still far from the volcano’s peak. Teide is on the same latitude as southern Morocco, yet in April the top is still spotted with snow. You can see it in pockets where the cable car
drops sightseers at the zenith of this island, which even into the 18th century was thought by some to be the tallest peak in the world. These high, rocky slopes used to be used as pastures for sheep and goats, by beekeepers, and to procure sulphur, firewood, medicinal herbs and snow.fn3 It seems an unlikely place to find the cream of cycling’s talent, yet here they are, a whole lot of them, crammed into one little hotel. It is three weeks before the Giro. Team Astana and Cannondale-Garmin are here, and two of the lottos – Team LottoNL-Jumbo’s men and Lotto-Soudal’s women – are in residence. Tinkoff were here last week (they’ve left bike boxes in the store) and Team Sky are on the premises too: Chris Froome, even though he is not riding the Giro, is getting an altitude top-up. Joe Dombrowski later observes to me that if by chance the volcano erupted at any point in the spring, the world’s supply of Grand Tour riders would be seriously depleted and cycling’s biggest races thrown wide open. There are a few other random, and to this untrained eye unnameable, elite endurance athletes staying, and then team staff, a couple of old French hikers and me. Literally two French hikers and me. It’s nigh on impossible to book one of the 30-something rooms here between February and June there are so many cycling teams trying to squeeze in. Later, I hear from a rider that his team had been looking into buying a property on Teide (on top of the difficulty in securing a place at the hotel, it’s not cheap), but couldn’t, because Teide is a national park and development is prohibited. So for now, the Parador Las Cañadas del Teide is where it’s at.