'C'est stupide!': The gruelling cycle race through France's battlefields

Riding in the Zone Rouge
by Tom Isitt
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 302pp, £20/$24.50

Within six months of the end of the First World War, a French newspaper organised a bicycle race through the battlefields of the Western Front, traversing such sites as Ypres, the Somme and Verdun.

The 87 riders who started the Circuit des Champs de Bataille (Tour of the Battlefields) in the spring of 1919 were to cross the Zone Rouge, an area in which human habitation or activity was proscribed because of war damage. The conditions were so severe that just 21 of the riders completed the race. Struggling to the end of one of the 18-hour stages, one of them summed it up with the words “C’est stupide” before almost collapsing.