Cemeteries and Pavé

The Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery, the largest French military cemetery

Plaque to Francois Faber, 1909 Tour winner in the above cathedral

Another plaque to Faber in Mont-Saint-Éloi near where he died

A pyramid of bikes down the street from the Faber plaque

A stretch of cobbles near Briastre where Michael Goulearts died in the 2018 Paris-Roubaix

Some of the 17 water bottles left at the Goulearts’ memorial

The start of the stretch of pavé named for Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle, two-time winner of Paris-Roubaix 

The official start of the stretch

A monument in Hem where Hennie Kuiper suffered a flat on his way to winning  the 1983 Paris-Roubaix

Grave of Belgian Frank Vandenbroucke in Ploegsteert 

The northeast of France abounds with military cemeteries from the two world wars.  Every few miles is another of one nationality or another.  They range in size from fewer than a hundred identical white tombstones in neat and orderly rows surrounded by perfectly manicured grass to thousands of the white markers.

I was drawn to the most massive of them all, Notre Dame de Lorette, containing the remains of over 40,000 French combatants as it offers a plaque to the winner of the 1909 Tour de France, Francis Faber.  The cemetery resides on a high ridge twenty miles north of Arras.  A memorial in the middle of the 64-acre grounds pierces the sky.  It can be seen from miles around.  It is flanked by a grand and majestic cathedral whose interior walls, top to bottom, are covered with names of the dead.

I made a complete circuit of the cathedral wedging my way around the pews scanning the walls before I spotted the plaque to Faber near the ceiling on the right side of the cathedral.  If I had made my circuit counter-clockwise I would have seen it immediately and been deprived of all the extra time in this quiet sanctuary. There had been ten winners of The Tour in its eleven editions before WWI.  Faber is one of three of them to have died in the war.

Faber is also honored with another plaque a few miles away in the village of Mont-Saint-Éloi near where he died.  It is mounted on a wall along the main street through the village a block from the city hall.  A rusty pyramid of bikes, such as one sees along The Tour de France route, stands another block away in front of the towering facade of a cathedral that was bombed by the Germans, as it served as a lookout surveying the vast valley.

Unlike the usual French cemeteries, the military cemeteries don’t have a water spigot.  I had to resort to a school late in the afternoon in the small town of Briastre despite the abundance of cemeteries when I was getting low on water and the time was growing near to be looking for a place to camp.  The door to the school was open and a couple of women were standing beside it.  One gladly took my bottles inside and filled them and returned with an additional bottle from the refrigerator with extra cold water.

I had passed by the school fifteen minutes before when school was letting out at the surprising late hour of 4:30.  Not only do the French keep their students at school late in the day, but also late into summer.  Their summer vacation at this school doesn't commence until July 5.  A congregation of young mothers stood in the shade of a row of trees waiting for their children to come out. Among them was one grandfather standing off to the side.

He was just who I was looking for—someone who would surely know the location of the memorial to the Belgian cyclist Michael Goulearts, who died in the 2018 Paris-Roubaix on a nearby pavé section, suffering cardiac arrest at the young age of 23.   I had already ridden two sections of the pavé into the town and then out without finding it.  He knew precisely where it was, near the summit of a rise on a fork in the road past the town stadium.  I had taken the wrong fork on my first attempt. Surprisingly there were no signs to the pavé, despite its legendary status.  That was the case too in several other towns I had passed through in search of its pavé.  I had to ask around or hope to come upon it.

I didn’t appreciate having to subject my bike to any more of the pavé than necessary.  I hoped this rough treatment wouldn’t lead to broken spokes.  I had been lucky so far with no flats or broken spokes in some 2,500 miles, just worn brake pads and one frayed derailleur cable.  There wasn’t anyone else out testing themselves on the pavé.  I had the Goulearts memorial all to myself.  Just like the Simpson memorial on Ventoux, there was an offering of water bottles and cycling caps.  Many of the seventeen water bottles were full.

Further north on the outskirts of Lille I came upon a section of pavé dedicated to the 1992 and 1993  Paris-Roubaix winner Frenchman Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle.  And a few miles beyond in Hem the final sector of pavé before Roubaix has been named for the 1983 Dutch winner Hennie Kuiper.  It included a monument near where he had a flat while in the lead, which he was able to maintain after a quick wheel-change.  The well-worn paving stones all radiated decades of loud cheers of the crowds and the fury of the riders giving all-out efforts as if their lives depended on it as they bounded over their hellacious route.

I’d been to the finish in the velodrome in Roubaix in the past, so continued directly north to another cycling shrine a few miles into Belgium in the small town of Ploegsteert—the grave of Frank Vandenbroucke, one of the foremost of the great Belgian hopes to be the next Eddie Merckx who died young in 2009 at the age of 34 after a tragic life of great promise undermined by bouts with performance-enhancing and recreational drugs.  He died of a pulmonary embolism in Senegal.  He had turned pro when he was eighteen.  He won Paris-Nice when he was twenty-three, then Liege-Bastogne-Liege the following year, crushing the field with Merckxian panache that thrilled all of Belgium.   

But he couldn’t handle all the acclaim and money that came his way.  He entitled his autobiography written two years before his death, “I’m not God.”  Despite all the woes that followed in the decade before his death, he remains a hero in his home town.  There are signs to his grave in the cemetery by the town cathedral.   His tombstone identified him as simply Frank. It was overwhelmed with flowers and plaques and water bottles.  It is the only cycling grave I’ve visited that incorporated a wheel into it.

The next day when I was at a bike shop back in France, the mechanic proudly told me, “Frank Vandenbroucke is from around here.”  He gave me a pat on the back when I told him I had visited his grave the evening before.