The Bicycle in War.

Hastings Standard, Issue 405, 21 August 1897, Page 4

The Bicycle in War.

A representative of the Daily Mail encountered in London a whilom sporting editor of a contemporary looking unusually sunburnt and pleased with himself generally. It was Mr Wilfred Pollock, just returned from acting as special war correspondent of the Morning Post with the Greek army in Thessaly. And his special cause for satisfaction was a claim to a new record with the bicycle, viz., to have been the first correspondent who had ever been through a campaign, practically from "first to last, mounted upon a pair of wheels instead of upon a horse. " But the roads in Greece are almost impassable for a bicycle, one would imagine from the various accounts of the war ?" " By no means," said Mr Pollock; " they are pretty bad, of course, but to the bicycle no carriage roads are impassable. Sometimes I had to get off and walk a mile or two. Sometimes it was I that did the carrying and not the machine. But this was seldom, and never for any great distance. On the other hand the zigzag cuttings up the many mountain passes are so well graded that it is quite possible to ride up them if the surface be good and the wind friendly. Riding down—and my machine had no brake—one had to remember that the corners of these twists'"are not banked, and the khud, as they call it in India, often offers many hundreds of feet of sheer drop." " Of course, you took your bicycle out with you ?" " Unfortunately, no. Everyone who had been in Greece said it would be useless. And so, of course, it would have been had the war been confined to the mountains of the frontier, where there are no roads, but only precipitous bridle paths. As it was, the level roads of the country between Volo and Larissa, and a pretty good conviction that the Greeks would be driven back, induced me, after my arrival in Thessaly, to telephone to my agent in Athens to procure me a bicycle with all speed. About three weeks afterwards, on the third day of the affair at Mati, a second-hand, second-grade machine duly turned up in Larissa. As a matter of fact, however, it proved throughly good English stuff, and carried me all through without anything approaching a break-down." " And the Greeks didn't steal it ?" "No. Fortunately for me the bicycle is still almost unknown in Greece. But my tool bag was stolen on three separate occasions. And before they stole the bag itself they took out of it the nice little tin box containing the ' outfit' for repairing the tyres. No doubt this elegant little case, tightly sealed as it was, appealed mora to the thief than the more prosaic spanner and oilcan. However, a lieutenant on the Dryad gave me a piece of rubber strap snd some naphtha solution which they use with their torpedoes. Going out to Yolo next morning I left the machine in the tender of the locomotive, all among the coals, so that there was ample time for bag and all to take itself wings. Only the naked bicycle was left at Yelestino. ** By this time my success in outstripping other correspondents in the several races to telegraph offices was becoming notorious, and bicycles became quite common adornments of the carriages in which my colleagues chiefly travelled. So I myself stole the tools belonging to Mr Franklin Bouillon, of the New York Journal. As a matter of fac-t, he lent them to me, and f&eh drove on without asking

for them baek. They were of little use, however, to me, for they and the bag in which I had placed them were stolen within the next half hour, while I was filling- my water-bottle at a spring. "My next set of tools, complete with outfit, were got at Athens. Ino louger left them on the unguarded bicycle. This time the bag resembled a cartridge case, and once more proved an irresistible temptation to a native, who had probably watched me carefully put it down beside me in the Dernoko cafe. Very luckily, however, my Raleigh held well together all the time, and the nuts never wanted altering." " So you beat the other men in racing to the telegraph offices ? " " Well, not only did the bicycle prove much faster, even on the Greek roads, than either the Greek horse or carriage, but to sling it on a train or steamer was the work of a moment, and a horse is by no means so easily manipulated. On three most important occasions my stuff reached England at least a whole day in front of that sent by any other English correspondent, thanks to the bicycle every time."