Showing posts with label bicycle infantry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bicycle infantry. Show all posts

20 July 2015

The Naked Truth About The Hipster Infantry

They have silly facial hair and ride single-speed bikes.  Who are they?

I wouldn't be surprised if you said "hipsters".  That's probably the answer I would give, too.

Miep von Sydow has another answer:

Those guys had silly mustaches and single speed bikes before the word hipster even existed.

Perhaps not surprisingly, von Sydow is a Swedish-American military historian.  This photo, on her blog, shows a World War I German bicycle infantry unit on the Western Front in 1914.


Now, I don't think it ever would have occurred to them, or hipsters, to beat swords into plowshares--or paintbrushes or handlebars or anything else. If it had, the result might look something like this:

naked bike riding

At least the silly facial hair isn't as noticeable on the Philadelphia Naked Bike Ride!