to be 20,000 to see him finish. He won again after riding the last 62 km alone after a day of potholes and knee-high water. He climbed the Col de Porte in a wind that twice blew him off his bike and being knocked down by a horse. His chain broke on the approach to Lyon and he ran a kilometre to the finish, pushing his bike. He won all five stages from Metz to Nice, all of them by himself, the final one after attacking Garrigou when he stopped due to a puncture. At the end of the race, the race official, Alphonse Steinès, asked Faber what he planned to do next. Faber said: Lucien Petit-Breton said of him: In the 1910 Tour, Faber was leading his Alcyon teammate Octave Lapize in the overall general classification when in Stage 7, a collision with a dog at the foot of the Pyrenees left him seriously injured. Despite winning the stage at Nîmes, the injury cost him the tour. Lapize attacked and took the tour with a last gasp attack from Faber on the final stage from Caen to Paris ending with a number of punctures. He continued to compete in the Tour de France with moderate success until his cycling career, like many of his peers, was curtailed with the start of World War I. Faber won 19 Tour de France stages, Paris–Brussels, Bordeaux–Paris, Sedan-Brussels, Paris–Tours twice, Paris–Roubaix and the Giro di Lombardia. Death Faber joined the French Foreign Legion when the First World War broke out. He was assigned to the 2nd Marching Regiment of the 1st Foreign Regiment, at Bayonne on 22 August 1914. He was promoted to corporal. On 9 May 1915, the first day of the Battle of Artois at Carency near Arras he received a telegram saying his wife had given birth to a daughter. One story says that, cheering, he jumped out of the trench and was killed by a German bullet. Another, more commonly accepted, is that he was shot while carrying an injured colleague back from no-man's land during fighting between Carency and Mont-Saint-Éloi. His regiment lost 1,950 of 2,900 in their attack. Faber was posthumously awarded the Médaille militaire. The GP François Faber, a small race in Luxembourg, is named after him. There is a plaque in his memory in the church of Notre Dame de Lorette in the French national