Among the first people in Europe to take up cycling as a serious means of transport were the Dutch, largely no doubt because their characteristic flat country was ideally suited for cycling. Anyhow, when the Franco-Prussian War of I870-7I ended and all the Continental powers were discussing how best to be permanently prepared for war, the Dutch military authorities decided to adapt the civilian bicycle to army use.

But one machine per soldier was obviously going to be far too expensive. So they built a cycle to carry twelve men and also to haul a trailer containing food and ammunition. The Multicycle, this very ambitious forerunner of the modern Tandem with a trailer for the baby, aroused considerable controversy and curiosity among foreign military experts and some years later it was tred out by the British War Office at Aldershot. Although it was not introduced into the British Army at the time, the Multicycle nevertheless takes its place in military history as the first experiment in mechanical troop transport, and certainly as the ancestor of the collapsible cycles with which Paratroops landed in enemy territory during the last war.

Taken from "Patent Applied For" by Fred Coppersmith and J. J. Lynx, published 1949. (There's a lot more where that came from.)