A member of the Cornwall Branch of the Celtic League who is a Breton living in Cornwall (there are many) has written this telling piece on the First World War and the treatment of the Bretons. During WWI (1914-18), the French had the biggest army in Europe, purely in terms of numbers, but for this, they drew on all their minorities very heavily, many of whom spoke little French, or at best, very bad or broken French. This was the case in Brittany, where the peasant classes (agricultural/farm workers) had no French language knowledge, apart from maybe a few in the East & Southeast, where Gallo, rather than Breton-Cornish (West) or Breton-Welsh (South) were spoken (Gallo is a cross between French & Breton, a little like Catalan is a mixture of French & Spanish). So the French army relied heavily on (French) educated NCOs drawn from Brittanys cities or major towns, such as Kemper, Brest, Vannes, Lorient, St. Brieuc and so on (note that by the early 20th century, French and/or Gallo were already widespread in Rennes, St. Malo, Nantes, etc.). This of course, for reasons of bilingualism, ie. so that army orders could be relayed to and understood by, ALL Breton soldiers. But the nature of WWI, where NCOs went over the top first, meant that many of these were the first casualties of any battle, meaning that when they were killed in action, there were very few soldiers around to understand, let alone translate orders from the top (the brave generals at the back!). Add to this what we now know happened to so many soldiers, relating to shell-shock & PTSD as well as, for many fighting in seriously foreign lands (in the 1980s, I knew some farmers that called fields they worked in Ethiopia because they were a very long way from the farm!) against an enemy they had never heard of and knew nothing about (Germany?? Who? Where?), let alone why they were even fighting them - the shooting of some royal in Serbia would probably not made headline news in local papers in rural Brittany, and if it did, many wouldnt been able to read it anyway! - and you have a lethal recipe for disaster, whereby soldiers were left rudderless, in the mud, blood and smoke, unable to even understand anyone around them, other than their equally lost comrades. This lead to the firing squad for many, by the French army, after failed - or successful - advances against the Germans, for desertion or refusing to obey orders. Because Brittany had a large population of farm workers, and because of their inability to understand THE language of the centralised French state, many of these Breton platoons (or whatever the term) were widely used as canon-fodder in the trench warfare (not the only ones of course). I dont have all the details or every fact about this (although Im sure theres more available on the internet), but my paternal grand-father, who was lucky enough to be in the artillery - older, mathematically-thinking (for calculating shell-fire angles, etc.) and French-speaking - survived that war (and went on to fight WWII as well!!) was there, so I have a lot of second-hand tales (via my father, who only managed WWII) This was so scandalous and appalling, that some Bretons, whod had so many family members slaughtered by their own generals, actually fought on the German side during the next war (1939-45), thinking that the Germans would actually liberate them from France!! And many nationalist parties, as well as the modern Breton Stars & Stripes (the Gwenn ha Du) grew out of this huge French injustice. (Picture shows Breton soldiers playing the bagpipes and the bombard during the First World War, from LIllustration, published in 1915 by French School)
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 12:28:23 +0000