In case you haven’t seen this clip before https://youtu.be/0GQ036V5lyA?si=A7TZ84JarP4OTxa9
This is a fun little exercise. A clip of the climax of the battle from Bondarchuk’s Waterloo, with characters speaking their own languages. It doesn’t have English subtitles, but most of us have probably seen the film so many times that we know much of the dialogue off by heart not to need it. Apart from which, I’d bet our hobby interest has given us a reasonable smattering of French and German, and especially military vocabulary.
Cheeky way that Boney’s internal dialogue is portrayed 😄
I'm reading about the 1813 campaign and the lead up to Leipzig and all the issues with the higher C&C, with some commanders not speaking French (almost the lingua franca of the day), so relying upon aides etc to translate for them. Even worse on the battlefield if you are not fluent or even proficient in the main language. During the Austro-Prussian War, the Hungarian units had Austrian officers who in the main couldn't speak Hungarian, not good, then if the officers were killed, the unit didn't know what was going on etc.
ReplyDeleteCheers for your comment about the Leipzig campaign. I’m surprised as I thought that French was commonly spoken by the upper classes across Europe then.
DeleteYou got me disappearing down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about lingua Franca. I thought it literally was French, but turns out it comes from the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and there’s some debate about whether it was Italian/an Italian pidgin or Spanish pidgin or all of the above (since ‘Italian’ and ‘Spanish’ are just high status dialects that came out of their respective peninsulas).
Any road up, the officers’ lack of Hungarian in the Habsburg armies doesn’t seem to have been a problem in earlier wars, so maybe it only became important because of nationalism or perhaps the requirement for soldiers to be more independent as the old linear order broke down? Surely German* was the command language, and in earlier times simple orders in German were easy to pick up. But in fluid actions with small units, fluent communication becomes more important.
Chris
French was commonly spoken (even Foreign Office memos etc were, until Palmerston changed them to English), but Blucher didn't (not surprising given he hated the French) and Gneisenau was of the same ilk IIRC. Not all Russians spoke it either, despite many emigres serving in their armies.
DeleteLingua France I always thought was literally the language of the Franks/French, so learnt something today too!
I think the problem came about with the unification of Austria and Hungary and is mentioned in Duffy's book on the Armies of Maria Theresa too? Hungarian is a notoriously difficult language to learn, having no other equivalent in Europe IIRC.
I think the ‘Franks’ bit derives from the Byzantines and Saracens who referred to all Europeans (from the west) as ‘Franks’. I suppose it was a bit of a put down by the Byzantines who were of course ‘Romans’.
DeleteAll the best
Chris