MORNING SERIAL
EVEN understanding marching orders and distinguishing between left and right could be challenging at first.
Nor were soldiers always even permitted to write home in their mother tongue since all letters had to be censored.
This was more than just inconvenient since not all parents could read English and thus understand the letters their children had sent.
Indeed, the same was true of letters sent home by the War Office and thus some parents had to rely on neighbours or others to find out if a telegram was informing them of the injury or death of their son.
But official regulations did allow letters to be written in Welsh and the language to be spoken in the trenches, and thousands of soldiers did both.
The suppression and sneering thus once again owed more to individual officers and officials than policy but it still created a powerful sense of anger amongst the victims.
One father thus wrote to a newspaper: “If Welsh blood is good enough to be spilt on the plains of Flanders the Welsh language is good enough to be written.”
The war also produced the most powerful argument against post-Tudor Wales being a colony in any traditional sense.
In 1916, the same year the Irish were taking up arms against the British, David Lloyd George, a Welsh-speaking Welshman, became prime minister.
It is a very odd colony that gets to govern its master during a time of war and crisis.
Moreover, he achieved this without abandoning his Welshness.
At the outset of war, he summoned the idea of a Welsh military tradition stretching back into medieval times in order to raise support for the war.
He also fought successfully to allow Nonconformist chaplains in the Army and for the formation of a Welsh division to serve in France.
But Lloyd George’s career also shows the continuing inequalities within the union.
> Wales: England’s Colony? by Martin Johnes is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com