The First Battle of All Brittany

The First Battle of All Brittany, sometimes called the Second Battle of Naoned/Nantes, was a decisive strategic victory for Brittany. A victory on the part of the Breton Armies, while the French Army of the Center retreated to lick its wounds in the middle of Brittany, where it was cut off from supplies.

The victories here, and the capture of Lafayette during the smaller battles in Brittany thereafter, gave the Bretons enough hope for victory - and enough prestige - to elevate themselves into a kingdom.

 Raw transcript: 

- A Prussian officer arrives in Brittany by ship, where he begins a strict training regimen for the Breton troops. Similarities between the serf-based recruitment system in Prussia and that of the Breton military mean that the measures are implemented easily and successfully. The Bretons are now better trained.

- British aid to the Army of All Brittany continues, with large quantities of gold and wealth arriving regularly on the Breton shores. Parliament likewise ships over 10 cannons on lease, though requests for “rockets” cause many to scratch their heads. The rocket is the purview of the savage Indians in the Kingdom of Mysore, and there is not yet any British equivalent.

- The Breton border forts ordered several months earlier are nearing completion, though not nearly soon enough. Despite all expectations, there is movement on the border - it looks as though an invasion has been ordered in the middle of winter. The mostly finished structures are unsteady and unstable, but the Marquis orders his forces into them nonetheless. They take up positions in sizable number, the newly delivered cannons jammed into several of them.

- Camps are set up throughout Brittany, far more so than the Breton’s army would actually require. It almost looks as though the vast majority of the population has rallied in defense of their country, though that seems logistically impossible.

- Louis Stanislas abandons the Austrian Netherlands when word reaches him of Massena’s approaching army, though he leaves his brother the comte d’Artois behind to maintain an emigre presence in the region. Huddled into ships belonging to the British fleet, the aristocrats find the conditions hardly to their liking, and only barely manage to escape the harsh winter that is setting in, landing in the port of Nantes.

- Stanislas gives a speech somewhere near Nantes tacitly endorsing his niece Marie Therese as a fine and decent woman, a Bourbon through and through. He even goes so far as to call her the duchess Brittany deserves. This sucks most of the support away from the Patrilinealists, and any divisions in the Noble Assembly begin to slowly fade.

- L'Armee des Princes uses vast British donations to hire mercenaries from throughout the Celtic world. Scottish and Welsh veterans from the Revolutionary Wars in particular sign on, with the only Irish mercenaries coming from the region around Belfast. These “Gallowglass” soldiers, believed to have completely disappeared, were once feared throughout western Europe... and now they have returned. They soon meet with Louis Stanislas, and his army is flush with 3,000 experienced and well-trained soldiers, albeit ones who are loyal only to the money he offers them.

- After issuing a final ultimatum to his soldiers: join me or leave, a healthy portion of the Armee du Nord (Royalist) follows the comte de Rochambeau into the army of Louis Stanislas. The remainder journey eastward to avoid fighting their former brothers-in-arms, hoping to meet with André Masséna’s army and join him in a push against the Germans.

- Cadoudal prepares the men of Brittany for war against the encroaching French forces. He calls on them to take up arms in a campaign of mass resistance, to join in the crusade against the Republican invaders. This is a war for survival, the war that will decide whether Bretons will be free or slaves. So goes Cadoudal’s cry, and the people of Brittany from every village to every town to every farmstead set down their plowshares and pick up their swords. The bombardment of the Breton shores was only the beginning, and should this war be lost, every home will be set aflame, every child put to the sword, every church made an altar of de Sade.

- The Ar Diebin Bretoned waste valuable time attacking and surrounding the obviously fake camp set up in the north along the shores of the English Channel. There are few actual soldiers there, perhaps a few hundred, though the Bretons mercilessly kill those they can find. As a result, their forces can not be called to arms in time to meet the French Army’s initial advance.

- The French, meanwhile, arrive in force. The war drums of the Armee du Centre echo the beating of the Breton’s hearts as they pour against the banks of the frozen Mayenne. Some forty-thousand French soldiers expect an easy crossing, the river being in French territory. Bretons suddenly appear, the men on the opposite side of the river open firing on the massive French line. The numbers are simply too many. The French artillery overwhelms them, with cannonfire obliterating the half-finished structures they stand by and forcing them in on themselves. Lafayette orders his men across to drive into Nantes, where his scouts have brought him reports of the Army of All Brittany on the move. He hopes to force a direct confrontation and make his name feared among all Bretons.

- As they are carefully crossing, the men notice small sticks scattered throughout the river. Flaming arrows suddenly descend on them, many hitting these tar sticks and setting them alight. The fire breaks the ice, which caves in on the interlopers, with hundreds falling into the frigid running river beneath and drowning. Of those who are pulled out, many die later of hypothermia. Lafayette orders wood brought in from the supply carts to form a bridge, but as he’s doing so, skirmishers dart around the ruined border forts, quickly taking up position in a poorly formed line and aiming. Lafayette’s troops fall to the ground, the planks falling unceremoniously with them. One of Lafayette’s officers even falls dead to the barrage. A counterline is formed on the opposite side, and with overwhelming numbers the sharpshooters are forced to fall back to an unknown location.

- Finally feeling somewhat secure, Lafayette manages to cross the river with most of his forces as snow falls all around them. As the days pass, Breton harassment continues almost incessantly, and though the inherent advantage lies with Lafayette’s troops, each village they come across is openly hostile to them, even as Lafayette tries to hand over the land of the local nobility to them. Lafayette’s troops are forced to fire on civilians constantly, as many of the Breton soldiers have taken to disguising themselves as peasants, and he can never truly be certain who is a friend and who is a foe. Though the vast majority are foes... and every peasant killed turns more of them against the invaders.

- By the time Lafayette moves further inland, his supply lines have been severed by continued raids on the wagons travelling from Caen, and much of the food he had brought with him has been lost to endless guerilla attacks across the snow-covered Breton plateaus. The Montagnes Noires, though never extending as high as those formidable mountains in the Pyrenees or the Alps, have a distinct, wild character to them that makes crossing extraordinarily difficult for Lafayette’s invading troops - especially in the winter. Hundreds desert, fading into the mountains.

- Battered and bruised, but not broken, the Armee du Center finally reach the outskirts of Nantes, where the British expeditionary force (of somewhat questionable quality) bombards them with garrison artillery and continual musket volleys. The Army of All Brittany is nowhere to be seen, however. The camps set up throughout the region seem to have misled Lafayette’s scouts... when an entire host of Breton forces descends on him. They are led from the rear by the Charles Armand Tuffin. They are outnumbered by the French, who promptly form into lines and return fire.

- They are too disorganized, however, too wearied by the march across the Breton slopes in the middle of winter. Royalist reinforcements and the sally of the British end any hope of a tactical victory as soldiers in the army begin throwing down their arms and abandoning their places in the line. Despite overwhelming odds, the Bretons - joined by their royalist allies in the form of Louis Stanislas and the remnants of the comte de Rochambeau’s army - repulse the Armee du Centre away from the city. The French regroup somewhere in central Brittany, not yet truly defeated. The Bretons have lost thousands of men, and while they actually killed far less men than they lost, the elements, desertion, and continued strikes at the soldier’s morale did the rest. The term Guerre petite would later enter into the English language to describe a war fought by a smaller, inferior force with unconventional tactics.

- The Bretons lose 3,620 men and all of their donated cannons. The British lose 2,210 men. The Royalists lose 515 of their elite mercenaries. The French lose 7,153 men to disease, desertion, and Breton raids - though most of Lafayette’s loyal National Guard recruits survive the campaign.

- Bathed in glory in the aftermath of their heroic victory, the Bretons call a conclave in the twice-saved city of Nantes. Loeiz II has died, and his successor must be chosen immediately. In the presence of the Archbishop of Paris and the Bishop of Nantes, the Noble Assembly cast their votes and unanimously elect the young princess Mari as Mari Tereza I of Brittany. Cheers go up in her name, and she pledges to righteously rule over the duchy as her father would have, and to establish a ruling family for the Breton people.