British Army soldiers have been reprimanded for lampooning the low morale among troops amid warnings from the top brass that they would likely be wiped out if a major war broke out.
A British Army Major was “summoned for a telling off” after it was revealed that he created a satirical song reflecting on the official position of senior officers that, should a big war come, they in the “first echelon” would have to be quickly replaced with new recruits if the country had a hope of winning the conflict.
The song, which quickly spread among the personal mobile devices of serving soldiers, expressed in its chorus and final verse:
…we keep on getting told that wars are won by the second and third echelon, but fuck that because we’re in the first one.
But don’t worry about it… because we’re all dying in the first wave.
Don’t think about the tactics or question the plan, there’s no kit but the [NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps] all over it so bring back the glory days and earn the parade of our coffins…
The line speaks both to a recent remarkable speech by General Sir Patrick Sanders about the inevitability of the “first echelon” of the British Army being expected to suffer badly should a major war come, and the institutional memory of when exactly the same fate befell soldiers in the First and Second World Wars.
General Sanders, who was Chief of the Defence Staff at the time, told the International Armoured Vehicles Conference in 2024 that the British Army needed to have the capability to rapidly expand for a potential future war with Russia because:
We need an Army designed to expand rapidly to enable the first echelon, resource the second echelon, and train and equip the citizen army that must follow… We will not be immune and as the pre-war generation we must similarly prepare – and that is a whole-of-nation undertaking. Ukraine brutally illustrates that regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them.
In 1914, the professional, pre-war British Army that was quickly deployed to France to stymie the German advance westwards — the ‘Old Contemptibles’ — sustained a staggering 58,000 casualties in the First Battle of Ypres, “the destruction of the old British army“. In 1939, the British Expeditionary Force, again the pre-war professional British Army, was smashed in France in a “colossal military disaster” that saw the Army lose almost all of its modern military equipment, although fortunately, most of the 390,000 soldiers deployed escaped with their lives.
In both cases, the loss of the first echelon was backfilled by the massive enlistment of civilians and latterly conscription into the military, trained by what remained of the old force, with millions eventually under arms.
General Sanders’ comments appear to have made clear to those actually serving in the Army that they are anticipated to face the same fate, and this has apparently had a concomitant impact on morale. A report in The Times, citing military insiders, states that:
…privately, serving military personnel have expressed their admiration for the individuals who generated the songs, which reflect the feeling of despair throughout the services. Senior army chiefs are believed to be furious.
The report states that the Army Major who created the song and has now been “summoned for a telling off”, pending formal punishment, did so while attending the Intermediate Command and Staff Course for newly-promoted Majors at Shrivenham Defence Academy. The course is described by the Army as “a 26-week residential, comprehensive and generalist mandatory career course” for newly promoted Majors, training them for their mid-careers through to Lieutenant-Colonel.
The Daily Telegraph reports, shockingly, that the whole class on the residential course were threatened with being failed unless the person responsible for the song came forward and confessed. After the man responsible did, other songs were created by unidentified further soldiers, including a sardonic apology that stated:
Last week I wrote a little song. Pushed send and then it went wrong, my intentions were good, no clue it would spiral…
…I didn’t mean to offend about the lack of kit, or the fact that we might be a little bit shit… if one little song, one little homage can cause such irreversible damage then perhaps problems lie a little deeper than a bored student with inadequate teachers.
… sorry for saying we don’t have enough artillery, and not enough kit on land, air, and sea. So when it’s my turn to charge the enemy, I’ll take the bullets through the chest gleefully.
A spokesman for the Army reportedly said: “Content of this kind falls short of the standards we expect of our people, particularly those undergoing professional military education.”
Breitbart London has been following the changing rhetoric of senior military leaders in the United Kingdom, and the wider NATO alliance on their belief a major land war is coming to the West and that civilians in European countries have to be gently introduced to the idea that they’ll be doing the fighting. General Sanders, in his second-echelon speech, said it was now time to take “preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing” to build the “citizen army”.
The same year, a British Parliamentary report found the British Army was too small for a future war with Russia, and that the war in Ukraine had shown the need to involve “the whole of society” in defence, but without spooking the public, who are naturally averse to conscription.
This could be achieved by “making the public much more aware of the dangers the UK is facing and, crucially, how they themselves can contribute to greater resilience”, it was stated, while warning “any discourse around non-military public contributions is articulated is challenging but important. There is always a risk that conversations could end up veering into discussions around conscription”.
As previously reported:
The British Army itself, which has been closely involved in the Ukrainian war effort behind the front lines by training tens of thousands of new Ukrainian soldiers, has been saying behind closed doors the experience has helped it re-learn how to rapidly generate a new “citizen army” should it be needed in a hurry. A Ministry of Defence source was said to have remarked this year: “We are observing that a lot of what we are doing could act as a mission rehearsal for generating our own second echelon”.
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