Hi, Teribus:

Yes, I am a veteran. I served seven years in the Canadian Forces during the 1970s; I joined at 17 and became a civilian again, due to asthma, at the age of 24. Years later, I married a serving soldier who is due to retire next year with nearly 30 years in the regular force, preceded by time in the Militia as a student. One way or another, he's been in uniform most of his life, starting as a cadet at the age of 13, and he's nearly 60. Both my brothers are also Canadian Forces veterans, with loads of years of service between them. If that weren't enough to validate my credentials to comment here, my father was a Royal Navy veteran of the Second World War, and one of my grandfathers served in both the Great War and the second lot.

Now, getting back to the song "Hanging on the old barbed wire" and its relatives, including "Has anyone seen the colonel".

No, of course I'm not saying that the whole leadership was rotten except for the corporals. But that same dear old sergeant used to say that many a true word is spoken in jest. It's a well-documented fact that the mass armies on all sides of the Great War all suffered major leadership crises. The French had mutinies and the Russians had a revolution; the British and their colonial allies were darned lucky to survive with nothing worse than the lingering bitterness that we carry on today.

What's interesting about those songs is that only the most junior leader, the Corporal, is seen as sharing the privates' risk and responsibilities. I would ascribe that to the fact that the privates are closest to the corporal, they live with him, and consequently they know what he does -- and, likewise, he knows where they are all the damn time, and he has great influence on their immediate comfort. I wouldn't care to get caught personally insulting the guy who decides whether my stint at fire picket starts at 2000 hr or 0300. In other songs, notably "Dinkie Die" but also going back to broadsides of the early 19th century (thinking of "Ratcliffe Highway"), everybody is mean and nasty to the soldier until his case finally attracts the attention of the commander in chief -- in "Dinkie Die", it's Lord Gort, and in "Ratcliffe Highway" it's Prince Albert.

As in the British Army, the Canadian military tradition is apolitical and largely non-interventionist with respect to grousing, as long as it is kept within the family, as it were. Songs, stories and jokes that poke fun at and even savagely criticize the chain of command are okay if shared only entre nous; don't do it in front of civilians because they don't understand.

As a young recruit, I, too, sang while doubling with my clunky FN rifle. My platoon favoured "While the red, red, robin goes bob-bob-bobbin' along", but we were girls. At the Combat Arms School in Gagetown, and at their regiments' depots, young soldiers learned their regiments' repertoires. I distinctly remember hearing a gang of Van Doos running around the airfield in Lahr singing "Marianne s'en va-t-en moulin", and even today teams training for the Nijmegen Marches can be seen trotting along the tow-path of the Rideau Canal here in Ottawa, in full combat kit with their official 10-kg rucks, singing "A yellow bird / with a yellow bill / sat upon / my windowsill". But you won't hear anything rough anywhere out in the world; that's only for the charmed circle (as it were) of the canteen, the mess, the shack (barracks) and the training area.

"Has anyone seen the colonel" is part of the medley used by Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry as their regimental quick march; the other tunes are "Mademoiselle from Armentières" and "Tipperary". The Patricias are quite the singing regiment; they also have a version of "D-Day Dodgers" that includes the verse about running a bus to Rimini right through the Gothic Line, and a variant of "Dinkie Die" -- learned from the Australians in Korea -- called "Sweet Briar Was Never Like This". This last song deals with the difference between training for war and actually doing it; Exercise Sweet Briar was conducted in the Northwest Territories just before 2PPCLI deployed to Korea.