The United States Marines have long and a rhyme (or song) that appears to date back to World War I (1917-18 for the U.S.):

"Ten thousand gobs laid down their swabs to fight one sick Marine."

The line appears in the 1926 silent film "Tell It to the Marines."

By 1945 it was being sung to the tune of "The Marines' Hymn," with a second line added:

"Ten thousand more stood by and swore 'twas the damnedest fight they'd seen."

In "The Run up to the Punch Bowl" (2006), Marine John Nolan recalled the following elaborate form from the Korean War (1950-53):

       A thousand gobs laid down their swabs
        To lick one sick Marine.                                
        A thousand more stood by and swore
       twas the bloodiest fight they’d seen.
        The Army and the Navy and the lousy Engineers
        Could never lick the Leathernecks
        In a hundred thousand years.

Chorus:
        As we go marching
        And the band begins to P-L-A-Y
        You can hear them shouting,
        The Raggedy Ass Marines are on parade


The chorus appeared as a separate WW1 song in Niles, Moore, & Walgren's "Songs My Mother Never Taught Me" (1928), and the lines about the Army and the Navy were sung during WW1 to the tune of "The Son of a Gamboleer" ("A Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech").

Does anybody still know the song?

(For those beyond the pond, "gob" is a now old-fashioned slang term for a sailor.)