To be fair to Jim, the thread had a honourable aim.

I think that comparing verse to historical evidence is rather silly really. It’s all about perspective. Even songs written at the time of events by those there can have a degree of poetic licence.   

“Three Score and Ten” was a poem written by a fisherman (who survived the said storm) in order to publish it and raise funds for the widows and orphans. Even then, he changed the ruddy month just for poetic convenience.   He was there...   At least Keith’s comfortable armchair is in Hertford rather than The Somme, so playing with toy soldiers doesn’t give the imagery of the Sassoon poem quoted above.

In traditional song, the noble art of borrowing and assuming has in some versions of a song a blue cockade with most of the other verses singing of a time when cockades were either black or white, some historians noting that colour dye was expensive. I could go on but going on and on and on I leave to Jim because my trousers have fallen down.