Trench Song

"It's like Fred Karno's army."

That was one of my dad's stock phrases, along with...

"Horses eat it, pigs shit in it," whenever I said "eh?" instead of "pardon?".

"Don't tickle it, it won't laugh," whenever I didn't kick the football hard enough.



And it is, indeed, like Fred Karno's army...

We are Fred Karno's army, we are the ragtime infantry.
We cannot fight, we cannot shoot, what bleeding use are we?
And when we get to Berlin we'll hear the Kaiser say,
'Hoch, hoch! Mein Gott, what a bloody rotten lot, are the ragtime infantry'