chocolate soldier

chocolate soldier

English

Etymology

Military sense popularized by George Bernard Shaw's 1894 play Arms and the Man.

Noun

chocolate soldier (plural chocolate soldiers)

1. (Digger slang) Someone who is unwilling to fight.
   • 1932 Warwick Deeping, Old wine and new, A. A. Knopf, p152

     To the maids across the way he was Julia's beau, and if not quite Beau Geste, a gent and well dressed. Obviously he was a chocolate soldier, a bouquet boy.

   • 1965 Joseph Rosner, The haters' handbook, Delacorte Press, p195

     He described him as "a political corpse whose ghost has returned to haunt us," adding that he was "a chocolate soldier, ... a man who never faced an enemy nor successfully faced an issue."

   • 2010 Robert Moss, Fire Along the Sky: Being the Adventures of Captain Shane Hardacre in the New World, SUNY Press, p51

     I thought he was a chocolate soldier which was probably unfair—everyone said he had done the “right thing” in the Canada campaign.

2. The butterfly Junonia iphita, the chocolate pansy.

Derived terms

• choc