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, page 152:

     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, page 195:

     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, page 51:

     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