chocolate soldier

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

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.

• choc