Football fans disciplined by sergeants and led by aristocrats.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 158.

“The traditional picture of the composition of this British army is that they were the dregs of society. “Scum of the earth,” Wellington is reputed to have called them a generation later. That judgment was challenged by Sylvia Frey in The British Soldier in America (1981), who claims that at the very least a large number of the rank and file were honest urban workers and rural laborers for whom there was no work and who were left with two choices: begging or taking the King’s shilling. Frey presents a good case, and support is offered by the Anglo-Irish schoolteacher Sergeant Roger Lamb, who saw extensive service in America and had a good opinion of his fellow soldiers. Or perhaps that eighteenth-century British army best fits one not entirely facetious description of the present British army: football fans disciplined by sergeants and led by aristocrats. Whatever they were, only the deeply prejudiced would disagree that those soldiers were a tough, tenacious breed and their performance in America magnificent. Saddled with as mediocre a lot of generals as ever ill served a nation, they deserved far better, for it was the rank and file, not their leaders, military or civilian, who kept England in the war for eight long years.