Interesting factoids about military facial hair to go with your joke: Moustaches were mandatory in the British army (and shaving them off a punishable offence)

Interesting factoids about military facial hair to go with your joke: Moustaches were mandatory in the British army (and shaving them off a punishable offence) for about sixty years, up until the middle of the First World War, where the rule fell out of favour in no small part because too many of the new recruits were too young for anything more than peach fuzz. The Victorian trend for really big bushy beards emerged in part out of mass public admiration for British soldiers returning from the Crimean War, who had grown long beards to help cope with the extreme cold over a very long campaign, after Queen Victoria noted them with some admiration. Though it probably did land at a time where shaving was somewhat out of fashion.