The famous eve-of-battle speech by Colonel Tim Collins electrified the British public and drew widespread praise, but it left the men under his command fearful and demoralised, according to one of his officers.

In a new book, Captain Doug Beattie claims that Colonel Collins’s address to the 1st Battalion, the Royal Irish Regiment, just a few hours before they went into battle against Saddam Hussein’s troops in March 2003, was rousing but also sobering.

Many commentators (including this one) hailed the speech as a masterpiece of martial rhetoric, but Captain Beattie, then regimental sergeant-major under Colonel Collins, recalls seeing “heads starting to go down” in the course of his speech, which left “more and more frowns on men’s faces”.

“I knew I had a problem,” Captain Beattie writes.

“He had left the men somewhere they shouldn’t have been: thinking about home, wondering if they would ever return there again, fearful of the dangers that faced them.

“It pulled no punches, the message was stark,” the soldier writes, recalling his reaction as the speech ended: “Cheers boss, thanks a bloody lot.”

The former sergeant-major says that he kicked the men “back to life” with a “string of barely separated profanities”. The Collins speech undoubtedly reminded his men of the reality of war and the possibility of death; it may even have been, in terms of tactics and morale, a mistake.

But it is still one of the finest pieces of battlefield oratory ever delivered. The day after Colonel Collins’s speech, I wrote: “Collins spoke of history, family, respect, dignity and the individual moral choice between killing justly, and just killing . . . A century hence, people will still be reading the speech.” I still believe that.

Truly great oratory transcends the time and place of its delivery, and Colonel Collins’s words resonated far beyond the battlefield. A copy of the speech hangs in the Oval Office; the Prince of Wales described it as “extraordinarily stirring, civilised and humane”.

Delivered in a punchy modern vernacular, the speech combined the cadence of the King James Bible with the language of the computer game: “tread lightly” but “rock their world”.

If it made the soldiers under his command think twice about what they were about to do, so much the better; a thinking soldier is always a better soldier. Captain Beattie felt that the speech contained “a little too much reality”. Can there be too much reality, especially on a battlefield?

The power of the speech lay in the way it connected to people across the world, causing them to see the conflict, and Iraq, in a different way. “It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood, and the birthplace of Abraham . . . the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own.”

If the soldiers did not react to the speech in the same way as we did, then that is hardly surprising: they were standing in a swirling Kuwaiti sandstorm waiting to fight, while we were reading the same words around our safe breakfast tables. This does not, however, diminish its historical importance.

Great battlefield oratory is seldom recognised instantly, but hallowed by time – and victory. Abraham Lincoln’s address inaugurating the cemetery at Gettysburg in November 1863, just 272 words, may be the most eloquent speech ever made in war-time, but then even the finest judges did not realise that they were hearing history in the making.

“The ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln,” The Times reported from Gettysburg.

Colonel Collins left the Army in 2004 and has since become a familiar and outspoken figure in the media.

An Ordinary Soldierby Doug Beattie is published by Simon & Schuster.

Extract of the Collins speech

“We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them. There are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly. Those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock their world. Wipe them out if that is what they choose. But if you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there . . .

“If there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death . . . there may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign. We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow.”

Rallying the troops

King Henry V at Agincourt (courtesy of Shakespeare): “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers/ For he today that sheds his blood with me/ Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile/ This day shall gentle his condition/ And gentlemen in England now a-bed/ Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here/ And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks/ That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

William Wallace at the Battle of Stirling, 1297 (according to Braveheart): “Fight and you may die. Run, and you’ll live – at least a while.

And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom?”

Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address, November 1863, 4 months after the battle: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

Winston Churchill on June 4, 1940: “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

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