TIM COLLINS, the army officer who touched the nation with a compassionate address to his troops on the eve of battle, is fulfilling his late father’s dream to serve his country in war.

As Lieutenant-Colonel Collins inspired his men with words of Shakespearean pathos, he showed the honesty, humanity and natural leadership of his father, Thomas, his mother said last night.

Mary Collins, 72, said that her husband, who died last year at 93, had always wanted to serve in the military, but his ambitions were thwarted by a partial deafness brought on by a childhood accident.

“He would have been so proud,” Mrs Collins said, speaking from the family home in Belfast. “That speech was just Tim. It is the way he is and always has been. He was brought up to be a very honest person. He has a real conscience and people acknowledge and respect those qualities.”

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Colonel Collins’s father had hoped to join the air-rescue service, helping to save airmen forced down off the Irish coast, but was told he could not serve on account of his deafness.

“Thomas had always wanted to be in the Forces,” Mrs Collins said. “Seeing what Tim has achieved meant so much to him.”

Colonel Collins, who is leading the battle group of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment through southern Iraq, captured the imagination of millions this week with his humane and rousing call-to-arms.

“If you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory,” he told his assembled men. “The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his Nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction.

“We go to liberate and 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.”

During the speech, delivered in the dying minutes of a day-long dust-storm to more than 600 soldiers, Colonel Collins spoke candidly of death and honour, drawing on Iraq’s history as the site of the Great Flood, the Garden of Eden and the birth of Abraham.

“Tread lightly there,” he warned his troops, reminding them that to harm their regiment or the innocent would leave them with “the mark of Cain”.

Mrs Collins said that the address showed how much her son loved his work and his men. She said that in his last letter to her, sent three weeks ago, he had enclosed a desert orchid.

In the letter Colonel Collins described wandering across the desert, thinking of his mother at home in Northern Ireland, and stumbling upon the little purple flower.

“He saw this purple glint out of the corner of his eye and it was the flower,” she said. “It was dying, so he picked it very gently and put it with my letter.”

Mrs Collins said that her son, who has served in the Army for 22 years, often sent her flowers from his different postings. “It is just a gesture to say, ‘I love you, Mum’,” she said. “It means an awful lot to me.”

On leaving the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in 1978, a school where he was known simply as “TC” and was regarded as “impish and lively” in his reports, Colonel Collins took a history degree before moving to the military academy at Sandhurst.

His enthusiasm for the Army saw him pick up several shooting awards. The school cadet corps also saw him build strong links with the Royal Irish, which he has served to this day.

Colonel Collins, 42, who is normally based with his wife, Caroline, and five children in barracks at Canterbury, is no stranger to conflict. After Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the Royal Signals for a year before joining the Royal Irish Rangers, serving in Cyprus, Berlin and Northern Ireland. The latter included a tour in South Armagh.

His talent for enduring the Army’s toughest physical courses was combined with a strong intellectual ability in military matters.

By 1994 he had graduated with an MA after attending Staff College in Camberley and the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire.

Martin Farnan, who taught Colonel Collins as a school cadet, described his achievements as nothing less than was expected of a dedicated soldier.

Mr Farnan, who now manages the shooting ranges at Bisley in Surrey, said that he had met Colonel Collins last year, shortly before he headed for the Gulf .

“He could have had no idea what lay in store for him,” Mr Farnan said. “But I know TC well enough to know that he will continue to lead from the front, with distinction, in whatever tasks lie ahead.”

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