It is the kind of old-fashioned discipline that was thought to have disappeared from even our elite Armed Forces.
But in a move hailed as a blow against modern ‘woke’ culture, the entire contingent of trainee Royal Marines has just been forced to crawl through mud to pay for the ‘sins’ of a handful of their colleagues.
Hundreds of rookie commandos were ordered to do the Marines’ ‘mud run’ after only a dozen or so fellow recruits were caught pilfering the camp’s canteen.
The run involves crawling through foul-smelling silt outside their training base in Devon in an exercise so gruelling that some ex-commandos thought it had been abolished. But defence sources confirmed last night that around 400 fit and able recruits had undergone the mud run.
A source told The Mail on Sunday: ‘They were putting stuff through the self-service canteen checkout without scanning some items and the mass mud run was ordered as a result.’ But far from criticising the ‘mass punishment’, current and former Marines heaped praise on commanders at the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone.
