One of the mandatory scenes required in movies set in 20th century America depicting basic training in the military is the shearing of recruits so that all of the participants essentially are denuded of facial and head hair and resemble crenshaw melons attached to torsos. This anti-follicle folly did not and does not apply across the board to all nations, and Great Britain, from 1860-1916, although requiring closely trimmed head hair, also mandated that each member of its armed forces had to sport a moustache. As the British were colonizing India and various middle eastern countries whose inhabitants regarded bare-lipped males as juvenile and not worthy of respect, ordering each serviceman to have facial hair made a certain amount of sense for an occupying power.
This edict was dropped in WWI when it became apparent that the Germans were not all that impressed by the 'staches of their foes and when, more significantly, the Brits discovered that the whiskers made it hard to obtain an effective seal when wearing a gas mask (plus, the guy who signed the new policy, General Sir Neville Macready, personally did not like moustaches and was happy to shave his off).
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