Word: subaltern
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...bestowed on his ancestor, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. School, by contrast, bored him; he was a poor student who allowed in later life that "no one has ever passed so few examinations and received so many degrees." Fame was always his spur. As a newly commissioned subaltern in the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, he searched impatiently for battlefields to prove his mettle. It was a poor time for the molding of heroes. The Industrial Revolution had raised Victoria's England to a position of surpassing wealth; Pax Britannica in all its majesty prevailed throughout...
...week throughout the year, always carried a copy of the Koran in his pocket at prep school. Despite his religious leanings, Eweida entered Egypt's military academy rather than Cairo's ulama-run al-Azhar University, graduated at the top of his class and rose from subaltern to major in four years. Nasser chose Eweida to organize Egypt's 2,000,000-strong Youth Corps; he did so well that Nasser four years ago gave him the larger chore of setting up an organization to propagate Islam...
These "soldier-industrialists" hold "sales conferences" and order subaltern flacks to tailor the corporate image. A photographer is told to do a general "from his good side only." From relatively safe distances, the symbolic big guns pump shells at the enemy. At the apex of this busy wedge of "middlemen," the "common laborers" at the front die in anonymous perplexity, to be replaced at once by other men whose dog tags were stamped at the same factory...
...most fashionable bordello. Confinement quickly erases the difference between whore and housewife, who come to share each other's concerns: a prim matron tries a striptease, the prostitutes study cake recipes. Eventually quarantine proves ineffective. The infection rages through Drohitz and the surrounding countryside and Ember, promoted from subaltern to Commissioner of Deceased Persons, runs out both coffins and burial parties. At novel's end the army marches off to another regrouping point, still expecting 'ever new and more glorious victories." The surviving Drohitzers are left in a defenseless city, a death trap for the advancing enemy...
...said, "possibly of necessity, because I have found out in later years that we were very poor. But the glory of America is that we didn't know it then." In a 1959 speech, he again drew on his memories, going back to his days as an Army subaltern, newly married to Mamie Geneva Doud, when he scrimped to buy a tiny insurance policy. "Well," he said, "I gave up smoking readymade cigarettes and went to Bull Durham and the papers.* I had to make a great many sacrifices . . . Yet I still think of the fun we had in working...