Word: subaltern
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Ichthyology & the Reds. Thanks to an unmilitary, scholarly commanding general named John Palmer, Lieut. White, while stationed in Panama as an infantry subaltern, got interested in both free-soaring thought and the young, free-soaring Air Corps. In 1924 he got an assignment to flight school at Brooks Field, Texas, won his wings...
...stream of cold wisdom. Anouilh uses the coarse, truthful exaggerations of caricature deliberately to offset the genteel evasions of life painted in watercolor. The general's foundling son may just be the latest in a long Gilbertian line; but the Jostling father, the middle-aged satyr with his subaltern dreams, who finds it harder to grow older because he has never really grown up, is part of a sharper comic vision. The figure of the general suggests that there would be much less war between men and women were there not so often war in one and the same...
...trenches, as a subaltern of 19, Lewis himself was blooded-hit in the back "oddly enough by an English shell." During the postwar decade, first as a starveling poet and then as tutor at Magdalen College, he felt something else at his back-the Hound of Heaven. He fled over the shifting ice floes of intellectual fashion: rationalism, realism, idealism, materialism. Still the Hound pursued, and Lewis was finally backed into a corner that became home...
...Nepal whose qualities as men and soldiers still excite his respect and imagination: "There were no excuses, no grumbling, no shirking, no lying. There was no intrigue, no apple-polishing, and no servility." Not until two years had passed did they put the seal of approval on the young subaltern. It was a loyalty worth having in the frontier wars of the '30s, when hostile tribes got their kicks from mutilating English prisoners and staking them out on the ground...
Thus Winston Churchill, a dashing young subaltern in the 21st Lancers, describes the Battle of Omdurman, one of those minor actions which made the British Empire great in the days of Queen Victoria. For 80 years, Egyptian armies had spread fire and confusion among the ancient kingdoms of Kordofan, Darfur and Nubia, immediately south of Egypt, part of a vast area south of the Sahara desert called by the Arabs Bilad-as-Sudan, meaning Country of the Blacks. When the British army occupied Egypt (1882), an attempt was made to bring order also to these vassal states...