Both the old and new elites, not the subaltern underclass of workers and peasants, superimposed the fever chart of the Russian Revolution on what they assumed to have been the fever chart of the French Revolution with a view to determining the degree to which the temperature curves of the two revolutions diverged from each other.
-- Arno J. Mayer, The Furies
The letters are never those of a groveling subaltern to his superior; they are rather like advisories from one soldier to another.
-- Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies
One of their officers, a subaltern, observed to me that his soldiers were infants that required constant attendance.
-- Paul Leicester Ford, "Dr. Rush and General Washington", The Atlantic, May 1895
