THE NAIVE YOUNG LIEUTENANT AND THE OLDER, SENSIBLE SERGEANT

Here's another commonplace that you surely recognize.

It's as old as the existance of professional armies itself: in the olden days, aristocratic teenagers were made lieutenants, while their sergeants were (either years or decades) older peasant veterans.
(Though Gustavus Adolphus made commoners who had showed their prowess on the battlefield officers and knighted them, actually!)

In Shakespeare's 1604 tragedy Othello, the first literary occurrence of this commonplace in fiction, Cassio is the naive young lieutenant, while Iago is the older and sensible sergeant... who resents not having been given an officer's commission. To Iago, Cassio appears as "a fellow almost damned in a fair life, who never set a squadron on the battlefield, nor the division of a battle knows [···] except the theory in books. Mere prattle without practice"... while the noncom states about himself that "the General's eyes have seen the proof (of Iago's prowess) on many battlegrounds, Christian and non-Christian".
Iago puts practice before theory, the scarred veteran before the learned and blue-blooded greenhorn. One of the many hypotheses for Iago's motivation is simply that he resents not having been made an officer in spite of his prowess and experience.

In the Verdian Othello opera, that premiered in the 1880s, dapper young lyricist Arrigo Boito has his awesome Iago tell crony Rod(e)rigo "the reason for his wrath" in a rather ominous tune:

"That puffed-up lieutenant

has usurped my position... my position,

which, by one hundred well-fought battles,

I have deserved!

Such was Othello's wish...

And I stay at His Moorish Lordship's service

as noncom!"

From Shakespeare's seventeenth century to our days, and even after the instauration of the French Revolution's equal-opportunity officer class, little has been done to subvert the commonplace... except by Terry Pratchett (in Monstrous Regiment, a superb travesty that does to military fiction what Monty Python's Holy Grail has done to Arthurian legends), and by the author of this blog. In The Ringstetten Saga (Arc I), Gerhard may be the posh dapper young lieutenant (he gets this rank at 16, after fighting at Breitenfeld) and Alois may be the (three years) older, realistic sergeant... but there are interesting subversions (as interesting as Pratchett's treatment of Lt. Blouse and Sgt. Jackrum): on one hand, Gerhard is not ashamed of getting his hands dirty, he drinks hard, and he complements this addiction with the rather feminine (though enforced in the Swedish ranks) hobby of lace making; while Alois was a high-ranking blue-blooded Leaguesman from the start (taken prisoner at Breitenfeld), he tends to do whatever Gerhard says without a complaint, and look at what Alois did when Lady Wallenstein and her daughter were left to die at Friedland, with the uprising, the Catholic invasion and all... he saved them from the flames, rather than leaving or harassing them!
Needless to say that The Ringstetten Saga (Arc I) takes place in the 1630s-1650s, some decades after Othello's premiere!