2024年2月28日发(作者：将采文)
英语故事
Winston Churchill
丘吉尔——才华横溢、精力充沛的多面手，英国精神的化身
Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill came of a military dynasty.
His ancestor John Churchill had been created first Duke of
Marlborough in 1702 for his victories against Louis XIV early
in the War of the Spanish Succession. Churchill was born in
1874 in Blenheim Palace, the house built by the nation for
Marlborough. As a young man of undistinguished academic
accomplishment — he was admitted to Sandhurst after two
failed attempts — he entered the army as a cavalry officer.
He took enthusiastically to soldiering (and perhaps even more
enthusiastically to regimental polo playing) between 1895 and
1898. Even at 24, Churchill was steely: “I never felt the
slightest nervousness,” he wrote to his mother. “I felt as
cool as I do now.” In Cuba he was present as a war correspondent,
and in India and the Sudan he was present as both a war
correspondent and as a serving officer. Thus he revealed two
other aspects of his character: a literary bent and an interest
in public affairs.
He was to write all his life. His life of Marlborough
is one of the great English biographies, and The History of
the Second World War helped win him a Nobel Prize for literature.
Writing, however, never fully engaged his energies. Politics
consumed him. His father Lord Randolph Churchill was a
brilliant political failure. Early in life, Winston determined
to succeed where his father had failed. His motives were
twofold. His father had despised him. Writing in August 1893
to Winston’s grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough,
he said the boy lacked “cleverness, knowledge and any capacity
for settled work. He has a great talent for show-off,
exaggeration and make-believe”. His disapproval surly stung,
but Churchill reacted by venerating his father’s memory.
Winston fought to restore his father’s honor in Parliament
(where it had been dented by the Conservative Party).
Churchill entered Parliament in 1901 at age 26. In 1904
he left the Conservative Party to join the Liberals, in part
out of calculation: the Liberals were the coming party, and
in its ranks he soon achieved high office. He became First Lord
of the Admiralty in 1911. Thus it was as political head of the
Royal Navy at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 that
he stepped onto the world stage.
A passionate believer in the navy’s historic strategic
role, he immediately committed the Royal Naval division to an
intervention in the Flanders campaign in 1914. Frustrated by
the stalemate in Belgium and France, he initiated the Allies’
only major effort to outflank the Germans on the Western Front
by sending the navy, and later a large force of the army, to
the Mediterranean. At Gallipoli in 1915, this Anglo-French
force struggled to break the defenses that blocked access to
Black Sea. It was a heroic failure that forced Churchill’s
resignation and led to his political eclipse.
It was effectively to last nearly 25 years. Despite his
readmission to office in 1917, he failed to reestablish the
reputation as a future national statesman he had won before
the war. In 1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservatives. The
Conservative Prime Minister appointed him Chancellor of the
Exchequer, but when he returned the country to the gold
standard, it proved financially disastrous, and he further
weakened his political position by opposing measures to grant
India limited self-government. He resigned office in 1931 and
entered what appeared to be a terminal political decline.
Churchill was truly a romantic, but also truly a democrat.
He had returned to gold standard, for instance, because of
romantic reasons, Britain’s status as a great financial power.
He had opposed limited self-government for India because of
equally romantic reasons, Britain’s imperial history. It was
to prove more important that as a democrat, he was disgusted
by the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. By supporting
anti-Nazi policies in his wilderness years between 1933 and
1939, he ensured that when the moment of final confrontation
between Britain and Hitler came in 1940, he stood out as the
one man in whom the nation could place its trust. He was against
the prewar appeasement policies of the Conservative leaders
Baldwin and Chamberlain. When Chamberlain lost the confidence
of Parliament, Churchill was installed in the premiership.
His was a bleak inheritance. Following the total defeat
of France, Britain truly, in his words, “stood alone.” It
had no real allies and, for much of 1940, lay under threat of
German invasion and under constant German air attack. He
nevertheless refused Hitler’s offers of peace, organized a
successful air defense that led to the victory of the Battle
of Britain and meanwhile sent most of what remained of the
British army, after its escape from the humiliation of Dunkirk,
to the Middle East to oppose Hitler’s Italian ally, Mussolini.
This was one of the boldest strategic decisions in
history. Convinced that Hitler could not invade Britain while
the Royal Navy and its protecting Royal Air Force remained
intact, he sent the army to a remote theater of war to open
a second front against the Nazi alliance. Its victories against
Mussolini during 1940-1941 both humiliated and infuriated
Hitler, while its intervention in Greece, to oppose Hitler’s
invasion of the Balkans, disrupted the Nazi dictator’s plans
to conclude German conquests in Europe by defeating Russia.
Churchill’s tendency to conduct strategy by impulse
infuriated his advisers. His chief of staff Alan Brooke
complained that every day Churchill had 10 ideas, only one of
which was good — and he did not know which one. Yet Churchill
the romantic showed acute realism in his reaction to Russia’s
predicament. He reviled communism. Required to accept a
communist ally in a struggle against a Nazi enemy, he did so
not only willingly but generously. He sent a large proportion
of Britain’s war production to Russia by Arctic convoys, even
at a time when the convoys from America to Britain suffered
devastating U-boat attacks.
From the outset of his premiership, Churchill, half
American by birth, had rested his hope of ultimate victory in
U.S. intervention. He had established a personal relationship
with President Roosevelt, that he hoped would flower into a
war-winning alliance. Roosevelt’s reluctance to commit the
U.S. to join in the war did not dent his optimism. He always
hoped events would work his way. The decision by Japan,
Hitler’s ally, to attack American Pacific fleet at Pearl
Harbor on Dec.7, 1941, justified his hopes. That evening he
confided to himself, “So we had won after all.”
America’s entry into the Second World War marked the
high point of Churchill’s statesmanship. Britain
demographically, industrially and financially, had entered
the war weaker than either of its eventual allies, the Soviet
Union and the U.S. However, the prestige Britain had won as
Hitler’s only enemy allowed Churchill to sustain parity of
leadership in the anti-Nazi alliance with Roosevelt and
Stalin.
Churchill was understandably exulted in the success of
the D-day invasion when it came in 1944. By then it was the
Russo-American rather than the Anglo-American nexus, however,
that dominated the alliance, as he ruefully recognized at the
last Big Three conference in February 1945. Shortly afterward
he suffered the domestic humiliation of losing the general
election and with it the premiership. He was to return to power
in 1951 and remain until April 1955, when ill health and visibly
failing powers caused him to resign.
It would have been kinder to his reputation had he not
returned. He was not an effective peacetime Prime Minister.
His name had been made, and he stood unchallengeable, as the
greatest of all Britain’s war leaders. It was not only his
own country, though, that owed him a debt. So too did the world
of free men and women to whom he had made a constant and
inclusive appeal in his magnificent speeches from embattled
Britain in 1940 and 1941.
2024年2月28日发(作者：将采文)
英语故事
Winston Churchill
丘吉尔——才华横溢、精力充沛的多面手，英国精神的化身
Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill came of a military dynasty.
His ancestor John Churchill had been created first Duke of
Marlborough in 1702 for his victories against Louis XIV early
in the War of the Spanish Succession. Churchill was born in
1874 in Blenheim Palace, the house built by the nation for
Marlborough. As a young man of undistinguished academic
accomplishment — he was admitted to Sandhurst after two
failed attempts — he entered the army as a cavalry officer.
He took enthusiastically to soldiering (and perhaps even more
enthusiastically to regimental polo playing) between 1895 and
1898. Even at 24, Churchill was steely: “I never felt the
slightest nervousness,” he wrote to his mother. “I felt as
cool as I do now.” In Cuba he was present as a war correspondent,
and in India and the Sudan he was present as both a war
correspondent and as a serving officer. Thus he revealed two
other aspects of his character: a literary bent and an interest
in public affairs.
He was to write all his life. His life of Marlborough
is one of the great English biographies, and The History of
the Second World War helped win him a Nobel Prize for literature.
Writing, however, never fully engaged his energies. Politics
consumed him. His father Lord Randolph Churchill was a
brilliant political failure. Early in life, Winston determined
to succeed where his father had failed. His motives were
twofold. His father had despised him. Writing in August 1893
to Winston’s grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough,
he said the boy lacked “cleverness, knowledge and any capacity
for settled work. He has a great talent for show-off,
exaggeration and make-believe”. His disapproval surly stung,
but Churchill reacted by venerating his father’s memory.
Winston fought to restore his father’s honor in Parliament
(where it had been dented by the Conservative Party).
Churchill entered Parliament in 1901 at age 26. In 1904
he left the Conservative Party to join the Liberals, in part
out of calculation: the Liberals were the coming party, and
in its ranks he soon achieved high office. He became First Lord
of the Admiralty in 1911. Thus it was as political head of the
Royal Navy at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 that
he stepped onto the world stage.
A passionate believer in the navy’s historic strategic
role, he immediately committed the Royal Naval division to an
intervention in the Flanders campaign in 1914. Frustrated by
the stalemate in Belgium and France, he initiated the Allies’
only major effort to outflank the Germans on the Western Front
by sending the navy, and later a large force of the army, to
the Mediterranean. At Gallipoli in 1915, this Anglo-French
force struggled to break the defenses that blocked access to
Black Sea. It was a heroic failure that forced Churchill’s
resignation and led to his political eclipse.
It was effectively to last nearly 25 years. Despite his
readmission to office in 1917, he failed to reestablish the
reputation as a future national statesman he had won before
the war. In 1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservatives. The
Conservative Prime Minister appointed him Chancellor of the
Exchequer, but when he returned the country to the gold
standard, it proved financially disastrous, and he further
weakened his political position by opposing measures to grant
India limited self-government. He resigned office in 1931 and
entered what appeared to be a terminal political decline.
Churchill was truly a romantic, but also truly a democrat.
He had returned to gold standard, for instance, because of
romantic reasons, Britain’s status as a great financial power.
He had opposed limited self-government for India because of
equally romantic reasons, Britain’s imperial history. It was
to prove more important that as a democrat, he was disgusted
by the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. By supporting
anti-Nazi policies in his wilderness years between 1933 and
1939, he ensured that when the moment of final confrontation
between Britain and Hitler came in 1940, he stood out as the
one man in whom the nation could place its trust. He was against
the prewar appeasement policies of the Conservative leaders
Baldwin and Chamberlain. When Chamberlain lost the confidence
of Parliament, Churchill was installed in the premiership.
His was a bleak inheritance. Following the total defeat
of France, Britain truly, in his words, “stood alone.” It
had no real allies and, for much of 1940, lay under threat of
German invasion and under constant German air attack. He
nevertheless refused Hitler’s offers of peace, organized a
successful air defense that led to the victory of the Battle
of Britain and meanwhile sent most of what remained of the
British army, after its escape from the humiliation of Dunkirk,
to the Middle East to oppose Hitler’s Italian ally, Mussolini.
This was one of the boldest strategic decisions in
history. Convinced that Hitler could not invade Britain while
the Royal Navy and its protecting Royal Air Force remained
intact, he sent the army to a remote theater of war to open
a second front against the Nazi alliance. Its victories against
Mussolini during 1940-1941 both humiliated and infuriated
Hitler, while its intervention in Greece, to oppose Hitler’s
invasion of the Balkans, disrupted the Nazi dictator’s plans
to conclude German conquests in Europe by defeating Russia.
Churchill’s tendency to conduct strategy by impulse
infuriated his advisers. His chief of staff Alan Brooke
complained that every day Churchill had 10 ideas, only one of
which was good — and he did not know which one. Yet Churchill
the romantic showed acute realism in his reaction to Russia’s
predicament. He reviled communism. Required to accept a
communist ally in a struggle against a Nazi enemy, he did so
not only willingly but generously. He sent a large proportion
of Britain’s war production to Russia by Arctic convoys, even
at a time when the convoys from America to Britain suffered
devastating U-boat attacks.
From the outset of his premiership, Churchill, half
American by birth, had rested his hope of ultimate victory in
U.S. intervention. He had established a personal relationship
with President Roosevelt, that he hoped would flower into a
war-winning alliance. Roosevelt’s reluctance to commit the
U.S. to join in the war did not dent his optimism. He always
hoped events would work his way. The decision by Japan,
Hitler’s ally, to attack American Pacific fleet at Pearl
Harbor on Dec.7, 1941, justified his hopes. That evening he
confided to himself, “So we had won after all.”
America’s entry into the Second World War marked the
high point of Churchill’s statesmanship. Britain
demographically, industrially and financially, had entered
the war weaker than either of its eventual allies, the Soviet
Union and the U.S. However, the prestige Britain had won as
Hitler’s only enemy allowed Churchill to sustain parity of
leadership in the anti-Nazi alliance with Roosevelt and
Stalin.
Churchill was understandably exulted in the success of
the D-day invasion when it came in 1944. By then it was the
Russo-American rather than the Anglo-American nexus, however,
that dominated the alliance, as he ruefully recognized at the
last Big Three conference in February 1945. Shortly afterward
he suffered the domestic humiliation of losing the general
election and with it the premiership. He was to return to power
in 1951 and remain until April 1955, when ill health and visibly
failing powers caused him to resign.
It would have been kinder to his reputation had he not
returned. He was not an effective peacetime Prime Minister.
His name had been made, and he stood unchallengeable, as the
greatest of all Britain’s war leaders. It was not only his
own country, though, that owed him a debt. So too did the world
of free men and women to whom he had made a constant and
inclusive appeal in his magnificent speeches from embattled
Britain in 1940 and 1941.