美国国家公共电台 NPR In 'The British Are Coming,' Rick Atkinson Turns His Gaze To The American Revolution

 

GERRY MARROCCO: This is the Green behind you. We call it Battle Green today, but it's really a common in the...

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

In April 19, 1775, the shot heard round the world was fired on the Lexington, Mass., town Green. Though Gerry Marrocco, who gives guided tours in a tri-cornered hat, waistcoat and breaches¹, told us the other day...

MARROCCO: The first shot of the American Revolution and to this day no one knows who fired it. But what's going to happen next? The red coats hear a single musket² fire, and they panic. Without orders, they start to fire at our militia³. Most of our militia have their backs to them - a few scattered⁴ shots and then a scatters⁵ volley.

SIMON: Eight militia - they called themselves rebels then, not yet Americans - fell dead. Rick Atkinson, who wrote the bestselling and greatly honored "Liberation Trilogy" about the American effort in Europe during the Second World War, has now written the first book in a new trilogy to tell the story of the war that made America. It's called "The British Are Coming."

MARROCCO: Now, if you turn around, folks, and you look across the street here, this yellow house is called Buckman Tavern⁶. That was the militia's headquarters.

SIMON: That's where we spoke⁷ with Rick Atkinson - right across from the Green where many militia spent the night waiting to see the whites in the eyes of more than 800 British soldiers who'd been sent to stop the American Revolution before it could begin.

What happened here April 19, 1775?

RICK ATKINSON: Well, the ambition of the British was to send a force of about 900 men into Concord⁸ - 18 miles from Boston - to seize the cannons⁹, the muskets¹⁰, the gunpowder¹¹, the other war material that they knew to be in Concord. They got here 12 miles outside of Boston to Lexington, found a small militia force waiting for them - maybe 50 men by the time everything had settled out. And there was a - there was a massacre¹² is really what it amounted to - eight Americans dead and 10 others wounded, two lightly wounded British soldiers. And then they proceeded on to Concord. By that point, Concord was ready for them.

SIMON: But nobody shot at the actual title of your book.

ATKINSON: No. "The British Are Coming," the title of the book, refers more to the larger theme involved. And, of course, it wouldn't have made any sense to people who lived there. They were British. It would be like shouting that we are coming.

Subsequently, one of the things that war does is straighten out identity politics. And within a year or two, I think, if someone had yelled the British are coming, then people would have understood, meaning, the enemy's coming. But it was probably the regulars are coming.

SIMON: Your portrait of Washington - if anyone needs convincing that he deserves to have his picture on the dollar bill, they will be convinced by reading your book. But he did make mistakes.

ATKINSON: He wasn't a very good tactical general. He does not see the battlefield spatially¹³ and temporally the way a great captain does, the way a Napoleon does. What you can see in Washington, though, is a man for - great responsibility enlarges him. When he first arrives in Cambridge to take over the Continental¹⁴ Army in the summer of 1775, he's disdainful of New Englanders. He's a Virginian. He doesn't really see how - why these dirty, obnoxious¹⁵, obstreperous¹⁶ people - he doesn't really like them, and he doesn't understand the mystical bond between a leader and led within the cultural constricts¹⁷ of democracy, this emerging democracy. And he's got to grow into that. He's got to learn that. The relationship that he's got to build with his army is something that we see develop over the first several years of the war.

SIMON: Washington had a phrase about the difference between an army that was driven and one that was led.

ATKINSON: Yeah, he says - and this is in January 1777 after he has nearly lost the war several times and recouped from the disastrous¹⁸ defeat across New Jersey¹⁹ by re-crossing the Delaware and capturing the Hessen garrison²⁰ at Trenton. He says a people not used to being forced to do things will not be drove. They must be led.

And he is a leader. He understands the essence of the requirements to lead rather than to force people to try to do what they don't want to do. And in the army that he's commanding, the army we have today, actually, that's a fairly critical insight that he's got and a recognition that this is the essence of leadership.

SIMON: A question must be asked in this day and age. Was the American Revolution truly a revolution for freedom, or was it a white patriarchy of slave owners and apologists for slave owners who simply wanted a bigger slice of the money pie?

ATKINSON: I don't think they're necessarily, completely contradictory²¹. Certainly you had some people - white slave owners in the South, for example, who felt pinched economically by the restrictions²² that have been placed on them. But I think that it's not romanticizing that era excessively to believe - particularly when you look at the contemporary writings and what it is they believed at the time - that they had their eye on a grander future than simply a slaveholding country that was a nice place to be if you were white and rich. I think that, really, we sell them short if we don't acknowledge that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator and all those other fine words out of the Declaration of Independence are things they really believed. They're aspirational²³, yes.

SIMON: They didn't really mean it when slaves, obviously, were...

ATKINSON: Five hundred thousand of the 2 1/2 million people here, it doesn't apply to them. It doesn't apply to women. It doesn't apply to the indigent²⁴. But it does open a vista²⁵ into a future in which you can see an egalitarian society that's quite different from the society that existed here in 1775 and is quite different from anything that exists anywhere else on Earth.

SIMON: What can we learn in today's fractious, political environment from that period?

ATKINSON: Well, I think one of the things we can learn is that the nation was born disputatiously. It's a very ornery people of 1775. And why should we be surprised that we are ornery people today? We can also learn that however difficult our difficulties today, we've had much more difficult periods in our national history. And we have not only survived it, we've triumphed ultimately. We can also learn, I think, that in difficult times, leaders have emerged to have helped us to get to where we need to go. And we've been fortunate enough to see men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower and there's a long list of them, and they share frequently a list of traits that we recognize as really admirable among our leaders. And we should demand that. We should be insistent²⁶ that a good, noble, accomplished²⁷ people be led by good, noble, accomplished leaders. I think that comes through clearly from the period of the Revolution and the early republic.

SIMON: Rick Atkinson speaking with us at Buckman Tavern in Lexington, Mass. His new book - "The British Are Coming," a powerful title even if no one said it.

MARROCCO: So what we're going to do now, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to show you that war memorial there.

SIMON: Toward the end of our tour, Gerry Marrocco, the tour guide, brought us to the stone obelisk²⁸ on the Green that marks where seven of the eight men who died in Lexington are buried. He says it's the most important part of the tour.

MARROCCO: So this is truly hallowed ground. Some days, especially in the summer, I'll see all these young people out here in high school, junior high throwing Frisbees, laying on towels. It's a beautiful thing to do. That's freedom, and that's what these men died for. But I wonder how many of them know 100 feet away, seven of the eight men that died for your freedom are buried there? So this is a very special place to me, and it means a lot.

1 breaches   

破坏( breach的名词复数 )； 破裂； 缺口； 违背

参考例句：

• He imposed heavy penalties for breaches of oath or pledges. 他对违反誓言和保证的行为给予严厉的惩罚。
• This renders all breaches of morality before marriage very uncommon. 这样一来，婚前败坏道德的事就少见了。

2 musket   

n.滑膛枪

参考例句：

• I hunted with a musket two years ago.两年前我用滑膛枪打猎。
• So some seconds passed,till suddenly Joyce whipped up his musket and fired.又过了几秒钟，突然，乔伊斯端起枪来开了火。

3 militia   

n.民兵，民兵组织

参考例句：

• First came the PLA men,then the people's militia.人民解放军走在前面，其次是民兵。
• There's a building guarded by the local militia at the corner of the street.街道拐角处有一幢由当地民兵团守卫的大楼。

4 scattered   

adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的

参考例句：

• Gathering up his scattered papers,he pushed them into his case.他把散乱的文件收拾起来，塞进文件夹里。

5 scatters   

v.（使）散开， （使）分散，驱散( scatter的第三人称单数 )；撒

参考例句：

• He scatters money about as if he were rich. 他四处挥霍，好像很有钱。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Truth raises against itself the storm that scatters its seeds broadcast. 真理引起了反对它自己的狂风骤雨，那场风雨吹散了真理的广播的种子。 来自辞典例句

6 tavern   

n.小旅馆，客栈；小酒店

参考例句：

• There is a tavern at the corner of the street.街道的拐角处有一家酒馆。
• Philip always went to the tavern,with a sense of pleasure.菲利浦总是心情愉快地来到这家酒菜馆。

7 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

8 concord   

n.和谐；协调

参考例句：

• These states had lived in concord for centuries.这些国家几个世纪以来一直和睦相处。
• His speech did nothing for racial concord.他的讲话对种族和谐没有作用。

9 cannons   

n.加农炮，大炮，火炮( cannon的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Cannons bombarded enemy lines. 大炮轰击了敌军阵地。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• One company had been furnished with six cannons. 某连队装备了六门大炮。 来自《简明英汉词典》

10 muskets   

n.火枪，（尤指）滑膛枪( musket的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The watch below, all hands to load muskets. 另一组人都来帮着给枪装火药。 来自英汉文学 - 金银岛
• Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight at towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. 深深的壕堑，单吊桥，厚重的石壁，八座巨大的塔楼。大炮、毛瑟枪、火焰与烟雾。 来自英汉文学 - 双城记

11 gunpowder   

n.火药

参考例句：

• Gunpowder was introduced into Europe during the first half of the 14th century.在14世纪上半叶，火药传入欧洲。
• This statement has a strong smell of gunpowder.这是一篇充满火药味的声明。

12 massacre   

n.残杀，大屠杀；v.残杀，集体屠杀

参考例句：

• There was a terrible massacre of villagers here during the war.在战争中，这里的村民惨遭屠杀。
• If we forget the massacre,the massacre will happen again!忘记了大屠杀，大屠杀就有可能再次发生！

13 spatially   

空间地，存在于空间地

参考例句：

• A well-defined array of stable fringes results and the field is spatially coherent. 结果得到一组完全确定的稳定条纹，而光场是空间相干的。
• The units are collaged together by a serial tectonic spatially and temporally. 这些构造单元是由构造原因，依一定的时空序列拼贴在一起的。

14 continental   

adj.大陆的，大陆性的，欧洲大陆的

参考例句：

• A continental climate is different from an insular one.大陆性气候不同于岛屿气候。
• The most ancient parts of the continental crust are 4000 million years old.大陆地壳最古老的部分有40亿年历史。

15 obnoxious   

adj.极恼人的，讨人厌的，可憎的

参考例句：

• These fires produce really obnoxious fumes and smoke.这些火炉冒出来的烟气确实很难闻。
• He is the most obnoxious man I know.他是我认识的最可憎的人。

16 obstreperous   

adj.喧闹的，不守秩序的

参考例句：

• He becomes obstreperous when he's had a few drinks.他喝了些酒就爱撒酒疯。
• You know I have no intention of being awkward and obstreperous.你知道我无意存心作对。

17 constricts   

压缩，压紧，使收缩( constrict的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The tumour constricts the nerves. 肿瘤压迫神经。
• Fat constricts the blood vessels, making your circulation bad. 脂肪压缩血管，造成你的血液循环不畅。

18 disastrous   

adj.灾难性的，造成灾害的；极坏的，很糟的

参考例句：

• The heavy rainstorm caused a disastrous flood.暴雨成灾。
• Her investment had disastrous consequences.She lost everything she owned.她的投资结果很惨，血本无归。

19 jersey   

n.运动衫

参考例句：

• He wears a cotton jersey when he plays football.他穿运动衫踢足球。
• They were dressed alike in blue jersey and knickers.他们穿着一致，都是蓝色的运动衫和灯笼短裤。

20 garrison   

n.卫戍部队；驻地，卫戍区；vt.派(兵)驻防

参考例句：

• The troops came to the relief of the besieged garrison.军队来援救被围的守备军。
• The German was moving to stiffen up the garrison in Sicily.德军正在加强西西里守军之力量。

21 contradictory   

adj.反驳的，反对的，抗辩的；n.正反对，矛盾对立

参考例句：

• The argument is internally contradictory.论据本身自相矛盾。
• What he said was self-contradictory.他讲话前后不符。

22 restrictions   

约束( restriction的名词复数 )； 管制； 制约因素； 带限制性的条件（或规则）

参考例句：

• I found the restrictions irksome. 我对那些限制感到很烦。
• a snaggle of restrictions 杂乱无章的种种限制

23 aspirational   

志同的，有抱负的

参考例句：

• Most of the images that bombard us all are aspirational. 轰击的图像，我们都期望最大。
• Analysts said self-help and aspirational reading could explain India's high figures. 分析师们指出，自助读书、热爱读书是印度人均读书时间超过别的国家的主要原因。

24 indigent   

adj.贫穷的，贫困的

参考例句：

• The town government is responsible for assistance to indigent people.镇政府负责给穷人提供帮助。
• A judge normally appoints the attorney for an indigent defendant at the defendant's first court appearence.法官通常会在贫穷被告人第一次出庭时，为其指派一名辩护律师。

25 vista   

n.远景，深景，展望，回想

参考例句：

• From my bedroom window I looked out on a crowded vista of hills and rooftops.我从卧室窗口望去，远处尽是连绵的山峦和屋顶。
• These uprisings come from desperation and a vista of a future without hope.发生这些暴动是因为人们被逼上了绝路，未来看不到一点儿希望。

26 insistent   

adj.迫切的，坚持的

参考例句：

• There was an insistent knock on my door.我听到一阵急促的敲门声。
• He is most insistent on this point.他在这点上很坚持。

27 accomplished   

adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的

参考例句：

• Thanks to your help,we accomplished the task ahead of schedule.亏得你们帮忙,我们才提前完成了任务。
• Removal of excess heat is accomplished by means of a radiator.通过散热器完成多余热量的排出。

28 obelisk   

n.方尖塔

参考例句：

• The obelisk was built in memory of those who died for their country.这座方尖塔是为了纪念那些为祖国献身的人而建造的。
• Far away on the last spur,there was a glittering obelisk.远处，在最后一个山峦上闪烁着一个方尖塔。