2005.09.29 每日电讯报》的二战讣告的魅力

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电讯报》的二战讣告的魅力
随着最后一波盟军英雄的消逝，他们的故事让人联想到几乎无法想象的勇气--以及英国殖民主义的鼎盛时期。

作者：大卫-A-格雷厄姆

一名妇女正在调整2015年委托悬挂在白金汉宫的布莱恩-斯图尔特的画像，这是D-Day老兵系列画像的一部分。(Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP)
2015年9月29日



以下是布莱恩-斯图尔特做的几件事。

在D日之后立即登陆诺曼底，带领一支部队摧毁了12辆装甲车。"他们有一个坏习惯，把狙击手钉在树上。但我有一个坏习惯，就是向树上的狙击手射击。"他说。
当被派往马来亚担任地区指挥官时，他带着一支小小的警察部队，在夜间伏击了一队强盗，并在第二天作为地方法官对他们进行了判决。
越南战争期间，在美国的轰炸下，被派往北越担任英国总领事。
他到达时不会说越南语，一下子就被红卫兵扣住了。他唯一的认证是在该市的市政办公室。如果外交部向政府发出信息，斯图尔特必须在排水部门的后门送达；如果需要与伦敦进行安全通信，他必须乘坐航空飞机出发，一周后返回。

他的马来亚经历意味着他不像大多数西方外交官那样对空袭感到不安，而且他认识到美国人并没有赢得越南人的心，尽管当他在西贡举行的美国高层会议上提交一份这样的文件时没有人相信他。

在经历了为北爱尔兰问题工作的动荡之后，他回到了亚洲，在那里，"他作为香港的远东控制员管理最大的秘密情报局站的技能受到了广泛的钦佩。"

斯图尔特于8月去世，享年93岁，但我是从《每日电讯报》上他精彩的讣告中得知这些事实的。(斯图尔特的儿子罗里是作家、外交官、军人，现在是国会议员，他已经积累了一套自己的非凡冒险经历）。斯图尔特的讣告并不是我在《电讯报》上读到的最令人惊讶的讣告。这一荣誉属于罗伯特-德-拉罗什福考德，《纽约客》认为这是 "世界上最有趣的讣告"。

这些讣告如此令人愉快的原因之一--尤其是对美国读者而言--是风格上的简单差异。正如詹姆斯-莱德贝特在2002年所说的那样，美国报纸将死亡视为一个新闻故事，并据此撰写讣告。最重要的信息放在最前面，而且文章遵循一个模板。相比之下，《电讯报》则把它当作一个讲述散文式故事的机会。这使得《电讯报》的讣告成为一个扣人心弦的故事，有狂热的叙述和偶尔的编辑评判。已故编辑休-马辛伯德（Hugh Massingberd）完善了这种形式，采用了丰富多彩的描述词和快节奏。电讯报》的讣告不是写得最好的--无与伦比的冠军是《纽约时报》的Margalit Fox，但它们是最有趣的。

然而，二战时期的讣告尤其有其独特之处。随着解放欧洲的英雄们渐渐离去，这些非老人的讣告最近出现得越来越频繁。他们的受欢迎程度证明了公众渴望在那段历史成为历史之前攥紧个人回忆和故事。电讯报》的 "军人讣告 "名单是一本英雄主义的剪贴簿，但也是对殖民主义时代难得的珍贵一瞥。它们是发黄的明信片，被困在一个老式的红色皇家邮政柱状箱中，来自那个时代，当时的杜松子酒很冷，每个人都是 "小伙子"，当地人躁动但被压制，大英帝国的太阳永不落。由于这些人中的许多人（几乎都是男性）出生在一个因大战而受到致命伤害但尚未死亡的有产阶级，他们属于最后一代真正的英国殖民地精英。


好吧，拉罗什弗考德不是。他出生在法国贵族阶层--是的，当然，他与这位格言作家有亲戚关系--在十几岁的时候，他遇到了希特勒，希特勒亲切地拍了拍他的脸颊。第二次世界大战爆发后，经戴高乐将军允许，他加入了抵抗组织，随后又加入了英国特别行动署。("做吧，即使与魔鬼结盟，也是为了法国。")他从罪犯那里学到了保险箱，然后回到了法国。他被抓获并被判处死刑。然后事情就变得有趣了。

在前往欧塞尔执行死刑的途中，拉罗什福考尔做出了一个突破，从载着他的卡车后部跳下，躲过了他的两名卫兵射出的子弹。在空荡荡的街道上冲刺，他发现自己来到了盖世太保的总部前，一位司机正在一辆挂着纳粹旗帜的豪华轿车旁踱步。看到点火器上的钥匙，拉罗什福考德跳上了车，咆哮着离开，沿着国道经过他一小时前离开的监狱.... 从欧塞尔出发，抵抗组织的朋友帮助他登上了开往巴黎的火车，在那里他蜷缩在盥洗室的水槽下面，躲避德国士兵的追捕。

拉罗什福考德在另一次任务中再次被捕，并考虑吞下自杀胶囊。相反，"他假装癫痫发作，当警卫打开他的牢房门时，用一条桌腿打他的头，然后扭断了他的脖子。穿上德国人的制服后，拉罗什弗考德走进警卫室，射杀了另外两名德国狱卒。然后他干脆走出堡垒，穿过荒废的小镇，来到一个地下联络人的地址"。

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多年后，在20世纪90年代，他为一个被指控为维希合作者的人站了出来，拉罗什弗考德说他是一名抵抗战士。这个人还是被定罪了，但却神秘地逃脱了--他从这位年迈的英雄那里获得了一本护照。当警察来询问拉罗什福考德时，他的妻子建议："不要试图把他关起来。他逃跑了，你知道"。

电讯报》的讣告被解放出来，以声音和叙述的方式，毫不掩饰地对那些在艰难时期无可争议的英雄人物（几乎总是男人）进行圣化，即使他们在私人生活中并非都是如此令人钦佩。

这些人往往以教会式的淡定态度淡化自己的成就，这更增加了他们的魅力。以炸弹处理专家斯图尔特-阿切尔（Stuart Archer）上校为例。"他回忆说："通过把我的手臂伸进炸弹内部，我能够握住引信袋，用蛮力和血腥的无知来回敲击它，直到我把整个东西弄出来。"以前很多人都把它们拉出来过，但他们都被炸死了，而我却没有。这就是运气，运气，运气。" 或者拿斯图尔特自己的、幽默而简练的自传来说。"我在军队的五年使我成为一个不同的人。它使一个正常的、安静的小伙子真正变成了一个极其自信的小伙子。" 当比利-德雷克的中队在法国上空击落四架德国战斗机时，一架自由法国战斗机通过无线电说："好样的！感谢皇家空军！"。感谢皇家空军！"德雷克回答说："感谢你的运动！"

它们是来自那个时代的发黄的明信片，当时杜松子酒很冷，每个人都是 "小伙子"，当地人躁动但被制服，大英帝国的太阳永不落。
由于这些对象是如此迷人，而且他们无可争辩地抓住了时机做了伟大的事情，这使得那些可能对庆祝这些特权子孙感到不舒服的读者更容易享受这段旅程，而不被内疚所束缚。由于对帝国的庆祝是通过英雄事迹来过滤的，所以很容易忽略那些不那么好的方面--土地贵族的不公正，英国在战前和战后的严重贫困，以及丘吉尔的等级偏执。斯图尔特在殖民地任职时遇到的 "当地人 "表示更喜欢日本人的统治而不是英国人，而他成功返回马来西亚是出乎意料的，因为传统观念认为 "前殖民地人总是不受欢迎的"，这是一个原因。

谈到他在D日的那一排，斯图尔特说他们 "是很普通的小伙子。获得军事勋章的人是一个来自邓迪的屠夫"。但是，在这些《电讯报》的讣告中，闪耀的并不是那些从矿井下到海滩上的工人阶级英雄们。斯图尔特，这位受过牛津教育的 "加尔各答黄麻商人的儿子，他在最初的16年里只见过他两次"，与其他人相比显得非常平民化，而不仅仅是与公爵有关系的拉罗什福考德。他们几乎都是牛津剑桥的毕业生。比利-德雷克（Billy Drake）在空中击落24.5次，他是弗朗西斯-德雷克爵士的直系后裔。约翰尼-科克上校--对你来说是约翰-卡斯伯特-德-埃维斯-科克--"1916年11月18日出生在埃克塞特，在他的祖父查尔斯-科克海军上将爵士的家里。" 等等。

这群人中最有名的可能是帕特里克-利-费摩尔爵士，这位深受喜爱的旅行作家于2011年去世，享年96岁。在被私立学校开除后，他决定步行穿越欧洲（这都是特权的明显标志）。费摩尔拥有出色的克里特希腊语，在岛上为特种部队工作，在那里他装扮成德国人，绑架了一名纳粹少将。当霍勒斯被费摩尔俘虏时，他们因霍勒斯而结为好友。

甚至他们的嗜好也带着一丝发霉的休闲气息。集团军上尉艾伦-莱特（Allan Wright）"是一个出色的、一丝不苟的木匠和木工"。德雷克的 "最大爱好是滑雪。他是皇家空军滑雪队的队长，每年都会去他的一个儿子在瑞士的家，一直到他90多岁时才会去滑雪"。科克形容自己是一个 "无所谓的滑雪者"，但却担任过 "大不列颠滑雪俱乐部的秘书和瑞士坎大哈滑雪俱乐部的财务主管"。斯图尔特 "从小就培养儿子的冒险生活，早早起床在海德公园用塑料剑练习决斗"，退休后成为一名 "热情的园丁"。




电讯报》，一份老牌的保守派（和保守派）报纸会成为这些纪念活动的主场，这并不完全令人惊讶。偶尔，倒退的政治也会溜走--例如，暗示妇女在身边主要是为了产生继承人。"1970年离婚后，他与莎莉-纽金特结婚，后者为他生下了菲奥娜和罗里，即保守党议员、作家和伊拉克副总督。但总的来说，这些为最后一波二战英雄写的讣告为庆祝帝国时代提供了一种没有罪恶感的方式。只是，借用一句话，不要躺在床上，过多地想起英国，否则内疚感可能又会爬上来。

大卫-A-格雷厄姆是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。


The Magic of The Telegraph’s World War II Obituaries
As the last wave of Allied heroes fades away, their stories offer a connection to almost unimaginable courage—and to the heyday of British colonialism.

By David A. Graham

A woman adjusts a portrait of Brian Stewart commissioned to hang at Buckingham Palace in 2015 as part of a series of portraits of D-Day veterans. (Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP)
SEPTEMBER 29, 2015
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Here are a few things Brian Stewart did:

Landed at Normandy right after D-Day and led a unit that destroyed 12 Panzer tanks. “They had a bad habit of sticking snipers up trees. But I had a bad habit of shooting at snipers up trees,” he said.
When sent to Malaya as a district commander, with a tiny police force, he ambushed a troop of bandits at night and sentenced them, as magistrate, the following day.
Was sent to North Vietnam as British consul general during the Vietnam War, as the U.S. bombed:​
He arrived speaking no Vietnamese, and was at once held by Red Guards. His only accreditation was to the city’s municipal office. If the Foreign Office sent the government a message Stewart had to deliver it at the back gate of the drains department; and if secure communications with London were needed he had to set off by aero plane and return a week later.

His Malayan experience meant that he was unperturbed by the air raids, unlike most western diplomats, and he recognised that the Americans were not winning Vietnamese hearts and minds, though nobody believed him when he delivered a paper to this effect to a high powered American conference in Saigon.

After a tumultuous stint working on Northern Irish issues, he returned to Asia where “he was widely admired for his skill in running the largest Secret Intelligence Service station as Far East Controller in Hong Kong.”

Stewart died at 93 in August, but I learned these facts from his fantastic obituary in The Daily Telegraph. (Stewart’s son Rory, an author, diplomat, soldier, and now a member of Parliament, has already accrued a set of his own remarkable adventures.) Stewart’s obituary is not the most amazing I’ve ever read in The Telegraph. That honor goes to Robert de La Rochefoucauld, which The New Yorker deemed “the world’s most interesting obituary.”

One reason these obituaries are so delightful—especially to American readers—is a simple difference in style. As James Ledbetter neatly put it in 2002, U.S. newspapers treat a death as a news story and write obituaries accordingly. The most important information goes at the top, and the piece follows a template. The Telegraph, in contrast, treats it as an occasion to tell an essayistic story. That makes a Telegraph obit a gripping tale with fevered narration and occasional editorial judgments. The late editor Hugh Massingberd perfected the form, with colorful descriptors and a quick pace. The Telegraph’s are not the best-written obituaries—the unrivaled champion is Margalit Fox of The New York Times—but they are the most fun.

Yet there’s something distinctive about the World War II obituaries in particular. The notices for these nonagenarians are coming more frequently these days, as the heroes of the fight to liberate Europe fade away. Their popularity testifies to a public eager to clutch personal recollections and tales of the time before it becomes mere history. The Telegraph’s list of “Military Obituaries” is a scrapbook of heroism, but it is also a rare, precious glimpse into the era of colonialism. They are yellowed postcards, trapped in an old-fashioned red Royal Mail pillar box, from an era when the gin and tonics were cold, everyone was a “chap,” the natives were restive but subdued, and the sun never set on the British Empire. And because so many of these men (almost always men) were born into a titled class mortally wounded by the Great War but not yet dead, they belong to the last generation of true British colonial elites.


Well, not La Rochefoucauld: He was born into French aristocracy—yes, of course, he was related to the writer of maxims—and as a teen met Hitler, who patted him affectionately on the cheek. When the Second World War broke out, he joined the Resistance and then the British Special Operations Executive, with General de Gaulle’s permission. (“Do it. Even allied to the Devil, it’s for La France.”) He learned safecracking from convicts, then headed back to France. He was captured and sentenced to death. Then things got interesting:

En route to his execution in Auxerre, La Rochefoucauld made a break, leaping from the back of the truck carrying him to his doom, and dodging the bullets fired by his two guards. Sprinting through the empty streets, he found himself in front of the Gestapo’s headquarters, where a chauffeur was pacing near a limousine bearing the swastika flag. Spotting the key in the ignition, La Rochefoucauld jumped in and roared off, following the Route Nationale past the prison he had left an hour earlier .… From Auxerre, friends in the Resistance helped him on to a train for Paris, where he evaded German soldiers hunting him by curling up underneath the sink in the lavatory.

La Rochefoucauld was again captured on another mission and considered swallowing a suicide capsule. Instead, “he faked an epileptic fit and, when the guard opened the door to his cell, hit him over the head with a table leg before breaking his neck. After putting on the German’s uniform, La Rochefoucauld walked into the guardroom and shot the two other German jailers. He then simply walked out of the fort, through the deserted town, and to the address of an underground contact.”

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Years later, in the 1990s, he stood up for a man accusing of being a Vichy collaborator, whom La Rochefoucauld said was a Resistance fighter. The man was convicted anyway, but mysteriously escaped—having acquired a passport from the aging hero. When police came to question La Rochefoucauld, his wife advised, “Don’t try to lock him up. He escapes, you know.”

Freed to speak with voice and narrative, The Telegraph’s obituaries are unabashedly hagiographic—sanctifying men (almost always men) who were incontrovertibly heroic in trying times, even if not all of them were always so admirable in their private lives.

It adds to the charm that the men in question tend to play down their own achievements with Churchillian nonchalance. Take the bomb-disposal expert Colonel Stuart Archer. “By getting my arm down inside the bomb, I was able to hold the fuze pocket and with brute force and bloody ignorance bang it back and forth until I got the whole thing free,” he recalled. “Lots of people had pulled them out before but they had been blown up, whereas I hadn’t. This was luck, luck, luck.” Or take Stewart’s own, humorously terse bildungsroman: “My five years in the Army made me a different person. It made a normal, quiet chap really into an extremely confident chap.” When Billy Drake’s squadron shot down four German fighters over France, a Free French fighter radioed, “Bravo! Merci pour le RAF!,” Drake replied, “Merci pour le sport!”

They are yellowed postcards from an era when the gin and tonics were cold, everyone was a “chap,” the natives were restive but subdued, and the sun never set on the British Empire.
Because the subjects are so charming, and because they inarguably seized the moment to do great deeds, it makes it easier for the reader who might otherwise feel uncomfortable celebrating these scions of privilege to simply enjoy the ride, unencumbered by guilt. Since the celebration of empire is filtered through heroic deeds, it’s easy to ignore the less savory aspects—the injustice of a landed aristocracy, the dire poverty in Britain up to and after the war, and the rank bigotry of Churchill. There is a reason that the “locals” whom Stewart encountered in his colonial postings expressed a preference for Japanese rule over British, and that his successful return to Malaysia was unexpected, given the conventional wisdom “that ex-colonials were always unwelcome.”

Speaking of his platoon at D-Day, Stewart said they “were pretty ordinary chaps. The guy who got the Military Medal was a butcher from Dundee.” But it isn’t the working-class heroes who went from down the mine to over the beaches who shine through in these Telegraph obituaries. Stewart, the Oxford-educated “son of a Calcutta jute merchant whom he only saw twice in his first 16 years” seems positively plebeian in comparison to the others, and not just the ducally related La Rochefoucauld. Almost to man, they are Oxbridge graduates. Billy Drake, who notched 24.5 aerial kills, was a direct descendant of Sir Francis Drake. Colonel Johnny Coke—John Cuthbert d’Ewes Coke to you—“was born on November 18 1916 in Exeter at the home of his grandfather, Admiral Sir Charles Coke.” And so on.

The best-known of the bunch is likely Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the beloved travel writer who died at 96 in 2011. After being expelled from private school, he decided to walk across Europe (both being clear signs of privilege). Armed with excellent Cretan Greek, Fermor worked for special forces on the island, where he dressed as a German and kidnapped a Nazi major general. They bonded over Horace whilst he was Fermor’s captive.

Even their hobbies carry a musty whiff of leisure. Group Captain Allan Wright “was an excellent and meticulous carpenter and woodworker.” Drake’s “great passion was skiing. He captained the RAF ski team, and made annual trips to the home of one of his sons in Switzerland, taking to the slopes until he was in his early nineties.” Coke described himself as an “indifferent skiier,” yet served as “secretary of the Ski Club of Great Britain and treasurer of the Kandahar Ski Club in Switzerland.” Stewart “nurtured his son for a life of adventure from an early age, rising early to practise duelling with plastic swords in Hyde Park” and become an “enthusiastic gardener” in retirement.




It’s not entirely surprising that the Telegraph, an old-line conservative (and Conservative) newspaper would be the home for these remembrances. Occasionally, retrograde politics slip through—the implication, for example, that women are primarily around to produce heirs: “After a divorce in 1970 he married Sally Nugent, who bore him Fiona and Rory, the Conservative MP, writer and Iraq deputy governor.” But in general, these obituaries for the last wave of World War II heroes offer a guilt-free way to celebrate the age of empire. Just don’t, to borrow a phrase, lie back and think of England too much, or the guilt might creep back in.

David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.