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Books and Arts;Book review;The second world war;
History is full of wars that were bloodier than the second world war. As a proportion of the population, more people were killed during the An Lushan rebellion in eighth-century China, for example, or by the Thirty Years War in 17th-century central Europe. But the sheer magnitude of the human tragedy of the second world war puts it in a class of its own, and its relative closeness to the present day makes claims on the collective memory that more remote horrors cannot.
縱觀人類歷史，比第二次世界大戰更血腥的戰爭比比皆是。例如，8世紀中國的安祿山叛亂或17世紀中歐的三十年戰爭死亡人數占總人口的比例就比二戰大。然而，第二次世界大戰造成的巨大人間慘劇本身讓其他戰爭根本不能與之相提并論。而且，二戰發生的年代相對較近，它給人類留下的集體記憶之深，是那些年代久遠的恐怖戰爭無可比擬的。
The statistics of the war are almost mind-numbing. Estimates differ, but up to 70m people died as a direct consequence of the fighting between 1939 and 1945, about two-thirds of them non-combatants, making it in absolute terms the deadliest conflict ever. Nearly one in ten Germans died and 30% of their army. About 15m Chinese perished and 27m Soviets. Squeezed between two totalitarian neighbours, Poland lost 16% of its population, about half of them Jews who were part of Hitler’s final solution. On average, nearly 30,000 people were being killed every day.
有關二戰的統計數據幾乎讓人麻木。各方估計的死亡人數有出入，但在1939-1945年的這場戰爭中，直接死亡人數高達七千萬，其中三分之二是非戰斗死亡，這使二戰成為人類歷史上絕對死亡人數最多的戰爭。二戰時期，每十個德國人中就有一個死亡，德軍死亡率達30%；約有一千五百萬中國人和兩千七百萬俄國人喪命。夾在兩個極權主義國家之間的波蘭人口減少了16%，其中約一半是猶太人，那是希特勒的“最終方案”要解決的部分目標。當時，每天平均有將近三萬人死于非命。
Partly because it is so hard to grasp what these numbers mean, recent historians have tended to concentrate on particular theatres or aspects of the war with an emphasis on trying to describe what it was like for the human beings caught up in it. Both Antony Beevor and Max Hastings are distinguished exemplars of this approach. Mr Hastings has written books on Britain’s strategic bombing campaign, the Allied invasion of Normandy and the battles for Germany and Japan in the closing stages of the war. With several books already under his belt, Mr Beevor became known in 1998 for his epic account of the siege of Stalingrad, and went on to produce accounts of D-Day and the fall of Berlin. Now both writers have tried something different: single-volume narrative histories of the entire war. In doing so, they are following in the footsteps of Andrew Roberts and Michael Burleigh, who made similar attempts in, respectively, 2009 and 2010.
在一定程度上，人們很難明白這些數字意味著什么，所以最近的歷史學家往往特別關注二戰的某些戰區或層面，致力于將親身經歷二戰的人眼中的二戰呈現給讀者。安東尼•比弗（Antony Beevor）和馬克斯•哈斯丁（Max Hastings）都是這方面的典范。馬克斯•哈斯丁已著有多本作品，內容涉及英國的戰略轟炸、盟軍的諾曼底聯合登陸以及戰爭末期德日兩國的戰役。安東尼•比弗同樣也寫了幾本書。1998年，他筆下的圍攻斯大林格勒令人印象深刻，他也因此聞名于世，之后他又寫了關于諾曼底登陸日及攻克柏林的書。現在兩位作家嘗試了不同的寫作方式，即跟隨安德鹵•羅伯特（Andrew Roberts）和邁克•伯利（Michael Burleigh）的腳步：以單卷本的方式講述整個二戰史。這兩位作家分別在2009年和2010年嘗試用單卷本寫二戰史。
Mr Hastings got there before Mr Beevor. “All Hell Let Loose” was published seven months ago (it is now out in paperback) to justifiably rave reviews.
