英语美文赏析 带翻译(2)

It seemed impossible for any city to take so much punishment and continue to endure. It seemed impossible for people of the city to do their daily jobs, to work and eat and sleep and carry on the business of life, with the crash

of bombs all around them

above.

But the city endured. Trains brought commuters in from the

The fires were brought suburbs

. Buses bumped

along the streets. and planes spitting fire in the skies

under control. Bottles of dairy milk arrived in door ways, and women took them in, as though the war were a thousand miles away. Newspapers

appeared and people bought them, hurrying to work and

reports of the battle raging over London.

And Edward R. Murrow went on the air, saying in his deep, steady

He did not speak them with any attempt to voice, "This is London." He spoke as though nothing could ever keep him from saying

those words.

sound heroic. He simply voiced the quiet truth of the city's existence. Murrow knew that Britain's fate depended upon the resolution of the people in the shops and streets, the men in the pubs

, the housewives, those watching for fire on the roofs, the people who had a thousand difficult and painful things to do.

Much depended upon the handful of pilots who rose day after day and

to meet the flocks

of Nazi bombers. The pilots in the night after night

still fighting.

But the people of London were also in the front lines, and they did not

They couldn't reach up

to They had to dig quickly in cellars

have the satisfaction of being able to fight back. and smash

the enemy planes. reading RAF reached the limits of exhaustion and then went beyond those limits,

rescue their friends who had been buried underneath the wreckage

. They had to put out endless fires. They had to stand firm and take whatever the enemy threw at them.

In a broadcast on October 1, 1940, Murrow declared:

bomb,

"Mark it down that these people are both brave and patient, that all are equal under the

that this is a war of speed and organization, and that

provides for the defense and decency whichever

political system best

of the little man will win."