哪个历史人物在一种文化中被视为英雄，却在另一种文化中被视为恶棍？
正文翻译
Richard Wang Knows Chinese 1y
理查德·王 懂中文，1年前回答
There are many people like this in history, let me give a few examples.
历史上这样的人物有很多，我举几个例子。
Ma Yuan, General Fubo
马援 伏波将军
General Ma was a meritorious general during the founding period of the Eastern Han Dynasty, and his achievements spread across the front lines of the empire in all directions. One of his achievements is that he easily suppressed the rebellion of Trung sisters in northern Vietnam, and took the heads of these two sisters back to Luoyang as proof of merit. The Trung sisters are regarded as national heroes by Vietnamese, and souvenirs such as temples commemorating them can be seen all over Vietnam.
马将军是东汉开国时期的功臣名将，功绩遍布帝国四方前线。他的功绩之一是轻松平定了越南北部的征氏姐妹起义，并将二人的首级带回洛阳作为军功凭证。征氏姐妹被越南人奉为民族英雄，越南各地都能见到纪念她们的庙宇等纪念场所。
Zhangsun Sheng, the Destroyer of Turks
长孙晟 突厥终结者
Zhangsun Sheng is an outstanding diplomat and spy. He utilized his excellent diplomatic skills to successfully create and intensify internal conflicts within the Turkic Empire, leading to its successful division and never having a chance for reunification. During the long period of turmoil south of the Great Wall from the Northern Zhou Dynasty to the Sui Dynasty to the early Tang Dynasty, the Turks were instigated by him and fell into a long civil war, with little opportunity to benefit from the turmoil south of the Great Wall. He can be considered a nightmare for the Turks, but what is more remembered is his daughter - the Empress of Emperor Taizong of Tang, and his son, Changsun Wuji, the last representative of the Guanlong aristocratic group.
长孙晟是杰出的外交家与间谍。他凭借出色的外交手腕，成功制造并加剧了突厥帝国内部的矛盾，使其顺利分裂且再也没有统一的机会。从北周至隋朝再到唐初，长城以南长期处于动荡之中，而突厥在他的挑拨下陷入长期内战，几乎没有机会从长城以南的动荡中获利。对突厥人来说，他堪称噩梦，但人们更铭记的是他的女儿——唐太宗的皇后，以及儿子——关陇贵族集团的末代代表长孙无忌。
Oliver Groom B.A. in Military History and Wars & National Security Studies, Rogers State University (Graduated 2018) upxed 6y
奥利弗·格鲁姆 罗杰斯州立大学，军事历史与战争学、国家安全研究学士（2018年毕业），6年前回答
Since few other answers have done so, I will devote mine to a couple notorious figures from modern German history.
由于其他回答很少涉及，我将聚焦现代德国历史上的几位知名人物。
No, I am not alluding to the likes of Hitler, Himmler, or any of the obvious candidates from the Nazi Reich, men who ultimately became loved by their Aryan countrymen but despised by those non-Aryans they persecuted both within the confines of the Second World War and without.
不，我指的不是希特勒、希姆莱这类纳粹德国的典型人物——他们最终受到雅利安同胞的爱戴，却遭到在二战期间及战前遭受其迫害的非雅利安人的憎恶。
I am alluding, instead, to earlier Germans whose actions—much like those of their Nazi successors—won them admiration from those they considered their racial equals and indignation from those they considered their racial inferiors.
相反，我指的是更早时期的德国人，他们的行为与后来的纳粹分子相似：赢得了他们眼中“种族平等者”的钦佩，却激起了他们眼中“种族劣等者”的愤慨。
I am also not referring to Europe, however. Even long before the crimes of Der Fuhrer and his genocidal hirelings, the German track record for heinous treatment of other peoples on the Continent has been well-founded in the pre-Holocaust annals of history. (For example, the “Rape of Belgium” in August 1914, during the opening weeks of World War One.)
但我谈论的也不是欧洲。早在元首及其种族灭绝爪牙犯下罪行之前，德国在欧洲大陆上虐待其他民族的恶劣记录，在大屠杀之前的历史记载中就已有据可查（例如1914年8月一战初期的“比利时暴行”）。
Rather, I am concentrating on a part of the world—sub-Saharan Africa—where the seeds of German aggression were sown at horrific expense to the indigenous peoples, yet the efforts of leaders, military and political, who stood devoted to ensuring Germany’s “place in the sun” emerged from the bloody wake of their atrocities as the most vaunted of their compatriots.
相反，我将聚焦世界的一个地区——撒哈拉以南非洲。德国在那里播下了侵略的种子，给土著民族带来了惨痛代价，但那些致力于确保德国“阳光下的地盘”的军事和政治领袖，却在其暴行造成的血腥后果中，成为同胞眼中最受赞誉的人物。
No one deserved their positions of infamy in pre-Nazi German-African history more than these two men. Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha and Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck
在纳粹之前的德属非洲历史上，没有谁比这两个人更该背负恶名——阿德里安·迪特里希·洛塔尔·冯·特罗塔与保罗·埃米尔·冯·莱托-福尔贝克。
Trotha, at 56 years old, became the center of Teutonic colonial policy as the Reichskommissar of the German Empire’s South-West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1884–1919). A lifelong soldier since his late teens, having seen action from the Austro-Prussian War (1866) to the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), under his governorship from June 1904 to November 1905, the imperial forces of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s regime—the Schutztruppe—brutally stamped their jackboot on the indigenous Hereros in what is now Namibia. When he first set foot on the “Dark Continent,” the concurrent war between the white German settlers and the black natives had been raging sporadically for a year, and faring abysmally for the Schutztruppe. The Herero insurgents, allied with the Nama and San tribes, altogether numbered well into the tens of thousands; the Germans, until Trotha’s arrival in Namibia, were vastly outmanned with a total force of scarcely 2,000. (Before the rebellion was finally put down, the Schutztruppe’s ranks swelled to approximately ten times its initial strength.)
56岁的特罗塔出任德意志帝国西南非洲（德属西南非洲，1884–1919年）总督，成为日耳曼殖民政策的核心人物。他十几岁后期便投身军旅，一生征战，经历了普奥战争（1866年）至中国义和团运动（1900年）等诸多战役。1904年6月至1905年11月任职期间，威廉二世政权的帝国军队——（殖民防卫军）——在如今的纳米比亚境内，对土著赫雷罗人实施了残暴镇压。他初抵这片“黑暗大陆”时，德国白人定居者与黑人土著之间的战争已零星爆发一年，殖民防卫军战况惨淡。赫雷罗起义者与纳马族、桑族结盟，总人数达数万人；而在特罗塔抵达纳米比亚之前，德国军队兵力严重不足，总数仅约2000人（叛乱最终被平定前，殖民防卫军兵力已扩充至初始规模的近十倍）。
What followed Trotha’s commandeering of the military situation in German South-West Africa was essentially a prophesying microcosm of the Nazis’ Holocaust that slew millions throughout Europe over the twelve years from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to his death and the subsequent collapse of his regime in 1945. So ruthless was Trotha’s counterinsurgency approach that, in October 1904, he defied his own government back in Berlin by implementing a personal decree—the Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order)—to his soldiers for all Hereros, armed and unarmed, to be punished collectively. The men were to be shot dead; the women and children exiled to the virtually arid deserts of Namib and Kalahari (the former situated along Namibia’s Atlantic coastline, the latter deep within Namibia’s interior), sentencing them also to certain death.
特罗塔掌控德属西南非洲军事局势后，其行径本质上是纳粹大屠杀的预言性缩影——1933年希特勒上台至1945年其死亡及政权崩溃的十二年间，纳粹在欧洲屠杀了数百万人。特罗塔的反叛乱手段极为残酷，1904年10月，他违抗柏林政府的指令，私自颁布“灭绝令”，命令士兵对所有赫雷罗人（无论武装与否）实施集体惩罚：男性一律射杀，妇女和儿童被放逐至几乎寸草不生的纳米布沙漠与卡拉哈里沙漠（前者位于纳米比亚大西洋沿岸，后者深入纳米比亚内陆），无异于判处他们死刑。
At the Battle of Waterberg two months earlier, Trotha put the beginnings of his anti-guerrilla strategy into fruition. Trapping the Hereros—some 60,000—on three sides between a 150-mile-long wall of German rifles, machine guns, and artillery on the one side and the westernmost rim of the Kalahari on the other, he mandated to his soldiers that all accessible water holes be contaminated and any Herero who dared to break out of the encirclement be labeled fair game for the muzzles of the Schutztruppe. (Trotha’s small army after that single day of fighting, as in the rebellion as a whole, sustained comparatively light casualties.)
两个月前的沃特伯格战役中，特罗塔初步践行了其反游击战略。他将约6万名赫雷罗人三面围困：一侧是长达150英里、配备步枪、机枪和火炮的德军防线，另一侧是卡拉哈里沙漠最西缘。他命令士兵污染所有可获取的水源，并规定任何胆敢突围的赫雷罗人都可被殖民防卫军随意射杀。（特罗塔的小股部队在当天的战斗中，以及整个叛乱期间，伤亡都相对轻微。）
Even when the Kaiserreich’s uppermost echelons of political and military leadership caught wind of the extermination policy and demanded for its rescission, Trotha continued to walk over his superiors back in faraway Germany. Those Hereros that managed to survive Trotha’s wholesale purge against their people were ultimately sent to do forced labor in concentration camps—by 1904 not a novelty to the contemporary world, as the Spaniards in Cuba and the British in South Africa clearly illustrated less than a decade previous. Even so, by the time the Prussian lieutenant general was recalled to Berlin, the sword of Herero resistance had been irreparably broken.
即便德意志帝国的最高军政领导层得知这一灭绝政策并要求撤销，特罗塔仍无视远在德国的上级指令。侥幸在特罗塔大规模清洗中存活的赫雷罗人，最终被送往集中营服苦役——到1904年，集中营已非新鲜事物，不到十年前西班牙人在古巴、英国人在南非就已设立过类似场所。即便如此，当这位普鲁士中将被召回柏林时，赫雷罗人的抵抗已被彻底瓦解，再无复原可能。
Thanks to Trotha’s contributions to military victory, moreover, the next three years for the defeated Herero amounted to Germany’s—and the twentieth century’s—first experiment with GENOCIDE. In all, upwards of 100,000 Hereros and 10,000 of their Nama comrades lay dead across the Kaiserreich’s playground of wanton slaughter. So devastating was this indiscriminate treatment under Trotha’s purview that in 1911, the census taken in Namibia that year estimated the Herero population at 15,000. (Of the roughly 19,000 Nama that took part in the rebellion, the other 9,000 that survived faced a life of imprisonment and slave labor in the camps as well as harsh exploitation by the local German businesses.)
此外，得益于特罗塔的军事“功绩”，战败后的赫雷罗人在接下来的三年中，遭遇了德国乃至二十世纪的首次种族灭绝实验。在德意志帝国这片肆意屠杀的“乐园”中，共有超过10万名赫雷罗人和1万名纳马盟友丧生。特罗塔主导的无差别迫害破坏力极强，1911年纳米比亚人口普查显示，赫雷罗人仅余1.5万人。（参与叛乱的纳马人约1.9万人，幸存的9000人在集中营中遭受监禁和奴隶劳动，还受到当地德国企业的残酷剥削。）
Trotha’s reputation in German Africa, needless to say, made him a hated man both among his white peers back home and among his black enemies who witnessed firsthand his almost unabated mass-murdering spree. That animosity only intensified, however, when a few short months after departing from Namibia he was deployed to the Dark Continent once more to help suppress yet another rising against German colonialism—this time in the Kaiser’s East African provinces, against the Maji Maji in what is now Tanzania. By the rebellion’s end in the summer of 1907—the aftermath of which saw the outbreak of a famine, due to the merciless brutality of German reprisals against the civilian populace—another 250,000–300,000 Africans had fallen on their own stomping grounds by the hand of a white European oppressor.
毋庸置疑，特罗塔在德属非洲的声名让他成为众矢之的——无论是德国国内的白人同胞，还是亲眼目睹他近乎无休无止大屠杀的黑人受害者，都对他深恶痛绝。而在离开纳米比亚仅数月后，他再次被派往“黑暗大陆”，协助镇压另一场反抗德国殖民统治的起义——此次是在德意志帝国的东非行省，对抗如今坦桑尼亚境内的马及马及起义者，这进一步加剧了人们对他的憎恶。1907年夏季起义结束时，由于德国对平民实施无情报复，当地爆发饥荒，又有25万至30万非洲人在自己的故土上死于欧洲白人压迫者之手。
Much less unsurprising, though, was the Nazi generation’s fanatical applause for him three decades later—even going so far as christening a new street in Munich with his name in 1933—while Hitler and his minions put forth their scheme to annihilate the Jews and other “undesirables” across their newfound European empire. (Trotha had already succumbed to typhoid fever in 1920, by then promoted to an infantry general and in the service of the Weimar Republic that supplanted the Kaiserreich after World War One.)
然而，三十年后纳粹一代对他的狂热追捧却不足为奇——1933年，希特勒及其追随者在欧洲推行灭绝犹太人和其他“不受欢迎者”的计划时，甚至在慕尼黑以他的名字命名了一条新街。（特罗塔已于1920年死于伤寒，彼时他已晋升为步兵将军，效力于一战后取代德意志帝国的魏玛共和国。）
Only a decade after Trotha’s heyday came Lettow-Vorbeck’s, at 44 years old. To his Fatherland during the onslaught of the Great War, Lettow-Vorbeck was the Prussian blend of Ancient Rome’s Fabius and Ancient Carthage’s Hannibal from the Second Punic War era—a general who both exploited his opponent’s resources on the one hand and risked battle with that same opponent on the other. To his main adversaries between 1914 and 1918, the British, Belgian, and Portuguese empires, he was a Teutonic Napoleon Bonaparte—another upstart menace to their hard-won standing on the international stage.
特罗塔的鼎盛时期过后仅十年，44岁的莱托-福尔贝克登上历史舞台。一战期间，对祖国而言，他是普鲁士版的古罗马费边与第二次布匿战争时期迦太基汉尼拔的结合体——既善于利用敌人的资源，又敢于与敌人正面交锋。1914至1918年间，对其主要对手英、比、葡三国而言，他是日耳曼版的拿破仑·波拿巴，是对他们来之不易的国际地位构成威胁的又一新兴势力。
A loyal warrior-servant of the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic like Trotha, Lettow-Vorbeck also fought against the Boxers and Hereros during his thirty-year-long military career (1890–1920). (In South-West Africa during the Herero conflict, only a couple battle-inflicted wounds to his left eye and chest prevented him from becoming embroiled in the controversial GENOCIDE.) Like his fellow Prussian and counterpart from Namibia fame, too, Lettow-Vorbeck strongly believed in taking the offensive against the enemy whenever, wherever, and however possible as the way toward victory.
与特罗塔一样，莱托-福尔贝克是德意志帝国与魏玛共和国的忠诚军人，三十年军旅生涯（1890–1920年）中，他也曾参与镇压义和团运动和赫雷罗人起义（在西南非洲的赫雷罗冲突中，他左眼和胸部受战伤，才未卷入那场颇具争议的种族灭绝事件）。和这位来自纳米比亚的普鲁士同胞一样，莱托-福尔贝克坚信，无论何时、何地、以何种方式，主动进攻敌人都是通往胜利的道路。
Given the priorities of Wilhelm’s Germany at the onset of hostilities with the Entente powers in summer 1914, this strategic philosophy of attacking as a means of defense was going to have to be Lettow-Vorbeck’s only option if the endgame was the preservation of the empire that his country, since the time of Bismarck, had fought hard to build for itself. Its feldgrau-clad armies bogged down by heavy fighting on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, its fleet shut out from the rest of the world by Britain’s Royal Navy, its allies just barely holding their own on battlefields elsewhere, and its other colonies in Africa and the Far East susceptible to Allied conquest, the German military was in peril on virtually every corner of the war where it was involved.
1914年夏季，德国与协约国开战之初，鉴于威廉德国的战略重点，若最终目标是保住自俾斯麦时期起德国苦心建立的帝国，这种“以攻为守”的战略理念就成了莱托-福尔贝克的唯一选择。当时，德国身着灰绿色军服的军队在东西两线陷入惨烈苦战，舰队被英国皇家海军封锁，无法与外界通航，盟友在其他战场勉强支撑，非洲和远东的其他殖民地易遭协约国攻占，德国军队在其参与的战争各条战线几乎都陷入险境。
For Lettow-Vorbeck, who had been redeployed back to Africa four months prior to Germany’s entry into the war, no help from Berlin was coming any time soon. Not one soldier. Not one rifle. Not one artillery shell.
莱托-福尔贝克在德国参战前四个月已被调回非洲，而柏林迟迟未能向他提供任何援助——没有一兵一卒，没有一支步枪，也没有一发炮弹。
When the African front opened up soon after the initial shots of war rang out across Europe, Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces initially comprised only 5,000 German regulars and African askaris; by the war’s end, his army would increase to 14,000—more than half of which was made up of native recruits. Against them stood odds of more than twenty to one—300,000 enemy troops drawn from Germany’s adjacent colonial neighbors. The paranoia of geopolitical encirclement that overwhelmed Germans back home had been true as well for Germans on the Dark Continent. British South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, and Uganda, Portuguese Mozambique and Angola, the Belgian Congo, and the sea enveloped Lettow-Vorbeck on all sides.
欧洲战场的枪声打响后不久，非洲战线随即开辟。莱托-福尔贝克最初的兵力仅包括5000名德国正规军和非洲雇佣军；到战争结束时，他的军队已扩充至1.4万人，其中超过一半是土著新兵。他们面临的敌军兵力超过30万，来自德国周边的殖民邻国，兵力对比超过20:1。德国本土民众深陷的地缘政治包围焦虑，对“黑暗大陆”上的德国人而言同样真实——英属南非、罗得西亚、肯尼亚、乌干达，葡属莫桑比克、安哥拉，比属刚果以及海洋，将莱托-福尔贝克团团包围。
Despite everything that made his chances of success appear unviable, though, Lettow-Vorbeck proceeded to achieve the unfathomable. Even with some initial losses—the whole of Germany’s South-West Africa colony fell to the Allied armies by July 1915, and then Kamerun (what is now Cameroon) by March 1916—Lettow-Vorbeck still managed to pin down much of the overwhelming might of the Entente’s European colonial powers, a combined strength that otherwise would have throttled into submission both Germany and its allies in Europe long before 1918.
尽管种种因素都表明他胜算渺茫，但莱托-福尔贝克却取得了令人难以置信的成就。即便初期遭遇失利——1915年7月德属西南非洲全境被协约国军队攻占，1916年3月喀麦隆也沦陷——他仍成功牵制了协约国欧洲殖民列强的大量主力。若这些兵力未被牵制，早在1918年前就可能将德国及其欧洲盟友彻底压制。
The locus of the Schutztruppe’s war took place in German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika). So it was there, in East Africa, that Lettow-Vorbeck made his mark as a commander equal in skill and stamina to the Kaiser’s other brilliant military mind, Paul von Hindenburg.
殖民防卫军的主战场位于德属东非。正是在东非，莱托-福尔贝克凭借出色的军事才能和耐力崭露头角，成为与德皇麾下另一位杰出军事家保罗·冯·兴登堡齐名的指挥官。
Until more than a week after the November 11 Armistice that officially brought the First World War to an end, the German Empire’s last stand in Africa between 1914 and 1918 dragged courageously on, and, what’s more, with several major victories won by Lettow-Vorbeck that left his Allied enemies totally thunderstruck. The greatest of these successes, the Battle of Tanga (November 3–5, 1914) fought near Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast, saw Britain’s first attempt to conquer German East Africa, via amphibious assault, thrown back into the sea. This victory, won against an enemy force nine times larger than his own, saw the British Empire troops (predominantly derived from Raj-governed India) lose as many as 1,190 killed and 2,450 wounded—a stark contrast to the 71 dead and 76 wounded from Lettow-Vorbeck’s army.
1918年11月11日停战协定正式结束一战后，德帝国在1914至1918年间于非洲的最后抵抗仍英勇持续了一周多，且莱托-福尔贝克赢得了数次重大胜利，让协约国敌人震惊不已。其中最辉煌的胜利是1914年11月3日至5日在坦桑尼亚印度洋沿岸附近爆发的坦噶战役——英国首次试图通过两栖进攻征服德属东非，却被击退。这场战役中，他以寡敌众，对阵兵力九倍于己的敌军，最终英军（主要由英属印度军队组成）伤亡惨重，阵亡1190人、受伤2450人，而莱托-福尔贝克的军队仅阵亡71人、受伤76人，形成鲜明对比。
What the Entente’s imperialist members in Africa lost in terms of human life was exacerbated further by the substantial loss of everything necessary for their armies to survive the pressures of modern warfare, from food and medicine to tents and blankets to rifles and Maxim machine guns. Such became the trend of Lettow-Vorbeck’s battles against his European adversaries for the next four years after Tanga: sustaining light casualties while reaping vast spoils.
非洲协约国殖民军队不仅人员伤亡惨重，维持现代战争所需的各类物资——从粮食、药品到帐篷、毛毯，再到步枪和马克沁机枪——也损失巨大，雪上加霜。坦噶战役后的四年里，莱托-福尔贝克与欧洲敌军的作战始终保持这一态势：自身伤亡轻微，却缴获颇丰。
The popular Great War notion of “lions led by donkeys” was never more true in the conflict’s entirety than it was at Tanga. At Tanga, the lions of the defeated British Indian force had met their match against the king of the pride. Lettow-Vorbeck thenceforth became heralded by his soldiers and fellow countrymen back home as the Lowe von Afrika—the Lion of Africa.
一战中广为流传的“驴领导的狮子”这一说法，在整场战争中没有比坦噶战役更贴切的体现了。在坦噶，战败的英属印度军队中的“狮子们”遇到了“狮群之王”。此后，莱托-福尔贝克被麾下士兵和德国同胞誉为“非洲之狮”。
After Tanga, the Lion proceeded to stalk the lands on which he outfought and outran his enemies with almost unchecked momentum.
坦噶战役后，这位“狮子”继续在非洲土地上驰骋，以近乎势不可挡的势头击败并甩开敌人。
One modern-day historian, Hew Strachan, perfectly analyzes Lettow-Vorbeck and his war as follows: “Here, at least, was a German commander who had never been defeated. But he became a legend to his enemies as well. Lettow-Vorbeck led them the length of East Africa from Uganda to the Zambezi [River, encompassing what is now Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique], but they never caught him up. Their incompetence played a large part, but it suited them better to believe that he had conducted a guerrilla campaign. That was nonsense. Lettow-Vorbeck was a Prussian general staff officer, with all the preconceptions that that implies. His . . . askaris . . . were organized in independent field companies, and were trained in bush fighting, but his inclination was to seek battle, not shun it. Cut off from Germany, he was almost entirely reliant on what he could get from within the colony: fighting for fighting’s sake both depleted his ammunition stocks and endangered his irreplaceable European officers and non-commissioned officers. As with [Vice-Admiral Maximilian von] Spee and his cruisers, Lettow’s strength lay in dispersal and in striking against weakness, forgoing the temptation to concentrate for battle. Like Spee, Lettow could not resist the pressures of the traditions in which he had been brought up.
现代历史学家休·斯特拉坎对莱托-福尔贝克及其战争行动的分析十分精辟：“至少，这是一位从未战败的德国指挥官。但他也成了敌人眼中的传奇。莱托-福尔贝克带领他们穿越了东非全境，从乌干达到赞比西河（涵盖如今的赞比亚、安哥拉、纳米比亚、博茨瓦纳、津巴布韦和莫桑比克），但他们始终未能抓获他。敌军的无能是重要原因，但他们更愿意相信他采取的是游击战——这纯属无稽之谈。莱托-福尔贝克是普鲁士总参谋部军官，有着该身份自带的所有固有观念。他的非洲雇佣军被编为独立野外连，接受过丛林作战训练，但他的倾向是主动求战，而非避战。与德国隔绝后，他几乎完全依赖殖民地内部的物资供给：为战而战既会耗尽弹药储备，也会让不可或缺的欧洲军官和士官陷入险境。与马克西米利安·冯·施佩海军中将及其巡洋舰部队一样，莱托的优势在于分散部署、攻击敌军薄弱环节，而非急于集中兵力决战。和施佩一样，莱托也无法摆脱自身成长所遵循的军事传统带来的压力。
A true guerrilla strategy would have rested the defence of German East Africa on the opportunities for fomenting revolution in the adjacent colonies of the enemy. The British colonial service was depleted by the need for its younger officials to join the armed forces, and the Belgians to the west and the Portuguese to the south had the reputation of being the most bloodthirsty and tyrannical of all the European colonial powers. Lettow-Vorbeck did not exploit this chance: he saw the fighting as a matter between armies in the field and the territories as simply ground over which they operated.
真正的游击战略本应借助在敌方邻近殖民地煽动革命的机会来保卫德属东非。英国殖民部门因年轻官员需参军而人手短缺，西边的比利时人和南边的葡萄牙人则被誉为所有欧洲殖民列强中最嗜血、最残暴的。但莱托-福尔贝克并未利用这一机会——他将战争视为战场上军队之间的较量，而殖民地仅被当作作战的场地。
By the same token, he never acknowledged—and perhaps never realized—how much he owed to the civil administration of German East Africa. Although there were certainly areas of the colony which gave support to the British forces, the Germans never had to cope with insurrection in their rear. The German governor, Heinrich Schnee, was not enthusiastic about the war, which he saw as undermining the progressive effects of colonisation. Initially, he embraced the Congo Act [of 1885]. For Lettow-Vorbeck, German East Africa fulfilled a purely military function: to draw British troops off from the main theatre in Europe. This could never be accomplished by neutrality. Lettow-Vorbeck therefore saw himself as constantly at odds with Schnee. In reality, he could never have lasted as long in the field as he did without the efforts of the civil administration.”
同理，他从未承认——或许也从未意识到——自己有多依赖德属东非的民政部门。尽管殖民地部分地区确实支持英军，但德军从未面临后方叛乱的困扰。德国总督海因里希·施内并不热衷于这场战争，他认为战争破坏了殖民带来的“进步效应”，最初还支持1885年《刚果法案》。而对莱托-福尔贝克而言，德属东非仅承担纯粹的军事职能：牵制英军，使其无法投入欧洲主战场。中立绝不可能实现这一目标，因此莱托-福尔贝克认为自己与施内始终处于对立状态。但事实上，若没有民政部门的支持，他绝不可能在战场上坚持如此之久。”[1]
Ultimately, the enemy blood that Lettow-Vorbeck spilled and the enemy resources that he swiped or destroyed achieved little in preventing the Kaiserreich’s doom. No amount of battles waged, of victories won, or defeats inflicted in faraway Africa helped conquer the fortress city of Verdun, nor held back the onrushing Allied tanks at Amiens, nor saved the routing vestiges of the German Army in the Argonne.
归根结底，莱托-福尔贝克流的敌人鲜血、掠夺或摧毁的敌人资源，在阻止德意志帝国覆灭方面收效甚微。在遥远非洲发动的无数战役、赢得的诸多胜利、给敌人造成的多次失败，既未能攻克凡尔登要塞，也未能阻挡协约国坦克在亚眠的猛攻，更未能挽救在阿贡森林溃散的德国残军。
To the colonized native peoples that found themselves caught in the grips of the war below the Sahara, meanwhile, Lettow-Vorbeck’s four-year reign over the battlefields of East Africa was not something to be celebrated as a flicker of hope for their liberation from what Kipling espoused at the turn of the century as “the white man’s burden.”
与此同时，对深陷撒哈拉以南战争泥潭的殖民地土著民族而言，莱托-福尔贝克在东非战场四年的征战，绝非他们摆脱吉卜林在世纪之交所宣扬的“白人的负担”、获得解放的一线希望，不值得庆贺。
Instead, Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaigns fomented death, destruction, and suffering of torrential magnitude. His raids into British, Portuguese, and Belgian territory produced horrendous results for the noncombatants in those territories as their farms were stripped bare of crops, livestock, and other essentials for human sustenance. German East Africa, too, faced severe repercussions as its lands and peoples were gradually swallowed up by Allied counteroffensives. Famine and disease, consequently, became rampant when such food shortages were worsened by the rain deficiency that suddenly plagued the war-torn sub-Sahara.
相反，莱托-福尔贝克的军事行动引发了大规模的死亡、破坏和苦难。他对英、葡、比属领土的突袭，给当地平民带来了可怕后果——农场的作物、牲畜及其他生活必需品被洗劫一空。随着协约国反攻逐渐吞噬德属东非的土地和人民，该地区也遭遇了严重冲击。加之战乱后的撒哈拉以南地区突然遭遇干旱，粮食短缺雪上加霜，饥荒和疾病随之肆虐。
By the time Lettow-Vorbeck and his Schutztruppe finally capitulated on November 25, 1918, civilian casualties in East Africa had reached 365,000—far exceeding those incurred in Namibia at Trotha’s hand. By the outset of 1919, millions more had perished from the “Spanish influenza” pandemic whose rapid expansion due to the war’s global outreach proved as decisive on the African savanna as it did in the trenches of France.
1918年11月25日，莱托-福尔贝克及其殖民防卫军最终投降时，东非平民伤亡已达36.5万人——远超特罗塔在纳米比亚造成的伤亡。到1919年初，又有数百万人死于“西班牙流感”大流行。这场疫情因战争的全球性传播而迅速扩散，在非洲草原造成的影响，与在法国战壕中同样致命。
A German doctor in Lettow-Vorbeck’s army during the war perhaps said it best when reflecting on the Lion’s tussle with the giants of Western imperialism in Africa: “Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation. We are no longer the agents of culture, our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years’ War.”
战争期间，莱托-福尔贝克军中的一位德国医生在反思这位“狮子”与西方帝国主义巨头在非洲的较量时，或许说得最为贴切：“我们身后留下的是荒芜的田地、被洗劫的仓库，以及即将到来的饥荒。我们不再是文明的使者，我们的足迹遍布死亡、掠夺和被遗弃的村庄，就像三十年战争中我们与敌军的推进轨迹一样。”
After the war, nonetheless, Lettow-Vorbeck, like Trotha before him, returned to a Germany that, even while in the grips of revolution, greeted him with open arms. (Lettow-Vorbeck later took up a commmand of Freikorps troops to help quell the pro-communist Spartacist Rising in January 1919, and then played yet another role in combating the failed Kapp Putsch against the Weimar government the following year.) Even twenty years after his post-Armistice surrender, despite his intimate history with the black askaris formerly under his command during the Great War, and despite his adamant and vocal distaste for Hitler and everything he and his regime stood for, Lettow-Vorbeck—again, like Trotha—became widely idolized by the Nazis.
然而战后，与此前的特罗塔一样，莱托-福尔贝克回到了德国——即便当时德国正处于革命动荡中，仍对他敞开双臂。（莱托-福尔贝克后来于1919年1月指挥自由军团，协助镇压亲共产主义的斯巴达克同盟起义；次年，他又参与挫败了反对魏玛政府的卡普政变。）即便在停战后投降二十年后，尽管他与一战期间麾下的黑人雇佣军渊源深厚，且公开强烈厌恶希特勒及其政权所代表的一切，莱托-福尔贝克仍像特罗塔一样，被纳粹广泛奉为偶像。
All that separates him from Trotha, though, is Lettow-Vorbeck’s unflagging personal refusal to associate himself with the Third Reich in any way, shape, or form. Consequently, his good standing in today’s Germany can be easily pointed out by the number of streets which still bear his name.
不过，莱托-福尔贝克与特罗塔的不同之处在于，他始终坚决拒绝以任何形式与第三帝国产生关联。因此，如今德国仍有不少以他名字命名的街道，这也足以证明他在德国的良好声誉。
In Africa, however, like the blue-blooded executioner of the Hereros, the so-called “Lion” retains a notoriety that has far outlived Germany’s days as a colonial power on the Dark Continent. And the ongoing repercussions from the West’s exploitation of that part of the world—long after European colonialism there met its final demise—will assuredly not permit Lettow-Vorbeck’s remembrance (and Trotha’s) to go away so easily among the descendants of those he caused the sort of far-flung and prolonged misery that he did.
然而在非洲，这位所谓的“狮子”与那位赫雷罗人的贵族刽子手（特罗塔）一样，其恶名远未随着德国在“黑暗大陆”殖民统治的终结而消逝。即便欧洲殖民主义在非洲早已消亡，但西方对该地区的剥削所产生的持续影响，注定会让那些因他而遭受深远且长久苦难的人们的后裔，难以轻易忘却莱托-福尔贝克（以及特罗塔）。
理查德·王 懂中文，1年前回答
There are many people like this in history, let me give a few examples.
历史上这样的人物有很多，我举几个例子。
Ma Yuan, General Fubo
马援 伏波将军
General Ma was a meritorious general during the founding period of the Eastern Han Dynasty, and his achievements spread across the front lines of the empire in all directions. One of his achievements is that he easily suppressed the rebellion of Trung sisters in northern Vietnam, and took the heads of these two sisters back to Luoyang as proof of merit. The Trung sisters are regarded as national heroes by Vietnamese, and souvenirs such as temples commemorating them can be seen all over Vietnam.
马将军是东汉开国时期的功臣名将，功绩遍布帝国四方前线。他的功绩之一是轻松平定了越南北部的征氏姐妹起义，并将二人的首级带回洛阳作为军功凭证。征氏姐妹被越南人奉为民族英雄，越南各地都能见到纪念她们的庙宇等纪念场所。
Zhangsun Sheng, the Destroyer of Turks
长孙晟 突厥终结者
Zhangsun Sheng is an outstanding diplomat and spy. He utilized his excellent diplomatic skills to successfully create and intensify internal conflicts within the Turkic Empire, leading to its successful division and never having a chance for reunification. During the long period of turmoil south of the Great Wall from the Northern Zhou Dynasty to the Sui Dynasty to the early Tang Dynasty, the Turks were instigated by him and fell into a long civil war, with little opportunity to benefit from the turmoil south of the Great Wall. He can be considered a nightmare for the Turks, but what is more remembered is his daughter - the Empress of Emperor Taizong of Tang, and his son, Changsun Wuji, the last representative of the Guanlong aristocratic group.
长孙晟是杰出的外交家与间谍。他凭借出色的外交手腕，成功制造并加剧了突厥帝国内部的矛盾，使其顺利分裂且再也没有统一的机会。从北周至隋朝再到唐初，长城以南长期处于动荡之中，而突厥在他的挑拨下陷入长期内战，几乎没有机会从长城以南的动荡中获利。对突厥人来说，他堪称噩梦，但人们更铭记的是他的女儿——唐太宗的皇后，以及儿子——关陇贵族集团的末代代表长孙无忌。
Oliver Groom B.A. in Military History and Wars & National Security Studies, Rogers State University (Graduated 2018) upxed 6y
奥利弗·格鲁姆 罗杰斯州立大学，军事历史与战争学、国家安全研究学士（2018年毕业），6年前回答
Since few other answers have done so, I will devote mine to a couple notorious figures from modern German history.
由于其他回答很少涉及，我将聚焦现代德国历史上的几位知名人物。
No, I am not alluding to the likes of Hitler, Himmler, or any of the obvious candidates from the Nazi Reich, men who ultimately became loved by their Aryan countrymen but despised by those non-Aryans they persecuted both within the confines of the Second World War and without.
不，我指的不是希特勒、希姆莱这类纳粹德国的典型人物——他们最终受到雅利安同胞的爱戴，却遭到在二战期间及战前遭受其迫害的非雅利安人的憎恶。
I am alluding, instead, to earlier Germans whose actions—much like those of their Nazi successors—won them admiration from those they considered their racial equals and indignation from those they considered their racial inferiors.
相反，我指的是更早时期的德国人，他们的行为与后来的纳粹分子相似：赢得了他们眼中“种族平等者”的钦佩，却激起了他们眼中“种族劣等者”的愤慨。
I am also not referring to Europe, however. Even long before the crimes of Der Fuhrer and his genocidal hirelings, the German track record for heinous treatment of other peoples on the Continent has been well-founded in the pre-Holocaust annals of history. (For example, the “Rape of Belgium” in August 1914, during the opening weeks of World War One.)
但我谈论的也不是欧洲。早在元首及其种族灭绝爪牙犯下罪行之前，德国在欧洲大陆上虐待其他民族的恶劣记录，在大屠杀之前的历史记载中就已有据可查（例如1914年8月一战初期的“比利时暴行”）。
Rather, I am concentrating on a part of the world—sub-Saharan Africa—where the seeds of German aggression were sown at horrific expense to the indigenous peoples, yet the efforts of leaders, military and political, who stood devoted to ensuring Germany’s “place in the sun” emerged from the bloody wake of their atrocities as the most vaunted of their compatriots.
相反，我将聚焦世界的一个地区——撒哈拉以南非洲。德国在那里播下了侵略的种子，给土著民族带来了惨痛代价，但那些致力于确保德国“阳光下的地盘”的军事和政治领袖，却在其暴行造成的血腥后果中，成为同胞眼中最受赞誉的人物。
No one deserved their positions of infamy in pre-Nazi German-African history more than these two men. Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha and Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck
在纳粹之前的德属非洲历史上，没有谁比这两个人更该背负恶名——阿德里安·迪特里希·洛塔尔·冯·特罗塔与保罗·埃米尔·冯·莱托-福尔贝克。
Trotha, at 56 years old, became the center of Teutonic colonial policy as the Reichskommissar of the German Empire’s South-West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1884–1919). A lifelong soldier since his late teens, having seen action from the Austro-Prussian War (1866) to the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), under his governorship from June 1904 to November 1905, the imperial forces of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s regime—the Schutztruppe—brutally stamped their jackboot on the indigenous Hereros in what is now Namibia. When he first set foot on the “Dark Continent,” the concurrent war between the white German settlers and the black natives had been raging sporadically for a year, and faring abysmally for the Schutztruppe. The Herero insurgents, allied with the Nama and San tribes, altogether numbered well into the tens of thousands; the Germans, until Trotha’s arrival in Namibia, were vastly outmanned with a total force of scarcely 2,000. (Before the rebellion was finally put down, the Schutztruppe’s ranks swelled to approximately ten times its initial strength.)
56岁的特罗塔出任德意志帝国西南非洲（德属西南非洲，1884–1919年）总督，成为日耳曼殖民政策的核心人物。他十几岁后期便投身军旅，一生征战，经历了普奥战争（1866年）至中国义和团运动（1900年）等诸多战役。1904年6月至1905年11月任职期间，威廉二世政权的帝国军队——（殖民防卫军）——在如今的纳米比亚境内，对土著赫雷罗人实施了残暴镇压。他初抵这片“黑暗大陆”时，德国白人定居者与黑人土著之间的战争已零星爆发一年，殖民防卫军战况惨淡。赫雷罗起义者与纳马族、桑族结盟，总人数达数万人；而在特罗塔抵达纳米比亚之前，德国军队兵力严重不足，总数仅约2000人（叛乱最终被平定前，殖民防卫军兵力已扩充至初始规模的近十倍）。
What followed Trotha’s commandeering of the military situation in German South-West Africa was essentially a prophesying microcosm of the Nazis’ Holocaust that slew millions throughout Europe over the twelve years from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to his death and the subsequent collapse of his regime in 1945. So ruthless was Trotha’s counterinsurgency approach that, in October 1904, he defied his own government back in Berlin by implementing a personal decree—the Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order)—to his soldiers for all Hereros, armed and unarmed, to be punished collectively. The men were to be shot dead; the women and children exiled to the virtually arid deserts of Namib and Kalahari (the former situated along Namibia’s Atlantic coastline, the latter deep within Namibia’s interior), sentencing them also to certain death.
特罗塔掌控德属西南非洲军事局势后，其行径本质上是纳粹大屠杀的预言性缩影——1933年希特勒上台至1945年其死亡及政权崩溃的十二年间，纳粹在欧洲屠杀了数百万人。特罗塔的反叛乱手段极为残酷，1904年10月，他违抗柏林政府的指令，私自颁布“灭绝令”，命令士兵对所有赫雷罗人（无论武装与否）实施集体惩罚：男性一律射杀，妇女和儿童被放逐至几乎寸草不生的纳米布沙漠与卡拉哈里沙漠（前者位于纳米比亚大西洋沿岸，后者深入纳米比亚内陆），无异于判处他们死刑。
At the Battle of Waterberg two months earlier, Trotha put the beginnings of his anti-guerrilla strategy into fruition. Trapping the Hereros—some 60,000—on three sides between a 150-mile-long wall of German rifles, machine guns, and artillery on the one side and the westernmost rim of the Kalahari on the other, he mandated to his soldiers that all accessible water holes be contaminated and any Herero who dared to break out of the encirclement be labeled fair game for the muzzles of the Schutztruppe. (Trotha’s small army after that single day of fighting, as in the rebellion as a whole, sustained comparatively light casualties.)
两个月前的沃特伯格战役中，特罗塔初步践行了其反游击战略。他将约6万名赫雷罗人三面围困：一侧是长达150英里、配备步枪、机枪和火炮的德军防线，另一侧是卡拉哈里沙漠最西缘。他命令士兵污染所有可获取的水源，并规定任何胆敢突围的赫雷罗人都可被殖民防卫军随意射杀。（特罗塔的小股部队在当天的战斗中，以及整个叛乱期间，伤亡都相对轻微。）
Even when the Kaiserreich’s uppermost echelons of political and military leadership caught wind of the extermination policy and demanded for its rescission, Trotha continued to walk over his superiors back in faraway Germany. Those Hereros that managed to survive Trotha’s wholesale purge against their people were ultimately sent to do forced labor in concentration camps—by 1904 not a novelty to the contemporary world, as the Spaniards in Cuba and the British in South Africa clearly illustrated less than a decade previous. Even so, by the time the Prussian lieutenant general was recalled to Berlin, the sword of Herero resistance had been irreparably broken.
即便德意志帝国的最高军政领导层得知这一灭绝政策并要求撤销，特罗塔仍无视远在德国的上级指令。侥幸在特罗塔大规模清洗中存活的赫雷罗人，最终被送往集中营服苦役——到1904年，集中营已非新鲜事物，不到十年前西班牙人在古巴、英国人在南非就已设立过类似场所。即便如此，当这位普鲁士中将被召回柏林时，赫雷罗人的抵抗已被彻底瓦解，再无复原可能。
Thanks to Trotha’s contributions to military victory, moreover, the next three years for the defeated Herero amounted to Germany’s—and the twentieth century’s—first experiment with GENOCIDE. In all, upwards of 100,000 Hereros and 10,000 of their Nama comrades lay dead across the Kaiserreich’s playground of wanton slaughter. So devastating was this indiscriminate treatment under Trotha’s purview that in 1911, the census taken in Namibia that year estimated the Herero population at 15,000. (Of the roughly 19,000 Nama that took part in the rebellion, the other 9,000 that survived faced a life of imprisonment and slave labor in the camps as well as harsh exploitation by the local German businesses.)
此外，得益于特罗塔的军事“功绩”，战败后的赫雷罗人在接下来的三年中，遭遇了德国乃至二十世纪的首次种族灭绝实验。在德意志帝国这片肆意屠杀的“乐园”中，共有超过10万名赫雷罗人和1万名纳马盟友丧生。特罗塔主导的无差别迫害破坏力极强，1911年纳米比亚人口普查显示，赫雷罗人仅余1.5万人。（参与叛乱的纳马人约1.9万人，幸存的9000人在集中营中遭受监禁和奴隶劳动，还受到当地德国企业的残酷剥削。）
Trotha’s reputation in German Africa, needless to say, made him a hated man both among his white peers back home and among his black enemies who witnessed firsthand his almost unabated mass-murdering spree. That animosity only intensified, however, when a few short months after departing from Namibia he was deployed to the Dark Continent once more to help suppress yet another rising against German colonialism—this time in the Kaiser’s East African provinces, against the Maji Maji in what is now Tanzania. By the rebellion’s end in the summer of 1907—the aftermath of which saw the outbreak of a famine, due to the merciless brutality of German reprisals against the civilian populace—another 250,000–300,000 Africans had fallen on their own stomping grounds by the hand of a white European oppressor.
毋庸置疑，特罗塔在德属非洲的声名让他成为众矢之的——无论是德国国内的白人同胞，还是亲眼目睹他近乎无休无止大屠杀的黑人受害者，都对他深恶痛绝。而在离开纳米比亚仅数月后，他再次被派往“黑暗大陆”，协助镇压另一场反抗德国殖民统治的起义——此次是在德意志帝国的东非行省，对抗如今坦桑尼亚境内的马及马及起义者，这进一步加剧了人们对他的憎恶。1907年夏季起义结束时，由于德国对平民实施无情报复，当地爆发饥荒，又有25万至30万非洲人在自己的故土上死于欧洲白人压迫者之手。
Much less unsurprising, though, was the Nazi generation’s fanatical applause for him three decades later—even going so far as christening a new street in Munich with his name in 1933—while Hitler and his minions put forth their scheme to annihilate the Jews and other “undesirables” across their newfound European empire. (Trotha had already succumbed to typhoid fever in 1920, by then promoted to an infantry general and in the service of the Weimar Republic that supplanted the Kaiserreich after World War One.)
然而，三十年后纳粹一代对他的狂热追捧却不足为奇——1933年，希特勒及其追随者在欧洲推行灭绝犹太人和其他“不受欢迎者”的计划时，甚至在慕尼黑以他的名字命名了一条新街。（特罗塔已于1920年死于伤寒，彼时他已晋升为步兵将军，效力于一战后取代德意志帝国的魏玛共和国。）
Only a decade after Trotha’s heyday came Lettow-Vorbeck’s, at 44 years old. To his Fatherland during the onslaught of the Great War, Lettow-Vorbeck was the Prussian blend of Ancient Rome’s Fabius and Ancient Carthage’s Hannibal from the Second Punic War era—a general who both exploited his opponent’s resources on the one hand and risked battle with that same opponent on the other. To his main adversaries between 1914 and 1918, the British, Belgian, and Portuguese empires, he was a Teutonic Napoleon Bonaparte—another upstart menace to their hard-won standing on the international stage.
特罗塔的鼎盛时期过后仅十年，44岁的莱托-福尔贝克登上历史舞台。一战期间，对祖国而言，他是普鲁士版的古罗马费边与第二次布匿战争时期迦太基汉尼拔的结合体——既善于利用敌人的资源，又敢于与敌人正面交锋。1914至1918年间，对其主要对手英、比、葡三国而言，他是日耳曼版的拿破仑·波拿巴，是对他们来之不易的国际地位构成威胁的又一新兴势力。
A loyal warrior-servant of the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic like Trotha, Lettow-Vorbeck also fought against the Boxers and Hereros during his thirty-year-long military career (1890–1920). (In South-West Africa during the Herero conflict, only a couple battle-inflicted wounds to his left eye and chest prevented him from becoming embroiled in the controversial GENOCIDE.) Like his fellow Prussian and counterpart from Namibia fame, too, Lettow-Vorbeck strongly believed in taking the offensive against the enemy whenever, wherever, and however possible as the way toward victory.
与特罗塔一样，莱托-福尔贝克是德意志帝国与魏玛共和国的忠诚军人，三十年军旅生涯（1890–1920年）中，他也曾参与镇压义和团运动和赫雷罗人起义（在西南非洲的赫雷罗冲突中，他左眼和胸部受战伤，才未卷入那场颇具争议的种族灭绝事件）。和这位来自纳米比亚的普鲁士同胞一样，莱托-福尔贝克坚信，无论何时、何地、以何种方式，主动进攻敌人都是通往胜利的道路。
Given the priorities of Wilhelm’s Germany at the onset of hostilities with the Entente powers in summer 1914, this strategic philosophy of attacking as a means of defense was going to have to be Lettow-Vorbeck’s only option if the endgame was the preservation of the empire that his country, since the time of Bismarck, had fought hard to build for itself. Its feldgrau-clad armies bogged down by heavy fighting on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, its fleet shut out from the rest of the world by Britain’s Royal Navy, its allies just barely holding their own on battlefields elsewhere, and its other colonies in Africa and the Far East susceptible to Allied conquest, the German military was in peril on virtually every corner of the war where it was involved.
1914年夏季，德国与协约国开战之初，鉴于威廉德国的战略重点，若最终目标是保住自俾斯麦时期起德国苦心建立的帝国，这种“以攻为守”的战略理念就成了莱托-福尔贝克的唯一选择。当时，德国身着灰绿色军服的军队在东西两线陷入惨烈苦战，舰队被英国皇家海军封锁，无法与外界通航，盟友在其他战场勉强支撑，非洲和远东的其他殖民地易遭协约国攻占，德国军队在其参与的战争各条战线几乎都陷入险境。
For Lettow-Vorbeck, who had been redeployed back to Africa four months prior to Germany’s entry into the war, no help from Berlin was coming any time soon. Not one soldier. Not one rifle. Not one artillery shell.
莱托-福尔贝克在德国参战前四个月已被调回非洲，而柏林迟迟未能向他提供任何援助——没有一兵一卒，没有一支步枪，也没有一发炮弹。
When the African front opened up soon after the initial shots of war rang out across Europe, Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces initially comprised only 5,000 German regulars and African askaris; by the war’s end, his army would increase to 14,000—more than half of which was made up of native recruits. Against them stood odds of more than twenty to one—300,000 enemy troops drawn from Germany’s adjacent colonial neighbors. The paranoia of geopolitical encirclement that overwhelmed Germans back home had been true as well for Germans on the Dark Continent. British South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, and Uganda, Portuguese Mozambique and Angola, the Belgian Congo, and the sea enveloped Lettow-Vorbeck on all sides.
欧洲战场的枪声打响后不久，非洲战线随即开辟。莱托-福尔贝克最初的兵力仅包括5000名德国正规军和非洲雇佣军；到战争结束时，他的军队已扩充至1.4万人，其中超过一半是土著新兵。他们面临的敌军兵力超过30万，来自德国周边的殖民邻国，兵力对比超过20:1。德国本土民众深陷的地缘政治包围焦虑，对“黑暗大陆”上的德国人而言同样真实——英属南非、罗得西亚、肯尼亚、乌干达，葡属莫桑比克、安哥拉，比属刚果以及海洋，将莱托-福尔贝克团团包围。
Despite everything that made his chances of success appear unviable, though, Lettow-Vorbeck proceeded to achieve the unfathomable. Even with some initial losses—the whole of Germany’s South-West Africa colony fell to the Allied armies by July 1915, and then Kamerun (what is now Cameroon) by March 1916—Lettow-Vorbeck still managed to pin down much of the overwhelming might of the Entente’s European colonial powers, a combined strength that otherwise would have throttled into submission both Germany and its allies in Europe long before 1918.
尽管种种因素都表明他胜算渺茫，但莱托-福尔贝克却取得了令人难以置信的成就。即便初期遭遇失利——1915年7月德属西南非洲全境被协约国军队攻占，1916年3月喀麦隆也沦陷——他仍成功牵制了协约国欧洲殖民列强的大量主力。若这些兵力未被牵制，早在1918年前就可能将德国及其欧洲盟友彻底压制。
The locus of the Schutztruppe’s war took place in German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika). So it was there, in East Africa, that Lettow-Vorbeck made his mark as a commander equal in skill and stamina to the Kaiser’s other brilliant military mind, Paul von Hindenburg.
殖民防卫军的主战场位于德属东非。正是在东非，莱托-福尔贝克凭借出色的军事才能和耐力崭露头角，成为与德皇麾下另一位杰出军事家保罗·冯·兴登堡齐名的指挥官。
Until more than a week after the November 11 Armistice that officially brought the First World War to an end, the German Empire’s last stand in Africa between 1914 and 1918 dragged courageously on, and, what’s more, with several major victories won by Lettow-Vorbeck that left his Allied enemies totally thunderstruck. The greatest of these successes, the Battle of Tanga (November 3–5, 1914) fought near Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast, saw Britain’s first attempt to conquer German East Africa, via amphibious assault, thrown back into the sea. This victory, won against an enemy force nine times larger than his own, saw the British Empire troops (predominantly derived from Raj-governed India) lose as many as 1,190 killed and 2,450 wounded—a stark contrast to the 71 dead and 76 wounded from Lettow-Vorbeck’s army.
1918年11月11日停战协定正式结束一战后，德帝国在1914至1918年间于非洲的最后抵抗仍英勇持续了一周多，且莱托-福尔贝克赢得了数次重大胜利，让协约国敌人震惊不已。其中最辉煌的胜利是1914年11月3日至5日在坦桑尼亚印度洋沿岸附近爆发的坦噶战役——英国首次试图通过两栖进攻征服德属东非，却被击退。这场战役中，他以寡敌众，对阵兵力九倍于己的敌军，最终英军（主要由英属印度军队组成）伤亡惨重，阵亡1190人、受伤2450人，而莱托-福尔贝克的军队仅阵亡71人、受伤76人，形成鲜明对比。
What the Entente’s imperialist members in Africa lost in terms of human life was exacerbated further by the substantial loss of everything necessary for their armies to survive the pressures of modern warfare, from food and medicine to tents and blankets to rifles and Maxim machine guns. Such became the trend of Lettow-Vorbeck’s battles against his European adversaries for the next four years after Tanga: sustaining light casualties while reaping vast spoils.
非洲协约国殖民军队不仅人员伤亡惨重，维持现代战争所需的各类物资——从粮食、药品到帐篷、毛毯，再到步枪和马克沁机枪——也损失巨大，雪上加霜。坦噶战役后的四年里，莱托-福尔贝克与欧洲敌军的作战始终保持这一态势：自身伤亡轻微，却缴获颇丰。
The popular Great War notion of “lions led by donkeys” was never more true in the conflict’s entirety than it was at Tanga. At Tanga, the lions of the defeated British Indian force had met their match against the king of the pride. Lettow-Vorbeck thenceforth became heralded by his soldiers and fellow countrymen back home as the Lowe von Afrika—the Lion of Africa.
一战中广为流传的“驴领导的狮子”这一说法，在整场战争中没有比坦噶战役更贴切的体现了。在坦噶，战败的英属印度军队中的“狮子们”遇到了“狮群之王”。此后，莱托-福尔贝克被麾下士兵和德国同胞誉为“非洲之狮”。
After Tanga, the Lion proceeded to stalk the lands on which he outfought and outran his enemies with almost unchecked momentum.
坦噶战役后，这位“狮子”继续在非洲土地上驰骋，以近乎势不可挡的势头击败并甩开敌人。
One modern-day historian, Hew Strachan, perfectly analyzes Lettow-Vorbeck and his war as follows: “Here, at least, was a German commander who had never been defeated. But he became a legend to his enemies as well. Lettow-Vorbeck led them the length of East Africa from Uganda to the Zambezi [River, encompassing what is now Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique], but they never caught him up. Their incompetence played a large part, but it suited them better to believe that he had conducted a guerrilla campaign. That was nonsense. Lettow-Vorbeck was a Prussian general staff officer, with all the preconceptions that that implies. His . . . askaris . . . were organized in independent field companies, and were trained in bush fighting, but his inclination was to seek battle, not shun it. Cut off from Germany, he was almost entirely reliant on what he could get from within the colony: fighting for fighting’s sake both depleted his ammunition stocks and endangered his irreplaceable European officers and non-commissioned officers. As with [Vice-Admiral Maximilian von] Spee and his cruisers, Lettow’s strength lay in dispersal and in striking against weakness, forgoing the temptation to concentrate for battle. Like Spee, Lettow could not resist the pressures of the traditions in which he had been brought up.
现代历史学家休·斯特拉坎对莱托-福尔贝克及其战争行动的分析十分精辟：“至少，这是一位从未战败的德国指挥官。但他也成了敌人眼中的传奇。莱托-福尔贝克带领他们穿越了东非全境，从乌干达到赞比西河（涵盖如今的赞比亚、安哥拉、纳米比亚、博茨瓦纳、津巴布韦和莫桑比克），但他们始终未能抓获他。敌军的无能是重要原因，但他们更愿意相信他采取的是游击战——这纯属无稽之谈。莱托-福尔贝克是普鲁士总参谋部军官，有着该身份自带的所有固有观念。他的非洲雇佣军被编为独立野外连，接受过丛林作战训练，但他的倾向是主动求战，而非避战。与德国隔绝后，他几乎完全依赖殖民地内部的物资供给：为战而战既会耗尽弹药储备，也会让不可或缺的欧洲军官和士官陷入险境。与马克西米利安·冯·施佩海军中将及其巡洋舰部队一样，莱托的优势在于分散部署、攻击敌军薄弱环节，而非急于集中兵力决战。和施佩一样，莱托也无法摆脱自身成长所遵循的军事传统带来的压力。
A true guerrilla strategy would have rested the defence of German East Africa on the opportunities for fomenting revolution in the adjacent colonies of the enemy. The British colonial service was depleted by the need for its younger officials to join the armed forces, and the Belgians to the west and the Portuguese to the south had the reputation of being the most bloodthirsty and tyrannical of all the European colonial powers. Lettow-Vorbeck did not exploit this chance: he saw the fighting as a matter between armies in the field and the territories as simply ground over which they operated.
真正的游击战略本应借助在敌方邻近殖民地煽动革命的机会来保卫德属东非。英国殖民部门因年轻官员需参军而人手短缺，西边的比利时人和南边的葡萄牙人则被誉为所有欧洲殖民列强中最嗜血、最残暴的。但莱托-福尔贝克并未利用这一机会——他将战争视为战场上军队之间的较量，而殖民地仅被当作作战的场地。
By the same token, he never acknowledged—and perhaps never realized—how much he owed to the civil administration of German East Africa. Although there were certainly areas of the colony which gave support to the British forces, the Germans never had to cope with insurrection in their rear. The German governor, Heinrich Schnee, was not enthusiastic about the war, which he saw as undermining the progressive effects of colonisation. Initially, he embraced the Congo Act [of 1885]. For Lettow-Vorbeck, German East Africa fulfilled a purely military function: to draw British troops off from the main theatre in Europe. This could never be accomplished by neutrality. Lettow-Vorbeck therefore saw himself as constantly at odds with Schnee. In reality, he could never have lasted as long in the field as he did without the efforts of the civil administration.”
同理，他从未承认——或许也从未意识到——自己有多依赖德属东非的民政部门。尽管殖民地部分地区确实支持英军，但德军从未面临后方叛乱的困扰。德国总督海因里希·施内并不热衷于这场战争，他认为战争破坏了殖民带来的“进步效应”，最初还支持1885年《刚果法案》。而对莱托-福尔贝克而言，德属东非仅承担纯粹的军事职能：牵制英军，使其无法投入欧洲主战场。中立绝不可能实现这一目标，因此莱托-福尔贝克认为自己与施内始终处于对立状态。但事实上，若没有民政部门的支持，他绝不可能在战场上坚持如此之久。”[1]
Ultimately, the enemy blood that Lettow-Vorbeck spilled and the enemy resources that he swiped or destroyed achieved little in preventing the Kaiserreich’s doom. No amount of battles waged, of victories won, or defeats inflicted in faraway Africa helped conquer the fortress city of Verdun, nor held back the onrushing Allied tanks at Amiens, nor saved the routing vestiges of the German Army in the Argonne.
归根结底，莱托-福尔贝克流的敌人鲜血、掠夺或摧毁的敌人资源，在阻止德意志帝国覆灭方面收效甚微。在遥远非洲发动的无数战役、赢得的诸多胜利、给敌人造成的多次失败，既未能攻克凡尔登要塞，也未能阻挡协约国坦克在亚眠的猛攻，更未能挽救在阿贡森林溃散的德国残军。
To the colonized native peoples that found themselves caught in the grips of the war below the Sahara, meanwhile, Lettow-Vorbeck’s four-year reign over the battlefields of East Africa was not something to be celebrated as a flicker of hope for their liberation from what Kipling espoused at the turn of the century as “the white man’s burden.”
与此同时，对深陷撒哈拉以南战争泥潭的殖民地土著民族而言，莱托-福尔贝克在东非战场四年的征战，绝非他们摆脱吉卜林在世纪之交所宣扬的“白人的负担”、获得解放的一线希望，不值得庆贺。
Instead, Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaigns fomented death, destruction, and suffering of torrential magnitude. His raids into British, Portuguese, and Belgian territory produced horrendous results for the noncombatants in those territories as their farms were stripped bare of crops, livestock, and other essentials for human sustenance. German East Africa, too, faced severe repercussions as its lands and peoples were gradually swallowed up by Allied counteroffensives. Famine and disease, consequently, became rampant when such food shortages were worsened by the rain deficiency that suddenly plagued the war-torn sub-Sahara.
相反，莱托-福尔贝克的军事行动引发了大规模的死亡、破坏和苦难。他对英、葡、比属领土的突袭，给当地平民带来了可怕后果——农场的作物、牲畜及其他生活必需品被洗劫一空。随着协约国反攻逐渐吞噬德属东非的土地和人民，该地区也遭遇了严重冲击。加之战乱后的撒哈拉以南地区突然遭遇干旱，粮食短缺雪上加霜，饥荒和疾病随之肆虐。
By the time Lettow-Vorbeck and his Schutztruppe finally capitulated on November 25, 1918, civilian casualties in East Africa had reached 365,000—far exceeding those incurred in Namibia at Trotha’s hand. By the outset of 1919, millions more had perished from the “Spanish influenza” pandemic whose rapid expansion due to the war’s global outreach proved as decisive on the African savanna as it did in the trenches of France.
1918年11月25日，莱托-福尔贝克及其殖民防卫军最终投降时，东非平民伤亡已达36.5万人——远超特罗塔在纳米比亚造成的伤亡。到1919年初，又有数百万人死于“西班牙流感”大流行。这场疫情因战争的全球性传播而迅速扩散，在非洲草原造成的影响，与在法国战壕中同样致命。
A German doctor in Lettow-Vorbeck’s army during the war perhaps said it best when reflecting on the Lion’s tussle with the giants of Western imperialism in Africa: “Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation. We are no longer the agents of culture, our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years’ War.”
战争期间，莱托-福尔贝克军中的一位德国医生在反思这位“狮子”与西方帝国主义巨头在非洲的较量时，或许说得最为贴切：“我们身后留下的是荒芜的田地、被洗劫的仓库，以及即将到来的饥荒。我们不再是文明的使者，我们的足迹遍布死亡、掠夺和被遗弃的村庄，就像三十年战争中我们与敌军的推进轨迹一样。”
After the war, nonetheless, Lettow-Vorbeck, like Trotha before him, returned to a Germany that, even while in the grips of revolution, greeted him with open arms. (Lettow-Vorbeck later took up a commmand of Freikorps troops to help quell the pro-communist Spartacist Rising in January 1919, and then played yet another role in combating the failed Kapp Putsch against the Weimar government the following year.) Even twenty years after his post-Armistice surrender, despite his intimate history with the black askaris formerly under his command during the Great War, and despite his adamant and vocal distaste for Hitler and everything he and his regime stood for, Lettow-Vorbeck—again, like Trotha—became widely idolized by the Nazis.
然而战后，与此前的特罗塔一样，莱托-福尔贝克回到了德国——即便当时德国正处于革命动荡中，仍对他敞开双臂。（莱托-福尔贝克后来于1919年1月指挥自由军团，协助镇压亲共产主义的斯巴达克同盟起义；次年，他又参与挫败了反对魏玛政府的卡普政变。）即便在停战后投降二十年后，尽管他与一战期间麾下的黑人雇佣军渊源深厚，且公开强烈厌恶希特勒及其政权所代表的一切，莱托-福尔贝克仍像特罗塔一样，被纳粹广泛奉为偶像。
All that separates him from Trotha, though, is Lettow-Vorbeck’s unflagging personal refusal to associate himself with the Third Reich in any way, shape, or form. Consequently, his good standing in today’s Germany can be easily pointed out by the number of streets which still bear his name.
不过，莱托-福尔贝克与特罗塔的不同之处在于，他始终坚决拒绝以任何形式与第三帝国产生关联。因此，如今德国仍有不少以他名字命名的街道，这也足以证明他在德国的良好声誉。
In Africa, however, like the blue-blooded executioner of the Hereros, the so-called “Lion” retains a notoriety that has far outlived Germany’s days as a colonial power on the Dark Continent. And the ongoing repercussions from the West’s exploitation of that part of the world—long after European colonialism there met its final demise—will assuredly not permit Lettow-Vorbeck’s remembrance (and Trotha’s) to go away so easily among the descendants of those he caused the sort of far-flung and prolonged misery that he did.
然而在非洲，这位所谓的“狮子”与那位赫雷罗人的贵族刽子手（特罗塔）一样，其恶名远未随着德国在“黑暗大陆”殖民统治的终结而消逝。即便欧洲殖民主义在非洲早已消亡，但西方对该地区的剥削所产生的持续影响，注定会让那些因他而遭受深远且长久苦难的人们的后裔，难以轻易忘却莱托-福尔贝克（以及特罗塔）。
评论翻译
Richard Wang Knows Chinese 1y
理查德·王 懂中文，1年前回答
There are many people like this in history, let me give a few examples.
历史上这样的人物有很多，我举几个例子。
Ma Yuan, General Fubo
马援 伏波将军
General Ma was a meritorious general during the founding period of the Eastern Han Dynasty, and his achievements spread across the front lines of the empire in all directions. One of his achievements is that he easily suppressed the rebellion of Trung sisters in northern Vietnam, and took the heads of these two sisters back to Luoyang as proof of merit. The Trung sisters are regarded as national heroes by Vietnamese, and souvenirs such as temples commemorating them can be seen all over Vietnam.
马将军是东汉开国时期的功臣名将，功绩遍布帝国四方前线。他的功绩之一是轻松平定了越南北部的征氏姐妹起义，并将二人的首级带回洛阳作为军功凭证。征氏姐妹被越南人奉为民族英雄，越南各地都能见到纪念她们的庙宇等纪念场所。
Zhangsun Sheng, the Destroyer of Turks
长孙晟 突厥终结者
Zhangsun Sheng is an outstanding diplomat and spy. He utilized his excellent diplomatic skills to successfully create and intensify internal conflicts within the Turkic Empire, leading to its successful division and never having a chance for reunification. During the long period of turmoil south of the Great Wall from the Northern Zhou Dynasty to the Sui Dynasty to the early Tang Dynasty, the Turks were instigated by him and fell into a long civil war, with little opportunity to benefit from the turmoil south of the Great Wall. He can be considered a nightmare for the Turks, but what is more remembered is his daughter - the Empress of Emperor Taizong of Tang, and his son, Changsun Wuji, the last representative of the Guanlong aristocratic group.
长孙晟是杰出的外交家与间谍。他凭借出色的外交手腕，成功制造并加剧了突厥帝国内部的矛盾，使其顺利分裂且再也没有统一的机会。从北周至隋朝再到唐初，长城以南长期处于动荡之中，而突厥在他的挑拨下陷入长期内战，几乎没有机会从长城以南的动荡中获利。对突厥人来说，他堪称噩梦，但人们更铭记的是他的女儿——唐太宗的皇后，以及儿子——关陇贵族集团的末代代表长孙无忌。
Oliver Groom B.A. in Military History and Wars & National Security Studies, Rogers State University (Graduated 2018) upxed 6y
奥利弗·格鲁姆 罗杰斯州立大学，军事历史与战争学、国家安全研究学士（2018年毕业），6年前回答
Since few other answers have done so, I will devote mine to a couple notorious figures from modern German history.
由于其他回答很少涉及，我将聚焦现代德国历史上的几位知名人物。
No, I am not alluding to the likes of Hitler, Himmler, or any of the obvious candidates from the Nazi Reich, men who ultimately became loved by their Aryan countrymen but despised by those non-Aryans they persecuted both within the confines of the Second World War and without.
不，我指的不是希特勒、希姆莱这类纳粹德国的典型人物——他们最终受到雅利安同胞的爱戴，却遭到在二战期间及战前遭受其迫害的非雅利安人的憎恶。
I am alluding, instead, to earlier Germans whose actions—much like those of their Nazi successors—won them admiration from those they considered their racial equals and indignation from those they considered their racial inferiors.
相反，我指的是更早时期的德国人，他们的行为与后来的纳粹分子相似：赢得了他们眼中“种族平等者”的钦佩，却激起了他们眼中“种族劣等者”的愤慨。
I am also not referring to Europe, however. Even long before the crimes of Der Fuhrer and his genocidal hirelings, the German track record for heinous treatment of other peoples on the Continent has been well-founded in the pre-Holocaust annals of history. (For example, the “Rape of Belgium” in August 1914, during the opening weeks of World War One.)
但我谈论的也不是欧洲。早在元首及其种族灭绝爪牙犯下罪行之前，德国在欧洲大陆上虐待其他民族的恶劣记录，在大屠杀之前的历史记载中就已有据可查（例如1914年8月一战初期的“比利时暴行”）。
Rather, I am concentrating on a part of the world—sub-Saharan Africa—where the seeds of German aggression were sown at horrific expense to the indigenous peoples, yet the efforts of leaders, military and political, who stood devoted to ensuring Germany’s “place in the sun” emerged from the bloody wake of their atrocities as the most vaunted of their compatriots.
相反，我将聚焦世界的一个地区——撒哈拉以南非洲。德国在那里播下了侵略的种子，给土著民族带来了惨痛代价，但那些致力于确保德国“阳光下的地盘”的军事和政治领袖，却在其暴行造成的血腥后果中，成为同胞眼中最受赞誉的人物。
No one deserved their positions of infamy in pre-Nazi German-African history more than these two men. Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha and Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck
在纳粹之前的德属非洲历史上，没有谁比这两个人更该背负恶名——阿德里安·迪特里希·洛塔尔·冯·特罗塔与保罗·埃米尔·冯·莱托-福尔贝克。
Trotha, at 56 years old, became the center of Teutonic colonial policy as the Reichskommissar of the German Empire’s South-West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1884–1919). A lifelong soldier since his late teens, having seen action from the Austro-Prussian War (1866) to the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), under his governorship from June 1904 to November 1905, the imperial forces of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s regime—the Schutztruppe—brutally stamped their jackboot on the indigenous Hereros in what is now Namibia. When he first set foot on the “Dark Continent,” the concurrent war between the white German settlers and the black natives had been raging sporadically for a year, and faring abysmally for the Schutztruppe. The Herero insurgents, allied with the Nama and San tribes, altogether numbered well into the tens of thousands; the Germans, until Trotha’s arrival in Namibia, were vastly outmanned with a total force of scarcely 2,000. (Before the rebellion was finally put down, the Schutztruppe’s ranks swelled to approximately ten times its initial strength.)
56岁的特罗塔出任德意志帝国西南非洲（德属西南非洲，1884–1919年）总督，成为日耳曼殖民政策的核心人物。他十几岁后期便投身军旅，一生征战，经历了普奥战争（1866年）至中国义和团运动（1900年）等诸多战役。1904年6月至1905年11月任职期间，威廉二世政权的帝国军队——（殖民防卫军）——在如今的纳米比亚境内，对土著赫雷罗人实施了残暴镇压。他初抵这片“黑暗大陆”时，德国白人定居者与黑人土著之间的战争已零星爆发一年，殖民防卫军战况惨淡。赫雷罗起义者与纳马族、桑族结盟，总人数达数万人；而在特罗塔抵达纳米比亚之前，德国军队兵力严重不足，总数仅约2000人（叛乱最终被平定前，殖民防卫军兵力已扩充至初始规模的近十倍）。
What followed Trotha’s commandeering of the military situation in German South-West Africa was essentially a prophesying microcosm of the Nazis’ Holocaust that slew millions throughout Europe over the twelve years from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to his death and the subsequent collapse of his regime in 1945. So ruthless was Trotha’s counterinsurgency approach that, in October 1904, he defied his own government back in Berlin by implementing a personal decree—the Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order)—to his soldiers for all Hereros, armed and unarmed, to be punished collectively. The men were to be shot dead; the women and children exiled to the virtually arid deserts of Namib and Kalahari (the former situated along Namibia’s Atlantic coastline, the latter deep within Namibia’s interior), sentencing them also to certain death.
特罗塔掌控德属西南非洲军事局势后，其行径本质上是纳粹大屠杀的预言性缩影——1933年希特勒上台至1945年其死亡及政权崩溃的十二年间，纳粹在欧洲屠杀了数百万人。特罗塔的反叛乱手段极为残酷，1904年10月，他违抗柏林政府的指令，私自颁布“灭绝令”，命令士兵对所有赫雷罗人（无论武装与否）实施集体惩罚：男性一律射杀，妇女和儿童被放逐至几乎寸草不生的纳米布沙漠与卡拉哈里沙漠（前者位于纳米比亚大西洋沿岸，后者深入纳米比亚内陆），无异于判处他们死刑。
At the Battle of Waterberg two months earlier, Trotha put the beginnings of his anti-guerrilla strategy into fruition. Trapping the Hereros—some 60,000—on three sides between a 150-mile-long wall of German rifles, machine guns, and artillery on the one side and the westernmost rim of the Kalahari on the other, he mandated to his soldiers that all accessible water holes be contaminated and any Herero who dared to break out of the encirclement be labeled fair game for the muzzles of the Schutztruppe. (Trotha’s small army after that single day of fighting, as in the rebellion as a whole, sustained comparatively light casualties.)
两个月前的沃特伯格战役中，特罗塔初步践行了其反游击战略。他将约6万名赫雷罗人三面围困：一侧是长达150英里、配备步枪、机枪和火炮的德军防线，另一侧是卡拉哈里沙漠最西缘。他命令士兵污染所有可获取的水源，并规定任何胆敢突围的赫雷罗人都可被殖民防卫军随意射杀。（特罗塔的小股部队在当天的战斗中，以及整个叛乱期间，伤亡都相对轻微。）
Even when the Kaiserreich’s uppermost echelons of political and military leadership caught wind of the extermination policy and demanded for its rescission, Trotha continued to walk over his superiors back in faraway Germany. Those Hereros that managed to survive Trotha’s wholesale purge against their people were ultimately sent to do forced labor in concentration camps—by 1904 not a novelty to the contemporary world, as the Spaniards in Cuba and the British in South Africa clearly illustrated less than a decade previous. Even so, by the time the Prussian lieutenant general was recalled to Berlin, the sword of Herero resistance had been irreparably broken.
即便德意志帝国的最高军政领导层得知这一灭绝政策并要求撤销，特罗塔仍无视远在德国的上级指令。侥幸在特罗塔大规模清洗中存活的赫雷罗人，最终被送往集中营服苦役——到1904年，集中营已非新鲜事物，不到十年前西班牙人在古巴、英国人在南非就已设立过类似场所。即便如此，当这位普鲁士中将被召回柏林时，赫雷罗人的抵抗已被彻底瓦解，再无复原可能。
Thanks to Trotha’s contributions to military victory, moreover, the next three years for the defeated Herero amounted to Germany’s—and the twentieth century’s—first experiment with GENOCIDE. In all, upwards of 100,000 Hereros and 10,000 of their Nama comrades lay dead across the Kaiserreich’s playground of wanton slaughter. So devastating was this indiscriminate treatment under Trotha’s purview that in 1911, the census taken in Namibia that year estimated the Herero population at 15,000. (Of the roughly 19,000 Nama that took part in the rebellion, the other 9,000 that survived faced a life of imprisonment and slave labor in the camps as well as harsh exploitation by the local German businesses.)
此外，得益于特罗塔的军事“功绩”，战败后的赫雷罗人在接下来的三年中，遭遇了德国乃至二十世纪的首次种族灭绝实验。在德意志帝国这片肆意屠杀的“乐园”中，共有超过10万名赫雷罗人和1万名纳马盟友丧生。特罗塔主导的无差别迫害破坏力极强，1911年纳米比亚人口普查显示，赫雷罗人仅余1.5万人。（参与叛乱的纳马人约1.9万人，幸存的9000人在集中营中遭受监禁和奴隶劳动，还受到当地德国企业的残酷剥削。）
Trotha’s reputation in German Africa, needless to say, made him a hated man both among his white peers back home and among his black enemies who witnessed firsthand his almost unabated mass-murdering spree. That animosity only intensified, however, when a few short months after departing from Namibia he was deployed to the Dark Continent once more to help suppress yet another rising against German colonialism—this time in the Kaiser’s East African provinces, against the Maji Maji in what is now Tanzania. By the rebellion’s end in the summer of 1907—the aftermath of which saw the outbreak of a famine, due to the merciless brutality of German reprisals against the civilian populace—another 250,000–300,000 Africans had fallen on their own stomping grounds by the hand of a white European oppressor.
毋庸置疑，特罗塔在德属非洲的声名让他成为众矢之的——无论是德国国内的白人同胞，还是亲眼目睹他近乎无休无止大屠杀的黑人受害者，都对他深恶痛绝。而在离开纳米比亚仅数月后，他再次被派往“黑暗大陆”，协助镇压另一场反抗德国殖民统治的起义——此次是在德意志帝国的东非行省，对抗如今坦桑尼亚境内的马及马及起义者，这进一步加剧了人们对他的憎恶。1907年夏季起义结束时，由于德国对平民实施无情报复，当地爆发饥荒，又有25万至30万非洲人在自己的故土上死于欧洲白人压迫者之手。
Much less unsurprising, though, was the Nazi generation’s fanatical applause for him three decades later—even going so far as christening a new street in Munich with his name in 1933—while Hitler and his minions put forth their scheme to annihilate the Jews and other “undesirables” across their newfound European empire. (Trotha had already succumbed to typhoid fever in 1920, by then promoted to an infantry general and in the service of the Weimar Republic that supplanted the Kaiserreich after World War One.)
然而，三十年后纳粹一代对他的狂热追捧却不足为奇——1933年，希特勒及其追随者在欧洲推行灭绝犹太人和其他“不受欢迎者”的计划时，甚至在慕尼黑以他的名字命名了一条新街。（特罗塔已于1920年死于伤寒，彼时他已晋升为步兵将军，效力于一战后取代德意志帝国的魏玛共和国。）
Only a decade after Trotha’s heyday came Lettow-Vorbeck’s, at 44 years old. To his Fatherland during the onslaught of the Great War, Lettow-Vorbeck was the Prussian blend of Ancient Rome’s Fabius and Ancient Carthage’s Hannibal from the Second Punic War era—a general who both exploited his opponent’s resources on the one hand and risked battle with that same opponent on the other. To his main adversaries between 1914 and 1918, the British, Belgian, and Portuguese empires, he was a Teutonic Napoleon Bonaparte—another upstart menace to their hard-won standing on the international stage.
特罗塔的鼎盛时期过后仅十年，44岁的莱托-福尔贝克登上历史舞台。一战期间，对祖国而言，他是普鲁士版的古罗马费边与第二次布匿战争时期迦太基汉尼拔的结合体——既善于利用敌人的资源，又敢于与敌人正面交锋。1914至1918年间，对其主要对手英、比、葡三国而言，他是日耳曼版的拿破仑·波拿巴，是对他们来之不易的国际地位构成威胁的又一新兴势力。
A loyal warrior-servant of the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic like Trotha, Lettow-Vorbeck also fought against the Boxers and Hereros during his thirty-year-long military career (1890–1920). (In South-West Africa during the Herero conflict, only a couple battle-inflicted wounds to his left eye and chest prevented him from becoming embroiled in the controversial GENOCIDE.) Like his fellow Prussian and counterpart from Namibia fame, too, Lettow-Vorbeck strongly believed in taking the offensive against the enemy whenever, wherever, and however possible as the way toward victory.
与特罗塔一样，莱托-福尔贝克是德意志帝国与魏玛共和国的忠诚军人，三十年军旅生涯（1890–1920年）中，他也曾参与镇压义和团运动和赫雷罗人起义（在西南非洲的赫雷罗冲突中，他左眼和胸部受战伤，才未卷入那场颇具争议的种族灭绝事件）。和这位来自纳米比亚的普鲁士同胞一样，莱托-福尔贝克坚信，无论何时、何地、以何种方式，主动进攻敌人都是通往胜利的道路。
Given the priorities of Wilhelm’s Germany at the onset of hostilities with the Entente powers in summer 1914, this strategic philosophy of attacking as a means of defense was going to have to be Lettow-Vorbeck’s only option if the endgame was the preservation of the empire that his country, since the time of Bismarck, had fought hard to build for itself. Its feldgrau-clad armies bogged down by heavy fighting on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, its fleet shut out from the rest of the world by Britain’s Royal Navy, its allies just barely holding their own on battlefields elsewhere, and its other colonies in Africa and the Far East susceptible to Allied conquest, the German military was in peril on virtually every corner of the war where it was involved.
1914年夏季，德国与协约国开战之初，鉴于威廉德国的战略重点，若最终目标是保住自俾斯麦时期起德国苦心建立的帝国，这种“以攻为守”的战略理念就成了莱托-福尔贝克的唯一选择。当时，德国身着灰绿色军服的军队在东西两线陷入惨烈苦战，舰队被英国皇家海军封锁，无法与外界通航，盟友在其他战场勉强支撑，非洲和远东的其他殖民地易遭协约国攻占，德国军队在其参与的战争各条战线几乎都陷入险境。
For Lettow-Vorbeck, who had been redeployed back to Africa four months prior to Germany’s entry into the war, no help from Berlin was coming any time soon. Not one soldier. Not one rifle. Not one artillery shell.
莱托-福尔贝克在德国参战前四个月已被调回非洲，而柏林迟迟未能向他提供任何援助——没有一兵一卒，没有一支步枪，也没有一发炮弹。
When the African front opened up soon after the initial shots of war rang out across Europe, Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces initially comprised only 5,000 German regulars and African askaris; by the war’s end, his army would increase to 14,000—more than half of which was made up of native recruits. Against them stood odds of more than twenty to one—300,000 enemy troops drawn from Germany’s adjacent colonial neighbors. The paranoia of geopolitical encirclement that overwhelmed Germans back home had been true as well for Germans on the Dark Continent. British South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, and Uganda, Portuguese Mozambique and Angola, the Belgian Congo, and the sea enveloped Lettow-Vorbeck on all sides.
欧洲战场的枪声打响后不久，非洲战线随即开辟。莱托-福尔贝克最初的兵力仅包括5000名德国正规军和非洲雇佣军；到战争结束时，他的军队已扩充至1.4万人，其中超过一半是土著新兵。他们面临的敌军兵力超过30万，来自德国周边的殖民邻国，兵力对比超过20:1。德国本土民众深陷的地缘政治包围焦虑，对“黑暗大陆”上的德国人而言同样真实——英属南非、罗得西亚、肯尼亚、乌干达，葡属莫桑比克、安哥拉，比属刚果以及海洋，将莱托-福尔贝克团团包围。
Despite everything that made his chances of success appear unviable, though, Lettow-Vorbeck proceeded to achieve the unfathomable. Even with some initial losses—the whole of Germany’s South-West Africa colony fell to the Allied armies by July 1915, and then Kamerun (what is now Cameroon) by March 1916—Lettow-Vorbeck still managed to pin down much of the overwhelming might of the Entente’s European colonial powers, a combined strength that otherwise would have throttled into submission both Germany and its allies in Europe long before 1918.
尽管种种因素都表明他胜算渺茫，但莱托-福尔贝克却取得了令人难以置信的成就。即便初期遭遇失利——1915年7月德属西南非洲全境被协约国军队攻占，1916年3月喀麦隆也沦陷——他仍成功牵制了协约国欧洲殖民列强的大量主力。若这些兵力未被牵制，早在1918年前就可能将德国及其欧洲盟友彻底压制。
The locus of the Schutztruppe’s war took place in German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika). So it was there, in East Africa, that Lettow-Vorbeck made his mark as a commander equal in skill and stamina to the Kaiser’s other brilliant military mind, Paul von Hindenburg.
殖民防卫军的主战场位于德属东非。正是在东非，莱托-福尔贝克凭借出色的军事才能和耐力崭露头角，成为与德皇麾下另一位杰出军事家保罗·冯·兴登堡齐名的指挥官。
Until more than a week after the November 11 Armistice that officially brought the First World War to an end, the German Empire’s last stand in Africa between 1914 and 1918 dragged courageously on, and, what’s more, with several major victories won by Lettow-Vorbeck that left his Allied enemies totally thunderstruck. The greatest of these successes, the Battle of Tanga (November 3–5, 1914) fought near Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast, saw Britain’s first attempt to conquer German East Africa, via amphibious assault, thrown back into the sea. This victory, won against an enemy force nine times larger than his own, saw the British Empire troops (predominantly derived from Raj-governed India) lose as many as 1,190 killed and 2,450 wounded—a stark contrast to the 71 dead and 76 wounded from Lettow-Vorbeck’s army.
1918年11月11日停战协定正式结束一战后，德帝国在1914至1918年间于非洲的最后抵抗仍英勇持续了一周多，且莱托-福尔贝克赢得了数次重大胜利，让协约国敌人震惊不已。其中最辉煌的胜利是1914年11月3日至5日在坦桑尼亚印度洋沿岸附近爆发的坦噶战役——英国首次试图通过两栖进攻征服德属东非，却被击退。这场战役中，他以寡敌众，对阵兵力九倍于己的敌军，最终英军（主要由英属印度军队组成）伤亡惨重，阵亡1190人、受伤2450人，而莱托-福尔贝克的军队仅阵亡71人、受伤76人，形成鲜明对比。
What the Entente’s imperialist members in Africa lost in terms of human life was exacerbated further by the substantial loss of everything necessary for their armies to survive the pressures of modern warfare, from food and medicine to tents and blankets to rifles and Maxim machine guns. Such became the trend of Lettow-Vorbeck’s battles against his European adversaries for the next four years after Tanga: sustaining light casualties while reaping vast spoils.
非洲协约国殖民军队不仅人员伤亡惨重，维持现代战争所需的各类物资——从粮食、药品到帐篷、毛毯，再到步枪和马克沁机枪——也损失巨大，雪上加霜。坦噶战役后的四年里，莱托-福尔贝克与欧洲敌军的作战始终保持这一态势：自身伤亡轻微，却缴获颇丰。
The popular Great War notion of “lions led by donkeys” was never more true in the conflict’s entirety than it was at Tanga. At Tanga, the lions of the defeated British Indian force had met their match against the king of the pride. Lettow-Vorbeck thenceforth became heralded by his soldiers and fellow countrymen back home as the Lowe von Afrika—the Lion of Africa.
一战中广为流传的“驴领导的狮子”这一说法，在整场战争中没有比坦噶战役更贴切的体现了。在坦噶，战败的英属印度军队中的“狮子们”遇到了“狮群之王”。此后，莱托-福尔贝克被麾下士兵和德国同胞誉为“非洲之狮”。
After Tanga, the Lion proceeded to stalk the lands on which he outfought and outran his enemies with almost unchecked momentum.
坦噶战役后，这位“狮子”继续在非洲土地上驰骋，以近乎势不可挡的势头击败并甩开敌人。
One modern-day historian, Hew Strachan, perfectly analyzes Lettow-Vorbeck and his war as follows: “Here, at least, was a German commander who had never been defeated. But he became a legend to his enemies as well. Lettow-Vorbeck led them the length of East Africa from Uganda to the Zambezi [River, encompassing what is now Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique], but they never caught him up. Their incompetence played a large part, but it suited them better to believe that he had conducted a guerrilla campaign. That was nonsense. Lettow-Vorbeck was a Prussian general staff officer, with all the preconceptions that that implies. His . . . askaris . . . were organized in independent field companies, and were trained in bush fighting, but his inclination was to seek battle, not shun it. Cut off from Germany, he was almost entirely reliant on what he could get from within the colony: fighting for fighting’s sake both depleted his ammunition stocks and endangered his irreplaceable European officers and non-commissioned officers. As with [Vice-Admiral Maximilian von] Spee and his cruisers, Lettow’s strength lay in dispersal and in striking against weakness, forgoing the temptation to concentrate for battle. Like Spee, Lettow could not resist the pressures of the traditions in which he had been brought up.
现代历史学家休·斯特拉坎对莱托-福尔贝克及其战争行动的分析十分精辟：“至少，这是一位从未战败的德国指挥官。但他也成了敌人眼中的传奇。莱托-福尔贝克带领他们穿越了东非全境，从乌干达到赞比西河（涵盖如今的赞比亚、安哥拉、纳米比亚、博茨瓦纳、津巴布韦和莫桑比克），但他们始终未能抓获他。敌军的无能是重要原因，但他们更愿意相信他采取的是游击战——这纯属无稽之谈。莱托-福尔贝克是普鲁士总参谋部军官，有着该身份自带的所有固有观念。他的非洲雇佣军被编为独立野外连，接受过丛林作战训练，但他的倾向是主动求战，而非避战。与德国隔绝后，他几乎完全依赖殖民地内部的物资供给：为战而战既会耗尽弹药储备，也会让不可或缺的欧洲军官和士官陷入险境。与马克西米利安·冯·施佩海军中将及其巡洋舰部队一样，莱托的优势在于分散部署、攻击敌军薄弱环节，而非急于集中兵力决战。和施佩一样，莱托也无法摆脱自身成长所遵循的军事传统带来的压力。
A true guerrilla strategy would have rested the defence of German East Africa on the opportunities for fomenting revolution in the adjacent colonies of the enemy. The British colonial service was depleted by the need for its younger officials to join the armed forces, and the Belgians to the west and the Portuguese to the south had the reputation of being the most bloodthirsty and tyrannical of all the European colonial powers. Lettow-Vorbeck did not exploit this chance: he saw the fighting as a matter between armies in the field and the territories as simply ground over which they operated.
真正的游击战略本应借助在敌方邻近殖民地煽动革命的机会来保卫德属东非。英国殖民部门因年轻官员需参军而人手短缺，西边的比利时人和南边的葡萄牙人则被誉为所有欧洲殖民列强中最嗜血、最残暴的。但莱托-福尔贝克并未利用这一机会——他将战争视为战场上军队之间的较量，而殖民地仅被当作作战的场地。
By the same token, he never acknowledged—and perhaps never realized—how much he owed to the civil administration of German East Africa. Although there were certainly areas of the colony which gave support to the British forces, the Germans never had to cope with insurrection in their rear. The German governor, Heinrich Schnee, was not enthusiastic about the war, which he saw as undermining the progressive effects of colonisation. Initially, he embraced the Congo Act [of 1885]. For Lettow-Vorbeck, German East Africa fulfilled a purely military function: to draw British troops off from the main theatre in Europe. This could never be accomplished by neutrality. Lettow-Vorbeck therefore saw himself as constantly at odds with Schnee. In reality, he could never have lasted as long in the field as he did without the efforts of the civil administration.”
同理，他从未承认——或许也从未意识到——自己有多依赖德属东非的民政部门。尽管殖民地部分地区确实支持英军，但德军从未面临后方叛乱的困扰。德国总督海因里希·施内并不热衷于这场战争，他认为战争破坏了殖民带来的“进步效应”，最初还支持1885年《刚果法案》。而对莱托-福尔贝克而言，德属东非仅承担纯粹的军事职能：牵制英军，使其无法投入欧洲主战场。中立绝不可能实现这一目标，因此莱托-福尔贝克认为自己与施内始终处于对立状态。但事实上，若没有民政部门的支持，他绝不可能在战场上坚持如此之久。”[1]
Ultimately, the enemy blood that Lettow-Vorbeck spilled and the enemy resources that he swiped or destroyed achieved little in preventing the Kaiserreich’s doom. No amount of battles waged, of victories won, or defeats inflicted in faraway Africa helped conquer the fortress city of Verdun, nor held back the onrushing Allied tanks at Amiens, nor saved the routing vestiges of the German Army in the Argonne.
归根结底，莱托-福尔贝克流的敌人鲜血、掠夺或摧毁的敌人资源，在阻止德意志帝国覆灭方面收效甚微。在遥远非洲发动的无数战役、赢得的诸多胜利、给敌人造成的多次失败，既未能攻克凡尔登要塞，也未能阻挡协约国坦克在亚眠的猛攻，更未能挽救在阿贡森林溃散的德国残军。
To the colonized native peoples that found themselves caught in the grips of the war below the Sahara, meanwhile, Lettow-Vorbeck’s four-year reign over the battlefields of East Africa was not something to be celebrated as a flicker of hope for their liberation from what Kipling espoused at the turn of the century as “the white man’s burden.”
与此同时，对深陷撒哈拉以南战争泥潭的殖民地土著民族而言，莱托-福尔贝克在东非战场四年的征战，绝非他们摆脱吉卜林在世纪之交所宣扬的“白人的负担”、获得解放的一线希望，不值得庆贺。
Instead, Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaigns fomented death, destruction, and suffering of torrential magnitude. His raids into British, Portuguese, and Belgian territory produced horrendous results for the noncombatants in those territories as their farms were stripped bare of crops, livestock, and other essentials for human sustenance. German East Africa, too, faced severe repercussions as its lands and peoples were gradually swallowed up by Allied counteroffensives. Famine and disease, consequently, became rampant when such food shortages were worsened by the rain deficiency that suddenly plagued the war-torn sub-Sahara.
相反，莱托-福尔贝克的军事行动引发了大规模的死亡、破坏和苦难。他对英、葡、比属领土的突袭，给当地平民带来了可怕后果——农场的作物、牲畜及其他生活必需品被洗劫一空。随着协约国反攻逐渐吞噬德属东非的土地和人民，该地区也遭遇了严重冲击。加之战乱后的撒哈拉以南地区突然遭遇干旱，粮食短缺雪上加霜，饥荒和疾病随之肆虐。
By the time Lettow-Vorbeck and his Schutztruppe finally capitulated on November 25, 1918, civilian casualties in East Africa had reached 365,000—far exceeding those incurred in Namibia at Trotha’s hand. By the outset of 1919, millions more had perished from the “Spanish influenza” pandemic whose rapid expansion due to the war’s global outreach proved as decisive on the African savanna as it did in the trenches of France.
1918年11月25日，莱托-福尔贝克及其殖民防卫军最终投降时，东非平民伤亡已达36.5万人——远超特罗塔在纳米比亚造成的伤亡。到1919年初，又有数百万人死于“西班牙流感”大流行。这场疫情因战争的全球性传播而迅速扩散，在非洲草原造成的影响，与在法国战壕中同样致命。
A German doctor in Lettow-Vorbeck’s army during the war perhaps said it best when reflecting on the Lion’s tussle with the giants of Western imperialism in Africa: “Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation. We are no longer the agents of culture, our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years’ War.”
战争期间，莱托-福尔贝克军中的一位德国医生在反思这位“狮子”与西方帝国主义巨头在非洲的较量时，或许说得最为贴切：“我们身后留下的是荒芜的田地、被洗劫的仓库，以及即将到来的饥荒。我们不再是文明的使者，我们的足迹遍布死亡、掠夺和被遗弃的村庄，就像三十年战争中我们与敌军的推进轨迹一样。”
After the war, nonetheless, Lettow-Vorbeck, like Trotha before him, returned to a Germany that, even while in the grips of revolution, greeted him with open arms. (Lettow-Vorbeck later took up a commmand of Freikorps troops to help quell the pro-communist Spartacist Rising in January 1919, and then played yet another role in combating the failed Kapp Putsch against the Weimar government the following year.) Even twenty years after his post-Armistice surrender, despite his intimate history with the black askaris formerly under his command during the Great War, and despite his adamant and vocal distaste for Hitler and everything he and his regime stood for, Lettow-Vorbeck—again, like Trotha—became widely idolized by the Nazis.
然而战后，与此前的特罗塔一样，莱托-福尔贝克回到了德国——即便当时德国正处于革命动荡中，仍对他敞开双臂。（莱托-福尔贝克后来于1919年1月指挥自由军团，协助镇压亲共产主义的斯巴达克同盟起义；次年，他又参与挫败了反对魏玛政府的卡普政变。）即便在停战后投降二十年后，尽管他与一战期间麾下的黑人雇佣军渊源深厚，且公开强烈厌恶希特勒及其政权所代表的一切，莱托-福尔贝克仍像特罗塔一样，被纳粹广泛奉为偶像。
All that separates him from Trotha, though, is Lettow-Vorbeck’s unflagging personal refusal to associate himself with the Third Reich in any way, shape, or form. Consequently, his good standing in today’s Germany can be easily pointed out by the number of streets which still bear his name.
不过，莱托-福尔贝克与特罗塔的不同之处在于，他始终坚决拒绝以任何形式与第三帝国产生关联。因此，如今德国仍有不少以他名字命名的街道，这也足以证明他在德国的良好声誉。
In Africa, however, like the blue-blooded executioner of the Hereros, the so-called “Lion” retains a notoriety that has far outlived Germany’s days as a colonial power on the Dark Continent. And the ongoing repercussions from the West’s exploitation of that part of the world—long after European colonialism there met its final demise—will assuredly not permit Lettow-Vorbeck’s remembrance (and Trotha’s) to go away so easily among the descendants of those he caused the sort of far-flung and prolonged misery that he did.
然而在非洲，这位所谓的“狮子”与那位赫雷罗人的贵族刽子手（特罗塔）一样，其恶名远未随着德国在“黑暗大陆”殖民统治的终结而消逝。即便欧洲殖民主义在非洲早已消亡，但西方对该地区的剥削所产生的持续影响，注定会让那些因他而遭受深远且长久苦难的人们的后裔，难以轻易忘却莱托-福尔贝克（以及特罗塔）。
理查德·王 懂中文，1年前回答
There are many people like this in history, let me give a few examples.
历史上这样的人物有很多，我举几个例子。
Ma Yuan, General Fubo
马援 伏波将军
General Ma was a meritorious general during the founding period of the Eastern Han Dynasty, and his achievements spread across the front lines of the empire in all directions. One of his achievements is that he easily suppressed the rebellion of Trung sisters in northern Vietnam, and took the heads of these two sisters back to Luoyang as proof of merit. The Trung sisters are regarded as national heroes by Vietnamese, and souvenirs such as temples commemorating them can be seen all over Vietnam.
马将军是东汉开国时期的功臣名将，功绩遍布帝国四方前线。他的功绩之一是轻松平定了越南北部的征氏姐妹起义，并将二人的首级带回洛阳作为军功凭证。征氏姐妹被越南人奉为民族英雄，越南各地都能见到纪念她们的庙宇等纪念场所。
Zhangsun Sheng, the Destroyer of Turks
长孙晟 突厥终结者
Zhangsun Sheng is an outstanding diplomat and spy. He utilized his excellent diplomatic skills to successfully create and intensify internal conflicts within the Turkic Empire, leading to its successful division and never having a chance for reunification. During the long period of turmoil south of the Great Wall from the Northern Zhou Dynasty to the Sui Dynasty to the early Tang Dynasty, the Turks were instigated by him and fell into a long civil war, with little opportunity to benefit from the turmoil south of the Great Wall. He can be considered a nightmare for the Turks, but what is more remembered is his daughter - the Empress of Emperor Taizong of Tang, and his son, Changsun Wuji, the last representative of the Guanlong aristocratic group.
长孙晟是杰出的外交家与间谍。他凭借出色的外交手腕，成功制造并加剧了突厥帝国内部的矛盾，使其顺利分裂且再也没有统一的机会。从北周至隋朝再到唐初，长城以南长期处于动荡之中，而突厥在他的挑拨下陷入长期内战，几乎没有机会从长城以南的动荡中获利。对突厥人来说，他堪称噩梦，但人们更铭记的是他的女儿——唐太宗的皇后，以及儿子——关陇贵族集团的末代代表长孙无忌。
Oliver Groom B.A. in Military History and Wars & National Security Studies, Rogers State University (Graduated 2018) upxed 6y
奥利弗·格鲁姆 罗杰斯州立大学，军事历史与战争学、国家安全研究学士（2018年毕业），6年前回答
Since few other answers have done so, I will devote mine to a couple notorious figures from modern German history.
由于其他回答很少涉及，我将聚焦现代德国历史上的几位知名人物。
No, I am not alluding to the likes of Hitler, Himmler, or any of the obvious candidates from the Nazi Reich, men who ultimately became loved by their Aryan countrymen but despised by those non-Aryans they persecuted both within the confines of the Second World War and without.
不，我指的不是希特勒、希姆莱这类纳粹德国的典型人物——他们最终受到雅利安同胞的爱戴，却遭到在二战期间及战前遭受其迫害的非雅利安人的憎恶。
I am alluding, instead, to earlier Germans whose actions—much like those of their Nazi successors—won them admiration from those they considered their racial equals and indignation from those they considered their racial inferiors.
相反，我指的是更早时期的德国人，他们的行为与后来的纳粹分子相似：赢得了他们眼中“种族平等者”的钦佩，却激起了他们眼中“种族劣等者”的愤慨。
I am also not referring to Europe, however. Even long before the crimes of Der Fuhrer and his genocidal hirelings, the German track record for heinous treatment of other peoples on the Continent has been well-founded in the pre-Holocaust annals of history. (For example, the “Rape of Belgium” in August 1914, during the opening weeks of World War One.)
但我谈论的也不是欧洲。早在元首及其种族灭绝爪牙犯下罪行之前，德国在欧洲大陆上虐待其他民族的恶劣记录，在大屠杀之前的历史记载中就已有据可查（例如1914年8月一战初期的“比利时暴行”）。
Rather, I am concentrating on a part of the world—sub-Saharan Africa—where the seeds of German aggression were sown at horrific expense to the indigenous peoples, yet the efforts of leaders, military and political, who stood devoted to ensuring Germany’s “place in the sun” emerged from the bloody wake of their atrocities as the most vaunted of their compatriots.
相反，我将聚焦世界的一个地区——撒哈拉以南非洲。德国在那里播下了侵略的种子，给土著民族带来了惨痛代价，但那些致力于确保德国“阳光下的地盘”的军事和政治领袖，却在其暴行造成的血腥后果中，成为同胞眼中最受赞誉的人物。
No one deserved their positions of infamy in pre-Nazi German-African history more than these two men. Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha and Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck
在纳粹之前的德属非洲历史上，没有谁比这两个人更该背负恶名——阿德里安·迪特里希·洛塔尔·冯·特罗塔与保罗·埃米尔·冯·莱托-福尔贝克。
Trotha, at 56 years old, became the center of Teutonic colonial policy as the Reichskommissar of the German Empire’s South-West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1884–1919). A lifelong soldier since his late teens, having seen action from the Austro-Prussian War (1866) to the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900), under his governorship from June 1904 to November 1905, the imperial forces of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s regime—the Schutztruppe—brutally stamped their jackboot on the indigenous Hereros in what is now Namibia. When he first set foot on the “Dark Continent,” the concurrent war between the white German settlers and the black natives had been raging sporadically for a year, and faring abysmally for the Schutztruppe. The Herero insurgents, allied with the Nama and San tribes, altogether numbered well into the tens of thousands; the Germans, until Trotha’s arrival in Namibia, were vastly outmanned with a total force of scarcely 2,000. (Before the rebellion was finally put down, the Schutztruppe’s ranks swelled to approximately ten times its initial strength.)
56岁的特罗塔出任德意志帝国西南非洲（德属西南非洲，1884–1919年）总督，成为日耳曼殖民政策的核心人物。他十几岁后期便投身军旅，一生征战，经历了普奥战争（1866年）至中国义和团运动（1900年）等诸多战役。1904年6月至1905年11月任职期间，威廉二世政权的帝国军队——（殖民防卫军）——在如今的纳米比亚境内，对土著赫雷罗人实施了残暴镇压。他初抵这片“黑暗大陆”时，德国白人定居者与黑人土著之间的战争已零星爆发一年，殖民防卫军战况惨淡。赫雷罗起义者与纳马族、桑族结盟，总人数达数万人；而在特罗塔抵达纳米比亚之前，德国军队兵力严重不足，总数仅约2000人（叛乱最终被平定前，殖民防卫军兵力已扩充至初始规模的近十倍）。
What followed Trotha’s commandeering of the military situation in German South-West Africa was essentially a prophesying microcosm of the Nazis’ Holocaust that slew millions throughout Europe over the twelve years from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to his death and the subsequent collapse of his regime in 1945. So ruthless was Trotha’s counterinsurgency approach that, in October 1904, he defied his own government back in Berlin by implementing a personal decree—the Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order)—to his soldiers for all Hereros, armed and unarmed, to be punished collectively. The men were to be shot dead; the women and children exiled to the virtually arid deserts of Namib and Kalahari (the former situated along Namibia’s Atlantic coastline, the latter deep within Namibia’s interior), sentencing them also to certain death.
特罗塔掌控德属西南非洲军事局势后，其行径本质上是纳粹大屠杀的预言性缩影——1933年希特勒上台至1945年其死亡及政权崩溃的十二年间，纳粹在欧洲屠杀了数百万人。特罗塔的反叛乱手段极为残酷，1904年10月，他违抗柏林政府的指令，私自颁布“灭绝令”，命令士兵对所有赫雷罗人（无论武装与否）实施集体惩罚：男性一律射杀，妇女和儿童被放逐至几乎寸草不生的纳米布沙漠与卡拉哈里沙漠（前者位于纳米比亚大西洋沿岸，后者深入纳米比亚内陆），无异于判处他们死刑。
At the Battle of Waterberg two months earlier, Trotha put the beginnings of his anti-guerrilla strategy into fruition. Trapping the Hereros—some 60,000—on three sides between a 150-mile-long wall of German rifles, machine guns, and artillery on the one side and the westernmost rim of the Kalahari on the other, he mandated to his soldiers that all accessible water holes be contaminated and any Herero who dared to break out of the encirclement be labeled fair game for the muzzles of the Schutztruppe. (Trotha’s small army after that single day of fighting, as in the rebellion as a whole, sustained comparatively light casualties.)
两个月前的沃特伯格战役中，特罗塔初步践行了其反游击战略。他将约6万名赫雷罗人三面围困：一侧是长达150英里、配备步枪、机枪和火炮的德军防线，另一侧是卡拉哈里沙漠最西缘。他命令士兵污染所有可获取的水源，并规定任何胆敢突围的赫雷罗人都可被殖民防卫军随意射杀。（特罗塔的小股部队在当天的战斗中，以及整个叛乱期间，伤亡都相对轻微。）
Even when the Kaiserreich’s uppermost echelons of political and military leadership caught wind of the extermination policy and demanded for its rescission, Trotha continued to walk over his superiors back in faraway Germany. Those Hereros that managed to survive Trotha’s wholesale purge against their people were ultimately sent to do forced labor in concentration camps—by 1904 not a novelty to the contemporary world, as the Spaniards in Cuba and the British in South Africa clearly illustrated less than a decade previous. Even so, by the time the Prussian lieutenant general was recalled to Berlin, the sword of Herero resistance had been irreparably broken.
即便德意志帝国的最高军政领导层得知这一灭绝政策并要求撤销，特罗塔仍无视远在德国的上级指令。侥幸在特罗塔大规模清洗中存活的赫雷罗人，最终被送往集中营服苦役——到1904年，集中营已非新鲜事物，不到十年前西班牙人在古巴、英国人在南非就已设立过类似场所。即便如此，当这位普鲁士中将被召回柏林时，赫雷罗人的抵抗已被彻底瓦解，再无复原可能。
Thanks to Trotha’s contributions to military victory, moreover, the next three years for the defeated Herero amounted to Germany’s—and the twentieth century’s—first experiment with GENOCIDE. In all, upwards of 100,000 Hereros and 10,000 of their Nama comrades lay dead across the Kaiserreich’s playground of wanton slaughter. So devastating was this indiscriminate treatment under Trotha’s purview that in 1911, the census taken in Namibia that year estimated the Herero population at 15,000. (Of the roughly 19,000 Nama that took part in the rebellion, the other 9,000 that survived faced a life of imprisonment and slave labor in the camps as well as harsh exploitation by the local German businesses.)
此外，得益于特罗塔的军事“功绩”，战败后的赫雷罗人在接下来的三年中，遭遇了德国乃至二十世纪的首次种族灭绝实验。在德意志帝国这片肆意屠杀的“乐园”中，共有超过10万名赫雷罗人和1万名纳马盟友丧生。特罗塔主导的无差别迫害破坏力极强，1911年纳米比亚人口普查显示，赫雷罗人仅余1.5万人。（参与叛乱的纳马人约1.9万人，幸存的9000人在集中营中遭受监禁和奴隶劳动，还受到当地德国企业的残酷剥削。）
Trotha’s reputation in German Africa, needless to say, made him a hated man both among his white peers back home and among his black enemies who witnessed firsthand his almost unabated mass-murdering spree. That animosity only intensified, however, when a few short months after departing from Namibia he was deployed to the Dark Continent once more to help suppress yet another rising against German colonialism—this time in the Kaiser’s East African provinces, against the Maji Maji in what is now Tanzania. By the rebellion’s end in the summer of 1907—the aftermath of which saw the outbreak of a famine, due to the merciless brutality of German reprisals against the civilian populace—another 250,000–300,000 Africans had fallen on their own stomping grounds by the hand of a white European oppressor.
毋庸置疑，特罗塔在德属非洲的声名让他成为众矢之的——无论是德国国内的白人同胞，还是亲眼目睹他近乎无休无止大屠杀的黑人受害者，都对他深恶痛绝。而在离开纳米比亚仅数月后，他再次被派往“黑暗大陆”，协助镇压另一场反抗德国殖民统治的起义——此次是在德意志帝国的东非行省，对抗如今坦桑尼亚境内的马及马及起义者，这进一步加剧了人们对他的憎恶。1907年夏季起义结束时，由于德国对平民实施无情报复，当地爆发饥荒，又有25万至30万非洲人在自己的故土上死于欧洲白人压迫者之手。
Much less unsurprising, though, was the Nazi generation’s fanatical applause for him three decades later—even going so far as christening a new street in Munich with his name in 1933—while Hitler and his minions put forth their scheme to annihilate the Jews and other “undesirables” across their newfound European empire. (Trotha had already succumbed to typhoid fever in 1920, by then promoted to an infantry general and in the service of the Weimar Republic that supplanted the Kaiserreich after World War One.)
然而，三十年后纳粹一代对他的狂热追捧却不足为奇——1933年，希特勒及其追随者在欧洲推行灭绝犹太人和其他“不受欢迎者”的计划时，甚至在慕尼黑以他的名字命名了一条新街。（特罗塔已于1920年死于伤寒，彼时他已晋升为步兵将军，效力于一战后取代德意志帝国的魏玛共和国。）
Only a decade after Trotha’s heyday came Lettow-Vorbeck’s, at 44 years old. To his Fatherland during the onslaught of the Great War, Lettow-Vorbeck was the Prussian blend of Ancient Rome’s Fabius and Ancient Carthage’s Hannibal from the Second Punic War era—a general who both exploited his opponent’s resources on the one hand and risked battle with that same opponent on the other. To his main adversaries between 1914 and 1918, the British, Belgian, and Portuguese empires, he was a Teutonic Napoleon Bonaparte—another upstart menace to their hard-won standing on the international stage.
特罗塔的鼎盛时期过后仅十年，44岁的莱托-福尔贝克登上历史舞台。一战期间，对祖国而言，他是普鲁士版的古罗马费边与第二次布匿战争时期迦太基汉尼拔的结合体——既善于利用敌人的资源，又敢于与敌人正面交锋。1914至1918年间，对其主要对手英、比、葡三国而言，他是日耳曼版的拿破仑·波拿巴，是对他们来之不易的国际地位构成威胁的又一新兴势力。
A loyal warrior-servant of the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic like Trotha, Lettow-Vorbeck also fought against the Boxers and Hereros during his thirty-year-long military career (1890–1920). (In South-West Africa during the Herero conflict, only a couple battle-inflicted wounds to his left eye and chest prevented him from becoming embroiled in the controversial GENOCIDE.) Like his fellow Prussian and counterpart from Namibia fame, too, Lettow-Vorbeck strongly believed in taking the offensive against the enemy whenever, wherever, and however possible as the way toward victory.
与特罗塔一样，莱托-福尔贝克是德意志帝国与魏玛共和国的忠诚军人，三十年军旅生涯（1890–1920年）中，他也曾参与镇压义和团运动和赫雷罗人起义（在西南非洲的赫雷罗冲突中，他左眼和胸部受战伤，才未卷入那场颇具争议的种族灭绝事件）。和这位来自纳米比亚的普鲁士同胞一样，莱托-福尔贝克坚信，无论何时、何地、以何种方式，主动进攻敌人都是通往胜利的道路。
Given the priorities of Wilhelm’s Germany at the onset of hostilities with the Entente powers in summer 1914, this strategic philosophy of attacking as a means of defense was going to have to be Lettow-Vorbeck’s only option if the endgame was the preservation of the empire that his country, since the time of Bismarck, had fought hard to build for itself. Its feldgrau-clad armies bogged down by heavy fighting on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, its fleet shut out from the rest of the world by Britain’s Royal Navy, its allies just barely holding their own on battlefields elsewhere, and its other colonies in Africa and the Far East susceptible to Allied conquest, the German military was in peril on virtually every corner of the war where it was involved.
1914年夏季，德国与协约国开战之初，鉴于威廉德国的战略重点，若最终目标是保住自俾斯麦时期起德国苦心建立的帝国，这种“以攻为守”的战略理念就成了莱托-福尔贝克的唯一选择。当时，德国身着灰绿色军服的军队在东西两线陷入惨烈苦战，舰队被英国皇家海军封锁，无法与外界通航，盟友在其他战场勉强支撑，非洲和远东的其他殖民地易遭协约国攻占，德国军队在其参与的战争各条战线几乎都陷入险境。
For Lettow-Vorbeck, who had been redeployed back to Africa four months prior to Germany’s entry into the war, no help from Berlin was coming any time soon. Not one soldier. Not one rifle. Not one artillery shell.
莱托-福尔贝克在德国参战前四个月已被调回非洲，而柏林迟迟未能向他提供任何援助——没有一兵一卒，没有一支步枪，也没有一发炮弹。
When the African front opened up soon after the initial shots of war rang out across Europe, Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces initially comprised only 5,000 German regulars and African askaris; by the war’s end, his army would increase to 14,000—more than half of which was made up of native recruits. Against them stood odds of more than twenty to one—300,000 enemy troops drawn from Germany’s adjacent colonial neighbors. The paranoia of geopolitical encirclement that overwhelmed Germans back home had been true as well for Germans on the Dark Continent. British South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, and Uganda, Portuguese Mozambique and Angola, the Belgian Congo, and the sea enveloped Lettow-Vorbeck on all sides.
欧洲战场的枪声打响后不久，非洲战线随即开辟。莱托-福尔贝克最初的兵力仅包括5000名德国正规军和非洲雇佣军；到战争结束时，他的军队已扩充至1.4万人，其中超过一半是土著新兵。他们面临的敌军兵力超过30万，来自德国周边的殖民邻国，兵力对比超过20:1。德国本土民众深陷的地缘政治包围焦虑，对“黑暗大陆”上的德国人而言同样真实——英属南非、罗得西亚、肯尼亚、乌干达，葡属莫桑比克、安哥拉，比属刚果以及海洋，将莱托-福尔贝克团团包围。
Despite everything that made his chances of success appear unviable, though, Lettow-Vorbeck proceeded to achieve the unfathomable. Even with some initial losses—the whole of Germany’s South-West Africa colony fell to the Allied armies by July 1915, and then Kamerun (what is now Cameroon) by March 1916—Lettow-Vorbeck still managed to pin down much of the overwhelming might of the Entente’s European colonial powers, a combined strength that otherwise would have throttled into submission both Germany and its allies in Europe long before 1918.
尽管种种因素都表明他胜算渺茫，但莱托-福尔贝克却取得了令人难以置信的成就。即便初期遭遇失利——1915年7月德属西南非洲全境被协约国军队攻占，1916年3月喀麦隆也沦陷——他仍成功牵制了协约国欧洲殖民列强的大量主力。若这些兵力未被牵制，早在1918年前就可能将德国及其欧洲盟友彻底压制。
The locus of the Schutztruppe’s war took place in German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika). So it was there, in East Africa, that Lettow-Vorbeck made his mark as a commander equal in skill and stamina to the Kaiser’s other brilliant military mind, Paul von Hindenburg.
殖民防卫军的主战场位于德属东非。正是在东非，莱托-福尔贝克凭借出色的军事才能和耐力崭露头角，成为与德皇麾下另一位杰出军事家保罗·冯·兴登堡齐名的指挥官。
Until more than a week after the November 11 Armistice that officially brought the First World War to an end, the German Empire’s last stand in Africa between 1914 and 1918 dragged courageously on, and, what’s more, with several major victories won by Lettow-Vorbeck that left his Allied enemies totally thunderstruck. The greatest of these successes, the Battle of Tanga (November 3–5, 1914) fought near Tanzania’s Indian Ocean coast, saw Britain’s first attempt to conquer German East Africa, via amphibious assault, thrown back into the sea. This victory, won against an enemy force nine times larger than his own, saw the British Empire troops (predominantly derived from Raj-governed India) lose as many as 1,190 killed and 2,450 wounded—a stark contrast to the 71 dead and 76 wounded from Lettow-Vorbeck’s army.
1918年11月11日停战协定正式结束一战后，德帝国在1914至1918年间于非洲的最后抵抗仍英勇持续了一周多，且莱托-福尔贝克赢得了数次重大胜利，让协约国敌人震惊不已。其中最辉煌的胜利是1914年11月3日至5日在坦桑尼亚印度洋沿岸附近爆发的坦噶战役——英国首次试图通过两栖进攻征服德属东非，却被击退。这场战役中，他以寡敌众，对阵兵力九倍于己的敌军，最终英军（主要由英属印度军队组成）伤亡惨重，阵亡1190人、受伤2450人，而莱托-福尔贝克的军队仅阵亡71人、受伤76人，形成鲜明对比。
What the Entente’s imperialist members in Africa lost in terms of human life was exacerbated further by the substantial loss of everything necessary for their armies to survive the pressures of modern warfare, from food and medicine to tents and blankets to rifles and Maxim machine guns. Such became the trend of Lettow-Vorbeck’s battles against his European adversaries for the next four years after Tanga: sustaining light casualties while reaping vast spoils.
非洲协约国殖民军队不仅人员伤亡惨重，维持现代战争所需的各类物资——从粮食、药品到帐篷、毛毯，再到步枪和马克沁机枪——也损失巨大，雪上加霜。坦噶战役后的四年里，莱托-福尔贝克与欧洲敌军的作战始终保持这一态势：自身伤亡轻微，却缴获颇丰。
The popular Great War notion of “lions led by donkeys” was never more true in the conflict’s entirety than it was at Tanga. At Tanga, the lions of the defeated British Indian force had met their match against the king of the pride. Lettow-Vorbeck thenceforth became heralded by his soldiers and fellow countrymen back home as the Lowe von Afrika—the Lion of Africa.
一战中广为流传的“驴领导的狮子”这一说法，在整场战争中没有比坦噶战役更贴切的体现了。在坦噶，战败的英属印度军队中的“狮子们”遇到了“狮群之王”。此后，莱托-福尔贝克被麾下士兵和德国同胞誉为“非洲之狮”。
After Tanga, the Lion proceeded to stalk the lands on which he outfought and outran his enemies with almost unchecked momentum.
坦噶战役后，这位“狮子”继续在非洲土地上驰骋，以近乎势不可挡的势头击败并甩开敌人。
One modern-day historian, Hew Strachan, perfectly analyzes Lettow-Vorbeck and his war as follows: “Here, at least, was a German commander who had never been defeated. But he became a legend to his enemies as well. Lettow-Vorbeck led them the length of East Africa from Uganda to the Zambezi [River, encompassing what is now Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique], but they never caught him up. Their incompetence played a large part, but it suited them better to believe that he had conducted a guerrilla campaign. That was nonsense. Lettow-Vorbeck was a Prussian general staff officer, with all the preconceptions that that implies. His . . . askaris . . . were organized in independent field companies, and were trained in bush fighting, but his inclination was to seek battle, not shun it. Cut off from Germany, he was almost entirely reliant on what he could get from within the colony: fighting for fighting’s sake both depleted his ammunition stocks and endangered his irreplaceable European officers and non-commissioned officers. As with [Vice-Admiral Maximilian von] Spee and his cruisers, Lettow’s strength lay in dispersal and in striking against weakness, forgoing the temptation to concentrate for battle. Like Spee, Lettow could not resist the pressures of the traditions in which he had been brought up.
现代历史学家休·斯特拉坎对莱托-福尔贝克及其战争行动的分析十分精辟：“至少，这是一位从未战败的德国指挥官。但他也成了敌人眼中的传奇。莱托-福尔贝克带领他们穿越了东非全境，从乌干达到赞比西河（涵盖如今的赞比亚、安哥拉、纳米比亚、博茨瓦纳、津巴布韦和莫桑比克），但他们始终未能抓获他。敌军的无能是重要原因，但他们更愿意相信他采取的是游击战——这纯属无稽之谈。莱托-福尔贝克是普鲁士总参谋部军官，有着该身份自带的所有固有观念。他的非洲雇佣军被编为独立野外连，接受过丛林作战训练，但他的倾向是主动求战，而非避战。与德国隔绝后，他几乎完全依赖殖民地内部的物资供给：为战而战既会耗尽弹药储备，也会让不可或缺的欧洲军官和士官陷入险境。与马克西米利安·冯·施佩海军中将及其巡洋舰部队一样，莱托的优势在于分散部署、攻击敌军薄弱环节，而非急于集中兵力决战。和施佩一样，莱托也无法摆脱自身成长所遵循的军事传统带来的压力。
A true guerrilla strategy would have rested the defence of German East Africa on the opportunities for fomenting revolution in the adjacent colonies of the enemy. The British colonial service was depleted by the need for its younger officials to join the armed forces, and the Belgians to the west and the Portuguese to the south had the reputation of being the most bloodthirsty and tyrannical of all the European colonial powers. Lettow-Vorbeck did not exploit this chance: he saw the fighting as a matter between armies in the field and the territories as simply ground over which they operated.
真正的游击战略本应借助在敌方邻近殖民地煽动革命的机会来保卫德属东非。英国殖民部门因年轻官员需参军而人手短缺，西边的比利时人和南边的葡萄牙人则被誉为所有欧洲殖民列强中最嗜血、最残暴的。但莱托-福尔贝克并未利用这一机会——他将战争视为战场上军队之间的较量，而殖民地仅被当作作战的场地。
By the same token, he never acknowledged—and perhaps never realized—how much he owed to the civil administration of German East Africa. Although there were certainly areas of the colony which gave support to the British forces, the Germans never had to cope with insurrection in their rear. The German governor, Heinrich Schnee, was not enthusiastic about the war, which he saw as undermining the progressive effects of colonisation. Initially, he embraced the Congo Act [of 1885]. For Lettow-Vorbeck, German East Africa fulfilled a purely military function: to draw British troops off from the main theatre in Europe. This could never be accomplished by neutrality. Lettow-Vorbeck therefore saw himself as constantly at odds with Schnee. In reality, he could never have lasted as long in the field as he did without the efforts of the civil administration.”
同理，他从未承认——或许也从未意识到——自己有多依赖德属东非的民政部门。尽管殖民地部分地区确实支持英军，但德军从未面临后方叛乱的困扰。德国总督海因里希·施内并不热衷于这场战争，他认为战争破坏了殖民带来的“进步效应”，最初还支持1885年《刚果法案》。而对莱托-福尔贝克而言，德属东非仅承担纯粹的军事职能：牵制英军，使其无法投入欧洲主战场。中立绝不可能实现这一目标，因此莱托-福尔贝克认为自己与施内始终处于对立状态。但事实上，若没有民政部门的支持，他绝不可能在战场上坚持如此之久。”[1]
Ultimately, the enemy blood that Lettow-Vorbeck spilled and the enemy resources that he swiped or destroyed achieved little in preventing the Kaiserreich’s doom. No amount of battles waged, of victories won, or defeats inflicted in faraway Africa helped conquer the fortress city of Verdun, nor held back the onrushing Allied tanks at Amiens, nor saved the routing vestiges of the German Army in the Argonne.
归根结底，莱托-福尔贝克流的敌人鲜血、掠夺或摧毁的敌人资源，在阻止德意志帝国覆灭方面收效甚微。在遥远非洲发动的无数战役、赢得的诸多胜利、给敌人造成的多次失败，既未能攻克凡尔登要塞，也未能阻挡协约国坦克在亚眠的猛攻，更未能挽救在阿贡森林溃散的德国残军。
To the colonized native peoples that found themselves caught in the grips of the war below the Sahara, meanwhile, Lettow-Vorbeck’s four-year reign over the battlefields of East Africa was not something to be celebrated as a flicker of hope for their liberation from what Kipling espoused at the turn of the century as “the white man’s burden.”
与此同时，对深陷撒哈拉以南战争泥潭的殖民地土著民族而言，莱托-福尔贝克在东非战场四年的征战，绝非他们摆脱吉卜林在世纪之交所宣扬的“白人的负担”、获得解放的一线希望，不值得庆贺。
Instead, Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaigns fomented death, destruction, and suffering of torrential magnitude. His raids into British, Portuguese, and Belgian territory produced horrendous results for the noncombatants in those territories as their farms were stripped bare of crops, livestock, and other essentials for human sustenance. German East Africa, too, faced severe repercussions as its lands and peoples were gradually swallowed up by Allied counteroffensives. Famine and disease, consequently, became rampant when such food shortages were worsened by the rain deficiency that suddenly plagued the war-torn sub-Sahara.
相反，莱托-福尔贝克的军事行动引发了大规模的死亡、破坏和苦难。他对英、葡、比属领土的突袭，给当地平民带来了可怕后果——农场的作物、牲畜及其他生活必需品被洗劫一空。随着协约国反攻逐渐吞噬德属东非的土地和人民，该地区也遭遇了严重冲击。加之战乱后的撒哈拉以南地区突然遭遇干旱，粮食短缺雪上加霜，饥荒和疾病随之肆虐。
By the time Lettow-Vorbeck and his Schutztruppe finally capitulated on November 25, 1918, civilian casualties in East Africa had reached 365,000—far exceeding those incurred in Namibia at Trotha’s hand. By the outset of 1919, millions more had perished from the “Spanish influenza” pandemic whose rapid expansion due to the war’s global outreach proved as decisive on the African savanna as it did in the trenches of France.
1918年11月25日，莱托-福尔贝克及其殖民防卫军最终投降时，东非平民伤亡已达36.5万人——远超特罗塔在纳米比亚造成的伤亡。到1919年初，又有数百万人死于“西班牙流感”大流行。这场疫情因战争的全球性传播而迅速扩散，在非洲草原造成的影响，与在法国战壕中同样致命。
A German doctor in Lettow-Vorbeck’s army during the war perhaps said it best when reflecting on the Lion’s tussle with the giants of Western imperialism in Africa: “Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation. We are no longer the agents of culture, our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years’ War.”
战争期间，莱托-福尔贝克军中的一位德国医生在反思这位“狮子”与西方帝国主义巨头在非洲的较量时，或许说得最为贴切：“我们身后留下的是荒芜的田地、被洗劫的仓库，以及即将到来的饥荒。我们不再是文明的使者，我们的足迹遍布死亡、掠夺和被遗弃的村庄，就像三十年战争中我们与敌军的推进轨迹一样。”
After the war, nonetheless, Lettow-Vorbeck, like Trotha before him, returned to a Germany that, even while in the grips of revolution, greeted him with open arms. (Lettow-Vorbeck later took up a commmand of Freikorps troops to help quell the pro-communist Spartacist Rising in January 1919, and then played yet another role in combating the failed Kapp Putsch against the Weimar government the following year.) Even twenty years after his post-Armistice surrender, despite his intimate history with the black askaris formerly under his command during the Great War, and despite his adamant and vocal distaste for Hitler and everything he and his regime stood for, Lettow-Vorbeck—again, like Trotha—became widely idolized by the Nazis.
然而战后，与此前的特罗塔一样，莱托-福尔贝克回到了德国——即便当时德国正处于革命动荡中，仍对他敞开双臂。（莱托-福尔贝克后来于1919年1月指挥自由军团，协助镇压亲共产主义的斯巴达克同盟起义；次年，他又参与挫败了反对魏玛政府的卡普政变。）即便在停战后投降二十年后，尽管他与一战期间麾下的黑人雇佣军渊源深厚，且公开强烈厌恶希特勒及其政权所代表的一切，莱托-福尔贝克仍像特罗塔一样，被纳粹广泛奉为偶像。
All that separates him from Trotha, though, is Lettow-Vorbeck’s unflagging personal refusal to associate himself with the Third Reich in any way, shape, or form. Consequently, his good standing in today’s Germany can be easily pointed out by the number of streets which still bear his name.
不过，莱托-福尔贝克与特罗塔的不同之处在于，他始终坚决拒绝以任何形式与第三帝国产生关联。因此，如今德国仍有不少以他名字命名的街道，这也足以证明他在德国的良好声誉。
In Africa, however, like the blue-blooded executioner of the Hereros, the so-called “Lion” retains a notoriety that has far outlived Germany’s days as a colonial power on the Dark Continent. And the ongoing repercussions from the West’s exploitation of that part of the world—long after European colonialism there met its final demise—will assuredly not permit Lettow-Vorbeck’s remembrance (and Trotha’s) to go away so easily among the descendants of those he caused the sort of far-flung and prolonged misery that he did.
然而在非洲，这位所谓的“狮子”与那位赫雷罗人的贵族刽子手（特罗塔）一样，其恶名远未随着德国在“黑暗大陆”殖民统治的终结而消逝。即便欧洲殖民主义在非洲早已消亡，但西方对该地区的剥削所产生的持续影响，注定会让那些因他而遭受深远且长久苦难的人们的后裔，难以轻易忘却莱托-福尔贝克（以及特罗塔）。
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