Unit 12 Take Over, Bos'n 2 War

“Take Over, Bos’n!”

Oscar Schisgall

1Hour after hour I kept the gun pointed at the other nine men. From the lifeboat’s stern, where I’d sat most of the twenty days of our drifting, I could keep them all covered. If I had to shoot at such close quarters, I wouldn’t miss. They realized that. Nobody jumped at me.But in the way they allglared I could see how they’d come to hate myguts.

2Especially Barrett, who’d been bos’n’s mate; Barrett said in his harsh, cracked voice, “You’re a fool, Snyder. Y-you can’t hold out forever! You’re half asleep now!”

3I didn’t answer. He was right. How long can a man stay awake? I hadn’t dared to shut my eyes in maybe seventy-two hours. Very soon now I’d doze off, and the instant that happened they’d jump on the little water that was left.

4The last canteen lay under my legs. There wasn’t much in it after twenty days. Maybe a pint. Enough to give each of them a few drops. Yet I could see in their bloodshot eyes that they’d gladly kill me for those few drops. As a man I didn’t count any more. I was no longer third officer4 of the wrecked Montala. I was just a gun that kept them away from the water they craved. And with their tongue swollen and their cheeks sunken, they were half crazy.

5The way I judged it, we must be some two hundred miles east of Ascension. Now that the storms were over, the Atlantic swells were long and easy, and the morning sun was hot – so hot it scorched your skin. My own tongue was thick enough to clog my throat. I’d have given the rest of my life for a single gulp of water.

6But I was the man with the gun — the only authority in the boat — and I knew this: once the water was gone we’d have nothing to look forward to but death. As long as we could look forward to getting a drink later, there was something to live for. We had to make it last as long as possible.If I’d given in to the curses, we’d have emptied the last canteen days ago. By now we’d all be dead.

7The men weren’t pulling on the oars. They’d stopped that long ago, too weak to go on. The nine of them facing me were a pack of bearded, ragged, half-naked animals, and I probably looked as bad as the rest. Some sprawled over the gunwales, dozing. The rest watched me as Barrett did, ready to spring the instant I relaxed.

8When they weren’t looking at my face they looked at the canteen under my legs.

9Jeff Barrett was the nearest one. A constant threat. The bos’n’s mate was a heavy man, bald, with a scarred and brutal face. He’d been in a hundred fights, and they’d left their marks on him.

10Barrett had been able to sleep — in fact, he’d slept through most of the night – and I envied him that. His eyes wouldn’t close. They kept watching me, narrow and dangerous.

11Every now and then he taunted me in that hoarse, broken voice:

12“Why don’t you quit? You can’t hold out!”

13“Tonight,” I said. “We’ll ration the rest of the water tonight.”

14“By tonight some of us’ll be dead! We want it now!”

15“Tonight ,” I said.

16Couldn’t he understand that if we waited until night the few drops wouldn’t be sweated out of us so fast? But Barrett was beyond all reasoning. His mind had already cracked with thirst. I saw him begin to rise, a calculating look in his eyes. I aimed the gun at his chest – and he sat down again.

17I’d grabbed my Luger on instinct, twenty days ago, just before running for the lifeboat. Nothing else would have kept Barrett and the rest away from the water.

18These fools — couldn’t they see I wanted a drink as badly as any of them? But I was in command here — that was the difference. I was the man with the gun, the man who had to think. Each of the others could afford to think only of himself; I had to think of them all.

19Barrett’s eyes kept watching me, waiting. I hated him. I hated him all the more because he’d slept. He had that advantage now. He wouldn’t keel over.

20And long before noon I knew I couldn’t fight any more. My eyelids were too heavy to lift. As the boat rose and fell on the long swells, I could feel sleep creeping over me like paralysis. I bent my head. It filled my brain like a cloud. I was going, going …

21Barrett stood over me, and I couldn’t even lift the gun. In a vague way I could guess what would happen. He’d grab the water first and take his drop. By that time the others would be screaming and tearing at him, and he’d have to yield the canteen. Well, there was nothing more I could do about it.

22I whispered, “Take over, bos’n.”

23Then I fell face down in the bottom of the boat. I was asleep before I stopped moving…

24When a hand shook my shoulder, I could hardly raise my head. Jeff Barrett’s hoarse voice said, “Here! Take your share o’ the water!”

25Somehow I propped myself up on my arms, dizzy and weak. I looked at the men, and I thought my eyes were going. Their figures were dim, shadowy; but then I realized it wasn’t because of my eyes. It was night. The sea was black; there were stars overhead, I’d slept the day away.

26So we were in our twenty-first night adrift— the night in which the tramp Croton finally picked us up – but now, as I turned my head to Barrett there was no sign of any ship. He knelt beside me, holding out the canteen, his other hand with gun steady on the men.

27I stared at the canteen as if it were a mirage. Hadn’t they finished that pint of water this morning? When I looked up at Barrett’s ugly face, it was grim. He must have guessed my thoughts.

28“You said, ‘Take over, bos’n,’ didn’t you?” he growled. “I’ve been holding off these apes all day.” He hefted the Luger in his hand. “When you’re boss-man,” he added, “in command and responsible for the rest — you — you sure get to see things different, don’t you?”

1. Dictation（注意下面文字中斜体的部分在ppt中要保持斜体）

Envision an ideal place / to live or run a business, / a friendly, safe and secure community / with large areas of open space / and extensive entertainment and recreational facilities. / Finally, picture this community continually moving around the world. / You are beginning to understand theFreedom Ship concept of / a massive ocean-going vessel. / With a design length of 4,500 feet, / a width of 750 feet, / and a height of 350 feet, /Freedom Ship would be more than 4 times longer / than theQueen Mary. / The design concepts include a mobile modern city / featuring luxurious living, / an extensive duty-free international shopping mall, / and a full 1.7 million-square-foot floor / set aside for various companies / to showcase their products.

II. Text 2

War

Gorge Santayana

1    To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other’s looks; or because they have met walking in opposite directions. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood. To fight for a reason and in a calculating spirit is something your true warrior despises; even a coward might screw his courage up to such a reasonable conflict. The joy and glory of fighting lie in its pure spontaneity and consequent generosity; you are not fighting for gain, but for sport and for victory. Victory, no doubt, has its fruits for the victor.  If fighting were not a possible means of livelihood the bellicose instinct could never have established itself in any long-lived race. A few men can live on plunder, just as there is room in the world for some beasts of prey; other men are reduced to living on industry, just as there are diligent bees, ants, and herbivorous kine. But victory need have no good fruits for the people whose army is victorious. That it sometimes does so is an ulterior and blessed circumstance hardly to be reckoned upon.

2    Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. There are panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a race decays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to this shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation’s wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought about the greatest set-back which the life of reason has ever suffered; it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being descended from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves; and it is not their bodies only that show it. After a long peace, if the conditions of life are propitious, we observe a people’s energies bursting their barriers; they become aggressive on the strength they have stored up in their remote and unchecked development. It is the unmutilated race, fresh from the struggle with nature (in which the best survive, while in war it is often the best that perish), that descends victoriously into the arena of nations and conquers disciplined armies at the first blow, becomes the military aristocracy of the next epoch and is itself ultimately sapped and decimated by luxury and battle, and merged at last into the ignoble conglomerate beneath. Then, perhaps, in some other virgin country a genuine humanity is again found, capable of victory because unblemished by war. To cal war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.  

3   Blind courage is an animal virtue indispensable in a world full of dangers and evils where a certain insensibility and dash are requisite to skirt the precipice without vertigo. Such animal courage seems therefore beautiful rather than desperate or cruel, and being the lowest and most instinctive of virtues it is the one most widely and sincerely admired. In the form of steadiness under risks rationally taken, and perseverance so long as there is a chance of success, courage is a true virtue; but it ceases to be one when the love of danger, a useful passion when danger is unavoidable, begins to lead men into evils which it was unnecessary to face.  Bravado, provocativeness, and a gambler’s instinct, with a love of hitting hard for the sake of exercise, is a temper which ought already to be counted among the vices rather than the virtues of man.  To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

4    The panegyrist of war places himself on the lowest level on which a moralist or a patriot can stand and shows as great a want of refined feeling as of right reason. For the glories of war are all blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative instinct is s savage prompting by which one man’s good is found in another’s evil. The existence of such a contradiction in the moral world is the original sin of nature whence flows every other wrong. He is a willing accomplice of that perversity in things who delights in another’s discomfiture or in his own, and craves the blind tension of plunging into danger without reason, or the idiot’s pleasure in facing a pure chance. To find joy in another’s trouble is, as man is constituted, not unnatural, though it is wicked; and to find joy in one’s own trouble, though it be madness, is not yet impossible for man.  These are the chaotic depths of that dreaming nature out of which humanity has to grow.