1、此资料由网络收集而来，如有侵权请告知上传者立即删除。资料共分享，我们负责传递知识。加拿大总理哈珀在纪念一战爆发101周年仪式英语演讲稿Thank you, Shelly, for that kind introduction.Thank you to Suzanne Sarault for serving as our emcee today.Greetings to Chief of Defence Staff General Lawson, to Chief Warrant Officer West, toambassadors and members of the diplomatic
2、corps, to my colleagues from the Parliament ofCanada, Royal Galipeau and Pierre Lemieux, members of the Canadian Armed Forces, honouredveterans and families, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.As Shelly said, a century has passed now since the dull roar of the guns of August was firstheard a
3、nd all across Europe, the lights of peace faded.This great conflict on the other side of an ocean need not have involved us.But then, as now, when our friends and the values we share with them are threatened,Canadians do not turn away.So it was that in 1914, Canadian and Newfoundland volunteers &nda
4、sh; Newfoundland being then aseparate Dominion – accepted this call to arms as a duty.At the end of the summer of 1914, Canadians left behind factories, fields, forests and fisheries.They left their homes, shops, offices and schools.Men by the tens of thousands signed up to fight.Men like Leo
5、Clarke, Frederick Hall and Robert Shankland, who all lived on Pine Street inWinnipeg.Men like brothers Bernard and Eric Ayre and their cousins Gerald and Wilfrid of St. John’s,Newfoundland.Men like George Vanier of Montréal, a young lawyer who had considered joining the priesthoodbefore
6、 hearing the call of duty.And women like Beatrice McNair from Vancouver, one of 2,500 nursing sisters who servedoverseas.The first Canadians left for Europe that October.Many thought they’d be home for Christmas.Some of them actually worried that they’d get over there too late to do thei
7、r part.As we all know, they were terribly, terribly wrong.Though the commitment to war was uncertain, over 600,000 Canadians fought to defendour country, only eight million strong at the time.The mud, the blood and the sacrifices that marked those years left more than a third of theseCanadians dead
8、or wounded.Forgive me if I do not dwell on these numbers, the bitter harvest of suffering and death.We have had a hundred years to contemplate this war.Much has been written on this subject.And yet, what it means to have lived in muck and disease, to fight through mud deep enoughto drown a man, to l
9、ose thousands of lives in a single day to gain what could be measured inyards.The sense of these things still eludes us.We can only imagine their courage, their fear, the devotion they had to King, to country, andto comrades that drove them over the top to take the fight to the enemy time and time a
10、gain.So let us pass on and dwell instead on what they achieved.Though inexperienced, these young men of 1914 were determined.By the time the war was in its final days, they were admired by the allies and dreaded by theenemy.They were called the shock troops of the British Empire.It is difficult to m
11、easure heroism, but if the awarding of our greatest military honour tells thestory, then let the records show that of the 98 Canadians who have earned the Victoria Cross, 72 of them did so in the First World War.Three of those heroes were the boys of Pine Street: Corporal Leo Clarke, Sergeant-MajorF
12、rederick Hall, and Lieutenant Robert Shankland.And so Pine Street in Winnipeg is now called Valour Road.It’s also difficult to measure sacrifice.Yet on the first day of the Battle of the Somme when Canadians and when British andCommonwealth forces suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, among those
13、 killed were all four Ayreboys.A St. John’s newspaper ventured this: that “;the price of freedom is paid in tears.;The First World War decimated an entire generation of young Canadians.So many communities like St. John’s.So many tears.Yet amid the appalling loss, by any measure, Canada a
14、s a truly independent country wasforged in the fires of the First World War.That is to say when the great nations of the world gathered, we must never forget that ourplace at the table was not given to us.It was bought and paid for on the gas-choked battlefield at Ypres where John McCrae wrote hisim
15、mortal work, In Flanders Fields; at Vimy Ridge, where Canadian men under Canadian leadersachieved a victory that had eluded so many others; in the drenched and cratered wastelandof Passchendaele, where Lieutenant Shankland earned his Victoria Cross; in the sombre andblood-soaked field hospitals, whe
16、re Beatrice McNair would become one of the first Canadianwomen to receive military honours for gallantry, standing by her post and comforting herpatients under constant bombardment.As the allies relentlessly pushed ahead during the final hundred days of the war, an enemyshell cost Major George Vanier a leg.But Vanier survived and continued serving his country, g