败给鸟类的军队

军队曾经败给了鸟类。把这个故事分享给那个说历史很无聊的朋友。一千九百三十二年末，澳大利亚西部的小麦农户正眼看着自己的庄稼被鸸鹋啃食殆尽。这种高大的不会飞的鸟成千上万地涌来寻找水源，结果却发现了大片的麦田。

An army once lost to birds. Send this to the friend who says history is dull. In late nineteen thirty-two, wheat farmers in Western Australia were losing their crop to emus, tall flightless birds that had arrived in their thousands looking for water and found fields of grain instead.

农户们向政府求助，政府派来了士兵，带着两挺机枪和一万发子弹。从纸面上看，这根本不是一场公平的战斗。可在田野里，情况却完全不同。鸸鹋跑得飞快，转弯灵活，很难被真正阻止，第一轮开火过后，鸟群就四散成一个个小群体，继续若无其事地前进。机枪还出现了卡壳。士兵们又试着用卡车追赶，可地面太颠簸，根本无法瞄准。

The farmers asked the government for help, and the government sent soldiers with two machine guns and ten thousand rounds of ammunition. On paper it was not a fair fight. In the fields it went rather differently. Emus run fast, turn sharply and take a great deal of stopping, and after the first bursts of fire the flocks broke into small scattered groups and simply kept moving. The guns jammed. A truck was tried, and the ground was far too rough to aim from.

大约一个月后，士兵们撤回了。在数量远超一千的鸸鹋群中，被打死的还不到一千只，世界各地的报纸都对这个故事津津乐道，而那些鸸鹋根本不知道有人曾向它们宣战，只是照旧回去继续啃食小麦。

After about a month the soldiers went home. Fewer than one thousand birds had been killed out of a crowd many times that size, newspapers around the world had a wonderful time with the story, and the emus, who never knew that war had been declared, went back to eating the wheat.