厄斯金·奇尔德斯

罗伯特·厄斯金·奇尔德斯 ( Robert Erskine Childers DSC ，1870年6月25日—1922年11月24日) ，是一位出生于英国的爱尔兰民族主义者。

期初厄斯金·奇尔德斯支持大英帝国，曾参与第二次布尔战争并为英国效力，但就在第二次布尔战争期间他开始转而不再那么支持英国。当时自由党支持爱尔兰自治，他以自由党候选人的身份参加英国国会选举。

他还是一位作家，他在他的作品中介绍了第二次布尔战争，并且提到德国准备从海上入侵英国。这部小说影响了第一海军大臣温斯顿·丘吉尔，促使他加强本土舰队的建设。第一次世界大战爆发时，丘吉尔劝说厄斯金·奇尔德斯加入英国皇家海军，厄斯金·奇尔德斯因此被授予杰出服务十字勋章。

后来他转而支持爱尔兰共和主义并主张爱尔兰独立。他加入爱尔兰义勇军并将枪支走私到爱尔兰，并支持复活节起义。英爱条约签订后，爱尔兰内部就是否执行英爱条约而爆发爱尔兰内战，内战中厄斯金·奇尔德斯与反对条约的那一方人一起逃亡，最终厄斯金·奇尔德斯被爱尔兰自由邦方面逮捕并被处决。

Robert Erskine Childers (25 June 1870 – 24 November 1922), usually known as Erskine Childers, was an English-born Irish nationalist who established himself as a writer with accounts of the Second Boer War, the novel The Riddle of the Sands (1903) about German preparations for a sea-borne invasion of England, and proposals for achieving Irish independence.

As a firm believer in the British Empire, Childers served as a volunteer in the army expeditionary force in the Second Boer War in South Africa, but his experiences there began a gradual process of disillusionment with British imperialism. He was adopted as a candidate in British parliamentary elections, standing for the Liberal Party at a time when the party supported a treaty to establish Irish home rule, but he later became an advocate of Irish republicanism and the severance of all ties with Britain.

On behalf of the Irish Volunteers, he smuggled guns into Ireland later used against British soldiers in the Easter Rebellion. He had a significant role in the negotiations between Ireland and Britain that culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but was elected as an anti-Treaty member of the first Irish parliament. He sought an active role in the Irish Civil War (over the acceptance of the terms of the treaty) that followed and was executed by the Irish Free State.

As an author, his most significant work was the novel The Riddle of the Sands, published eleven years before the start of the First World War. Its depiction of a secret German invasion fleet directed against England influenced Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, into strengthening the Home Fleet of the Royal Navy. On the outbreak of the First World War Churchill was instrumental in calling Childers for service in the Royal Navy, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Childers was the son of British Orientalist scholar Robert Caesar Childers, the father of the fourth president of Ireland Erskine Hamilton Childers, the cousin of British politician Hugh Childers and of Irish nationalist Robert Barton, and the grandfather of the writer and diplomat Erskine Barton Childers and of the former MEP Nessa Childers.

Early life

Childers was born in Mayfair, London, in 1870. He was the second son of Robert Caesar Childers, a translator and oriental scholar from an ecclesiastical family, and Anna Mary Henrietta Barton, from an Anglo-Irish landowning family of Glendalough House, Annamoe, County Wicklow, with interests in France such as the winery that bears their name. When Erskine was six, his father died from tuberculosis and his mother, although at that stage showing no signs of the disease, was confined to an isolation hospital to safeguard her children. She corresponded regularly with Childers until she died from tuberculosis, without having seen her children again, six years later. The five children were sent to the Bartons, the family of their mother's uncle, at Glendalough. Well-treated by his new family, Childers grew up with a strong affection for, and knowledge of, Ireland, albeit, at that point in time, from the comfortable viewpoint of the "Protestant Ascendancy". According to his biographer Michael Hopkinson, it was the personal tension caused by his Anglo-Irish identity, as well as his psychological peculiarities, which later caused his remarkable conversion to "hard-line Irish republicanism".