THE H.B. TRIBUNE FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 1936 ANZAC DAY.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXVI, Issue 112, 24 April 1936, Page 4

THE H.B. TRIBUNE FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 1936 ANZAC DAY.

Tomorrow’s observances in commemoration of the landing of the Australian and New Zealand expeditionary forces on Gallipoli will arouse many and mixed memories and misgivings. First and foremost will come, among those who lost sons and brothers and close friends, some awakening of the sleeping sorrow that cannot but still persist in many sorely grieved hearts. For them the sweet anodyne of time will have done much to allay the first poignancy of grief, but on occasions such as this the pain, though softened, will still assert itself. Then, among the elders at any rate, will come a revival of the sense of pride in a glorious feat of arms, if ever glory can be said to be an accompaniment of modern warfare. Throughout the long war that followed there was no finer exhibition of real heroism than on that day, twenty-one years ago, when in the face of the withering fire of Turkish gunnery the bands of gallant youth from the far Pacific effected their landing on the shore of Suvla Bay. It was an achievement that was to be followed by many more in which equal courage and daring were displayed. But, as the first blooding of youthful, raw and inexperienced troops under conditions of exceptional difficulty and danger, it must always take a first place in the Dominion’s association with the greatest of all wars. “The desperate feat,” wrote John Masefield, “was expected and then done. . . .No such body of free men has given so heroically since our history began.” It was the real beginning of what proved to be a long-drawn test of years of desperate fighting and patient endurance from which the men of the Empire’s most distant dominion emerged with a reputation such as had never been earned before by any but the most seasoned levies. Of the part New Zealanders played at Suvla Bay

and afterwards on various sections of the long battle front, from the North Sea to the Jordan and beyond it, the passing, the present and all future generations

of their fellows may well be proud.

To-day, however, when we look round the world, there cannot but also be some sense of doubt as to whether all the sacrifice involved was really worth while. To many it must seem as if the war that was to end war had most signally failed of its purpose. Now, in the eighteenth year after its close, we find all the Great Powers that were engaged in it either already armed or hastily rearming as if there were no arbitrament to solve their differences but another resort to war. Upon some of them the lesson that was

so dearly bought would seem to have been altogether lost. All the old national and racial antipathies, jealousies and suspicions are rearing their evil heads as high as ever, and even nations that then fought side by side are now at strong variance. The sabrerattling that preceded and led up Io the Great War is just as much in evidence as in 1914.

Personal dictatorships, with all the iijsane ambitions they generally imply, have in many countries taken the place of sane democratic government, and there seems to be none to stay their hands. Just now all Europe goes in something like fear and trembling under the threats of warlike action which both Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini, in direct violation of the Briand-Kellogg Pact, are making the chief instrument of national policy. The Italian dictator has gone even further than this, for he has actually waged one of the bloodiest, most callous and most barbarous of minor wars upon a comparatively helpless fellow member of the League of Nations. Fifty other members of that League have unanimously condemned him as a violator of its Covenant and of various other treaties and conventions, yet have proved impotent to impose any effective check upon him, while Rome, the mother of European civilisation, gloats over the news of numberless black bodies being carried down the swollen waters of Abyssinian rivers. And to all this Paris, “ centre of European culture, is ready to shut her eyes rather than risk the friendship of the convicted culprit. It is most assuredly a mad world in which we live in this twentieth, century of the Christian era and with but few symptoms showing of any early return to sanity.