Manawatu Evening Standard. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 1940 ANZAC DAY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 124, 24 April 1940, Page 8

Manawatu Evening Standard. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 1940 ANZAC DAY.

Though twenty-five years liave passed since the memorable landing at Gallipoli of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, in association with British, French and Indian troops, and supported by the naval forces, Anzac Day still retains its established place in the Dominion’s calendar. Tomorrow, throughout the country, thoughts will again be turned to that great achievement in our history, when New Zealand emerged to nationhood as its young men won undying fame on the shores of a hostile land far from the one that gave them birth. It is a glorious chapter, the establishment of a tradition that has been bequeathed to the young men who to-day are to carry, the torch. Many have been the tributes paid to the Anzacs of 1915, and of their suberb bravery on that never to be forgotten day, which tools sad toll of life. “They were men,” Dr. C. E. W. Bean has said in his story of Anzac incorporated in the Australian Ofiicial History, “whom their countries could ill-afford to lose. But with their lives they purchased a tradition beyond all human power to appraise and set for all time the standard of conduct for the Australian and New Zealand soldier.” Though the Dardanelles campaign had to be written down as a military failure, there were times when it came very near to triumph. And even though it did not achieve its aim it had a tremeudously important bearing upon the trend of events in the Middle East and Southern Europe, and played a not inconspicuous part in the Allies’ ultimate triumph. But the words of the Poet Laureate are still a guide and comfort to those who lost dear ones in that desperate adventure, which he says should be regarded “not as a tragedy, nor as a mistake, but as a great human effort . . . which achieved the impossible many times and failed in the end . . from something which had nothing to do with the arms or the men who bore them.”

The spirit of Anzac found its expression in all the other theatres where the New Zealand forces were employed, and tomorrow’s commemoration embraces all the men and women who gave their lives in the Great War. Its true expression will be found in the services at the shrines of remembrance and elsewhere when everything that Anzac conveys, heroism, endurance, loyalty, and self-sacrifice will be emphasised. For such were the men of Anzac, in whose footsteps to-day there has followed another army of young New Zealanders to Egypt, There, where the Anzacs received the training that magnificently

equipped them to face the greatest perils on the rugged and precipitous cliffs of Gallipoli, and the difficulties and hardships of the subsequent warfare until the evacuation, the Second Expeditionary Force is being trained to take its part in the adventure that lies before it until the world is rid of the blot of Hitlerism. No more appropriate place could have been chosen, a fact that this generation of soldiers would be quick to sense. Theirs is the task to help in completing the job that was left unfinished in 1918 —to make the world safe for decent people and enable national life to continue free from war’s alarms and the ruination of strife. What Sir Francis Drake said of his sailors, “God send us such another company when there be need,” is fittingly appropriate to these young soldiers cf 1940. The traditions of Anzac are safe in their keeping.