THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, APRIL 25. 1918. ANNIVERSARY OF ANZAD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LV, Issue 16833, 25 April 1918, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, APRIL 25. 1918. ANNIVERSARY OF ANZAD.

I To-pay is the third anniversary of I the landing at Anzac It is a day ; sacred to tho memory of many gali lant men, among whom we pardonI ably count first the sons of New Zealand. It is a day on which many emotions blend, but above all it is a national day, a date wo cherish as associated for all time with our Dominion, , even although it be as sacred to Australia and to many English homes. It was on April 25, 1915, that New Zealanders for the first time felt the blast of modern, scientific war, and found themselves as a virile, fighting race, worthy of the freedom they had inherited and in which they had been nurtured. Sir lan Hamilton has put it on record that the landing involved difficulties for which no precedent was forthcoming in military history. He might have added that they were difficulties which only the soldier could overcome, for the Landing was a soldiers' battle. Tho rugged coast affoHed opportunity for no Napoleonic touch, the narrow beaches gave room for no manoeuvre by which generalship might outwit the enemy. There was no surprise and there, could be no evading tho formidable defences which German engineers had superimposed on natural ramparts. The decision rested entirely with the soldier, and the task which tho British forces were called upon to perform was the seemingly impossible one of storming a shore which nature had apparently made impregnable, in the face of an enemy at least twice as strong who had been fortifying for months. This was the test to which untried Now Zealand and Australian troops were put, and on the result hung more than the Gallipoli campaign.

Tho Battle of the Landing was, the first in which a citizen army was pitted against the legions of German militarism. The war was still in its infancy, and although the manhood of England had rushed to arms it was not yet trained. The regular army, after assisting tho French to stop tho first headlong rush at the battle of the Marne, was defending the Channel coast and even as tho New Zealanders and Australians landed at Anzac was putting the seal on its devotion in the second battle of Ypres. Some Englisji territorials had taken the field and the Canadians were about to give another proof of tho quality of Dominion troops by their fine defence under clouds of poisonous gas, then novel in its barbarity. But on the whole the new armies of the Empire were still in the making and the Gallipoli landing was the first employment of them on a major scale. How would they behave ? That was a question on the answer to which hung the fate of civilisation itself. German critics sneered at tho "raw levies," and affirmed that these amateur soldiers could not be matched against carefully-trained German divisions or the German-led Turks. Had tho German critics been right; had it proved that peace-loving nations could not defend themselves against a militarism which had become expert in war through long apprenticeship; had courage been a product of the Prussian barracks and steadfastness a matter of training— would have been no Landing and freedom would have perished from the earth.

But there was a Landing. Those ardent sons of Australia and New Zealand were aflame with a passion which German critics could neither know nor understand. What mattered it that eight months before few of them had thought of war. Enough that when war challenged, they waited not, but sought the stricken field so that their own fair land might remain inviolate. Discipline They were a band of brothers bound to each other by a common cause, fearing no officer, but respecting each according to his merits. Courage? They were of a fighting race and the pick of its volunteers. Morale! They were afire with a righteous indignation which transformed them. No German tradition of past battles could kindle and exalt as these men wero lifted above themselves by their homely ideals of freedom and right. No Turk who cried aloud to Allah had their faith in the justice of their cause. Numbers? What did it matter if the enemy were in double strength. These citizens were ready to die that their country might live and perhaps because of their very inexperience they deemed nothing impossible. So the open boats left the ships to creep painfully through the Turkish barrage, opening the first chapter in the long tale of heroism which has made Gallipoli a word revered in every allied land. Australians first in tho wild dash 1 for the shore; New Zealanders as hot on their heels as officers would allow; at other points gallant English divisions winning the same glory. The Landing was made and i the world knew that free men could and would defeat German militarism, that the soul of a New Zealander made him more than a match for the Turk, and that what citizen armies might lack in training they more than supplied in devotion. Gallipoli was a pledge that the armies mustering in England would bo worthy successors to the men who won tho Marne and held the Yser, a forecast of Flers, Messines, and Passchendaele Ridge, and a moral assurance to the allies that from overy free Dominion of the Empire men will march to war until the authors of war are utterly overthrown, and peace is again established on a sure foundation of liberty and self-government.