ANZAC: TWENTY-ONE YEARS AFTER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22402, 24 April 1936, Page 1 (Supplement)

ANZAC: TWENTY-ONE YEARS AFTER

JN APRIL, 1915, it seemed incredible that there could ever be such a time as twenty-one years after! So overwhelming was the thought of war that it seemed as though the world must remain drowned in strife and sorrow for ever. Often we looked back in a kincl of amazement to the days before the war; it seemed unbelievable that such horror could have been s.waiting, and we so utterly unknowing, so unprepared. Yet stranger still to look ahead, and picture a world without war, without hospital ships, training camps, troop-ships—and casualty lists. So it went on, year after year, and then suddenly it was all over, and peace came to the world once more. Peace! Looking back over the years, one wonders anew how the world has managed to survive the "peace," just as we wondered, twenty-one years ago, how it would survive the warl Yet it seems that humanity can survive anything, war, peace, famine, earthquake, fire, flood, prosperity, adversity—anything at all I At the end of a generation or two, it is perfectly ready and waiting to discuss the pros and coris of another cataclysm. That is very much the position in which the twenty-first anniversary of Anzac finds us to-day. We who remember, hate and dread beyond all power of words the thought of another war, and there are millions upon millions of the stillremembering alive to-day. But there are alive also millions more who know nothing of war save what they have read or been told. They have no personal memories to make it real. You cannot pass on memories; you live with them, or you try to escape from them, but when they are burned into the fibre of your being with fires of suffering, salted down with tears, they are yours forever; you can forget nothing. Significance o 1 Anzac Day That is why the latest suggestion to rob our own Anzac Day of its special significance, and merge it into a holiday, is likely still to meet with little public support. There are still too many of us who remember. We remember not only the years of war, but the days before, the long, happy days of unbroken home life of a generation more happy and carefree, perhaps, than our world will know .again. It was our generation that saw the fulfilment-—and alas I the frustration—of the dearest hopes of the pioneer founders of our country. They themselves had come through war and all the hardships of colonisation; through long years of penury and privation they had worked for their sons, built homes for them, centred all their hopes on them, and then suddenly the whole structure of life collapsed like a toy house built with a child's pack of cards. The. Empire was at war; New Zealand was at war. Men must die by the million, and mothers must read in a printed casualty list the last brief memorial to the children they had borne, fathers must leave off planning and hoping for the sons whose names the world would know no more, save on their country's Roll of Honour. Tt is not our individual loss we mourn to-day, we who remember. It is not because my brother fell at Gallipoli, or yours in France, jbhat jvb want to

We Who Remember

By ELSIE K. MORTON

keep Anzac Day as a day of precious remembrap.ee. It is because they were members of one great and splendid company, that of a lost generation, and because the keeping of Anzac Day in its present form is the most powerful and potent aid to remembrance of our obligation to the living as well as to the dead. The Aftermath They are with us in every walk of life, the majority of them absorbed into the life of the community. But those others? Those pitiful others, who year by year lie on beds of pain, those whom the stress and strain of the years have placed by the hundred in our homes for the mentally afflicted, those overtaken too soon by advancing age and increasing physical frailty? Twenty-one years ago they were in the prime of a splendid youth and manhood. Now they are breaking, or are already broken. What are we doing about it, we who still remember, we who should remember, but have, alas, forgotten ? Every year as Anzac Day comes round, there is much talk of the splendour of sacrifice and the glory of service, and of faithfulness-unto-death, and, even as they listen, men who did not die as heroes, but lived to come back, are thinking grimly that the fruits of victory sometimes turn as bitter in the mouth as the ashes of defeat and death. Youth and War Time passes so swiftly, yet stands so very still. We who remember think back to-day to that first Anzac morning, our thoughts winging the great sundering gulf of the years as though it were but yesterday. The past lives again as we handle the photographs, the old fading letters, that were written on the eve of the Landing. The old grief is deadened with the passing of the years, but the core of sorrow is still buried deep in the heart.

But we sorrow now not so much for them —they are at rest, they need not our tears nor yet our praise—as for those who, having drunk the bitter dregs of war's suffering, have found no recompense in the fruits of peace. And mingled with the inevitable sadness of remembrance is apprehension as to what the coming years may bring to youth, going on its way unheeding, even as we went in years gone by. Thousands of boys and girls will come of age in this twenty-first year after Anzac, who were not born, or who were but babes in arms, when New Zealand won her nationhood at Gailipoli. Even men and women with sons and daughters now of school ago were but little children when New Zealand soldiers made their immortal Landing. They have nothing to remember. It is only the ageing fathers and mothers, and our own generation, that of the men of Aii7»c, who still remember. When threats of war darken the world horizon, we wish witn all our hearts wo could spare youth from ever knowing the tragedy and foul crime of war. But all things work out to their destined end. Wars have stricken nations from the beginning of time, peace has come, and peace has passed. Anzac still remains to us in peace, as in war, an inspiration and a memorial for all time.. It is for those who bore the brunt of the war years, those in the forefront of battle and those behind the lines, who served their Empire day by day in a thousand unknown homes, to say how Anzac Day shall still be observed. After our generation has passed, it will not matter greatly. All we ask is that we bo allowed still to honour our dead and. remember the living, as .we have done for twenty years past, we who once were young with those who gave their youth, their all Youth, you belong to ua, Who are neither old nor young. You are the very dreamß- we dreamed, You are the sonss we sung, So we build an nltfir to you, We who are not old, But cnce upon a day were young.