THE WAIPA POST Printed on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. TUESDAY, 24th APRIL, 1928. FOR REMEMBRANCE.

Waipa Post, Volume 36, Issue 2148, 24 April 1928, Page 4

THE WAIPA POST Printed on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. TUESDAY, 24th APRIL, 1928. FOR REMEMBRANCE.

WHERE the white man lives, and, in no few cases, where the brown man has his some, through the length and breadth of the British Empire, scarce a city, a town, or a hamlet but has its memorial to the dead who die “ in Flanders fields,” whose grave mounds, “ sunless billows,” mark the sandy shores of Tigris; who rest beneath the cliffs of Gallipoli; or who lie among the Balkan hills. The reason is but too sadly plain. No city, town, or village but mourns its young sons, even its daughters, who gave to their country the greatest gift of all, very life itself; and, more than this, uplifted by love of country, surrendered communion with friends, love of wife and child, and kindly intercourse in lovely peace between man and man. What wonder that in cenotaph, upon inscribed brass, from broken obelisk or glowing window, in stately memorials of enduring stone, and in a hundred other ways the dead material calls trumpet-tongued to the inner ear that these men and women are not dead, do but sleep, are of the "glorious throng of the immortals ? Memory shall not fade with us who knew them, but shall go on from generation to generation “while the races of mankind endure.” The stone may crumble, the inscribed brass grow illegible with age, the windows be fragments, the very iron be rusted into nothingness, yet the printed word which the Latin adage calls lasting shall through the centuries tell of these warriors whose dust has long mingled with environing clay, yet whose deeds life. That is the purpose of the monument in the heart of Te Awamutu today, and its lesson should be in the hearts of all the people of Te Awamutu every day throughout the year—but particularly on the anniversary of the epia landing on Gallipoli’s shores on the morning of 25th April, 1915.

It is a truism that, as life goes on, the passage of time seems to be extraordinarily rapid. To youth a month is as long as is a year to mature age. Thirteen years ! Some of us may think it almost incredible that such a time has passed since the immortal landing at Gallipoli. Immortal, that is, in so far as the note of immortality can attach to human history. It is pathetically inevitable that the recurrent anniversaries will gradually lose something of the pristine vitality. But it will be many a year before the solemn celebration of 25th April is dropped, ’and perhaps the thirteenth milestone is marked by a special significance. Those who were children in the early stages of the Great War are men and women now. They will not entirely have forgotten the lessons of that crucial period. There is a new generation in the schools. The youngsters of to-day can know nothing of the perils and achievements of the great crusade in behalf of freedom and civilisation except such as they learn from parents and teachers and books. It is to be trusted that they do learn something, and that they are not quite unaware of all they owe to the sacrificial valour and endurance displayed on so many battlegrounds. While Anzac Day primarily commemorates a particular and outstanding episode, which will always possess a unique interest for this part of the Empire, it embraces the whole sentiment and record of Impei'ial endeavour during the time when so much—everything—was at stake. It is the sacred memorial of every soldier who gave his life for the Empire’s cause, but it also marks the service of every soldier who 'risked his life without losing it. (The dead and the living rank equally in point of merit; and, as we have said before, there should be special thought of those who have been tragically incapacitated in body or mind. There is a death-in-life that may be more pathetic than actual death.

At the same time this comprehensive view of Anzac Day should not exclude recognition of the more restricted aspects of the occasion. For most people “Anzac,” however comprehensive the connotation of the Avord may be, spells “ Gallipoli,” and is fraught vdth the imperishable memories of a gloriously forlorn crusade. Controversy continues. Not a year passes without the appearance of some book of series of correspondence canvassing the origin and strategy and tactics of the expedition. It is not many months since the publication of an expert volume dealing critically with the circumstances of Wellington’s Peninsula campaign; and, if the analogy is reliable, the military students of the twenty-first century will concern themselves with the problems of a later and perhaps not less arresting Peninsula enterprise. Controversy, however, is outside the spirit of the coming celebration. The rights and wrongs of the bad, sad, splendid business, the “ infinite regret for all that might have baen,” all the grievances and heartburnings and sorroAVs are over and done with. They have be-

come portion and parcel of the dreadful past,” and the great Anzac episode is simply accepted as a sheer fact which had to be and was. It stands eminently conspicuous in the heroic annals which are proudly aloof from debate, free from the 1 soilure of ignoble aspersion. The Gallipoli enterprise, dispassionately regarded, whs not an entire failure. It might conceivably have been supremely successful. But even if it had been an entire failure, “ Anzac ” would be entitled to its . abiding renown. “ They never fail who die in a great cause, said Byron; and, to use a more popular strain, “ The souls of 'heroes die not in the land which they adore.” The Anzac commemoration is only two days apart from the festival -of St. George—an occasion not as carefully observed as it might be, but charged with the undying spirit of English chivalry and valour. St. George, with St. Andrew and St. Patrick in gallant company, may be supposed to. have watched over the awful, magnificent enterprise on 25th April, 1915.