Monday 25 April 2016 marks the centenary of the first ever
ANZAC day commemorations and service.
While the there was a half day holiday declared and services
held on 30 April 1915 when news of the landings reached New Zealand and
Australia, the character of that event would have been triumphal and hopeful.
The headlines of the time certainly reflect this. This would be the knockout
blow that brought the Central Powers to their knees and a swift end to the war.
The boys fought gallantly. The boys are pressing the enemy back. The boys will
be home by Christmas.
Over a million men of the Allied forces were already dead or
seriously wounded, but they were French and British and Irish and Indian and a
long way away. New Zealanders and Australians knew of the human cost of war but
did not yet feel it.
By 25 April 1916 the Gallipoli campaign was a failure, the
troops had been evacuated. Over 8,000 New Zealanders had been seriously
wounded, including over 2,700 who lost their lives. Almost everyone in our
population of c 1 million was related to or knew someone who was dead or ruined
on that bleak peninsula. In addition to the published casualty lists, the
public in towns great and small would see both outpourings of grief and the
living spectacle of maimed men home from the front. We were not yet hardened to
loss the way we would be when the death notices started to come in from the
Western Front in the next great blood-letting on the Somme.
The commemoration in 1916 may have included speeches and
publications that echoed the triumphalist jingoism of April 1915, but the
hearts of those gathered would have been touched by a sense of tragedy and
awful waste for our society as a whole and for the .
From this arose the two phrases we associate most with ANZAC
day: Lest we forget, and We will remember them. Superficially they appear to be
different renderings of the same sentiment, but are quite distinct. Lest we
forget is a directive, an admonishment- lest we forget that we put our sons’
and brothers’ lives in the hands of generals over who we have no control, that
we are not inherently militarily superior to men of another culture and we must
respect our enemies’ willingness to fight, that a war may be just but no war is
good, that sacrifice is not just a word. These are ideas, important but
essentially insubstantial.
We remember faces, voices, touch. We remember formerly
strong men wrecked, moving painfully on crutches or twitching and quivering in
our streets as the gas damage slowly claims them in the years following return.
We remember old men who would never talk about what happened ‘over there’.
We remember parents and grandparents who, as children, lived in the
shadow of the telegram delivery boy. And who will remember their own father
forever through the eyes of a six-year-old. We remember people, even if only
through the memories of others.
So whatever noble words are said at dawn on Monday about
what we must not forget, I will think of brothers Sergeant Cecil Walter Riley
and Lieutenant Harry Bolton Riley of Collingwood, Tasman. Killed at Sari Bair
in August 1915 and the Somme October 1916 respectively. I will remember them.
