The Press Monday, April 25, 1921. Anzac Day.

Press, Volume LVII, Issue 17128, 25 April 1921, Page 6

The Press Monday, April 25, 1921. Anzac Day.

There will be few in New Zealand and Australia whose thoughts will not go back to-day to the great adventure which has consecrated the day in our national history. There will be scores of thouaandß to whom Anzao Day will bring crowding memories, emotions of sorrow, and pride that are beyond the power of speech to express, that penetrate, in Masefield's phrase, "beyond " the guard of the English heart." In the six years that have passed since, in the thrice-famous "landing," the young countries whose men there won undying renown found their nationhood, the day has acquired a special and almost sacred significance. Set apart, not as a mere holiday, but as a day of commemoration it has come to be not only the anniversary of the daring enterprise for ever associated in all minds

with the name of Gallipoli, but also the

day which calls to remembrance tho -- heroism and sacrifices of. Australasian soldiers on all the battle-fronts in which they fought and fell throughout the war. The courage and tenacity they displayed in passing through the hell-fire of* the landing, in the dawn of that Sunday morning that now seems so far distant, they showed on many a stricken field in France and Flanders and Palestine. The fact that lifts the early fighting on the steep hills and narrow beaches of Gallipoli out of the long aeries of episodes in the following years was that it was the initiation of our men into the grim game of war. We had bidden them good-bye only a few short months before, and we had hardly realised that the young men whom we had been used to see in our streets and on our farms had become soldiers, before they had accomplished a feat thbt won for them undying lame. By the sheer bravery and dogged resolution- of that Sect they not only seemed to have risen to a higher plane, but even to have given their country a dignity and status that it had never before possessed. There was hardly a man or woman in New Zealand who in those days was not mourning the death of a 3on, or relative, or friend, but who wrs not at the same time ' conscious of a feeling that those who had passed away had, by the manner of their death, added fresh luetre to tho history of the race from which they had sprung. So Anzac Day has become not solely a day of sorrowful rekindling of poignant memories. We mourn to-day with those who mourn, but with them ' we can rejoice that men oi our blood in that direful day proved to the world tihat the old heroic strain still ran true. Nor was theirs the blind valour of ignorance. Though as the months went on, battlo and disease and suffering exacted their heavy daily toll, the spirit of the Anzacs never flagged. A distin r guished Australian general a few days ago, in an address on the war and its lessons, speaking of uhe evacuation of Gallipoli, said that on the last night the operations were carried out by tho organisation of the men still remaining on shore into three parties, and it made a lump come into his throat when he remembered that the only popular party of the three was the one that was to bethe last to leave. Anzac Day has its lessons for tho future as well as its memoiies of the past. It commemorates, in its wider acceptance, as our national war memorial day, the fine ideals of national service to which the war gave birtih. Wo are not referring now to military service, ' of which, let us hope in all sin-

cerity, the necessity will never again be forced upon the Dominion, but to that service for the country and the Empire, as well as for the soldiers, of winch the war furnished us with fo many opportunities. It was a time of which it might be said almost literally that none was for the party or for himself, but all were for the State. The need for the exercise of that spirit was never greater than to-day, even though we have no immediate foreign foes to conquer. Anzac Day will be commemorated in vain if it- does not remind all of us of the groat ideals for which the war was fought, and impress us afresh with the need of applying the lessons wo then learned to the conduct of our life as a nation and a member of t;he great family of the Empire.