The Press Friday, April 24, 1925. Anzac Day.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18365, 24 April 1925, Page 18

The Press Friday, April 24, 1925. Anzac Day.

With each Anzac Day there comes a lurking thought that a day may daAvn on which we no longer care. Man is born to sorrow, but he is born also to frivolity and forgetfulness. Already to some of us Gallipoli is among the "old, unhappy far-off things" in which we have no personal belief. Wo know that there was a landing, a battle, days and weeks of agonising struggle, and then a sad farowell. Wo know it because wo havo seen it in books, because men have, talked to us who were there, because it has added words to our vocabulary, and because dreams do not disorganise the calendar and close our shops. Wo know it as we know Plassey and Trafalgar and Blenheim and Balaclava, but no longer as a recent and real experience. And these oven who do feel its reality knew that their feelings will be duller after the second ten years. There are fathers and mothers, of course—we do not dare t6 think how many live in Canterbury —who -will never again approach April without heaviness and dread. Nothing that can bo said to-day or any day will help them. But most of us escaped the woTSfc that could happen, and the best is beyond us. For tho best of Gallipoli, if we could keep it in .our heads and hearts, was its comradeship. There hasj never been anything in history finer than the spirit of the men who smiled through so many terrible months, and then accepted the discipline of defeat. We cannot expect in pcaco the occasional rapfcuros,of war, nor is it able to ask that the men who buoyed one another up in the face of the onemy and tho presence of death should still be heroes at home. Tho sting in Anzac Day is the knowledge that the men who fought as well as tho men who ukeoxed them on are subject to time's ,&«ie treacheries. It is only for an hour or two, only when their day dawns and the old memories come flooding back, that i they can be themselves again; <tnd it is possibly that fact, and, not the honour we can do the dead; which is the real justification for keeping' the day sacred. Fortunately WO keep it to-morrow, except for One sad thought, with bolder hearts than we had twelve months agOi It is a tragedy which no one will feel more than the soldiers themselves, who know how staunch a patriot he, is, and how doggedly he worked through all the long days of war, that our Prime Minister is not able to niake his customary Appearance,' or deliver one Of his Oldtime messages. But if we could forget that difference, we should be able to feel that the world is after alPinaking some progress towards stability and peace, and that some of the anxieties we hftd twelve months ag6 can be seen now to have been unjustifiable. The world is a confused place, still in many directions, but when we thank Our soldiers to-morrow for the noble sacrifices they made we can see, if still as through a glass darkly, that the Struggle availed something.