Anzac Day

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 45, 3 May 1940, Page 12

Anzac Day

T was not surprising that the Anzac Day celebrations last week recalled the fervour and solemnity of days that we were beginning to forget. What was surprising was the fact that some speakers seemed to feel that the battles of twenty-five years ago had been fought in vain. To assume that any battle is useless which is necessary is a worse form of defeatism than to suppose that struggle can be futile when surrender means death. There is no, such thing as useless fighting against degradation. Whatever the odds against us are, we must gain something by resistance, and lose everything by surrender. We fought twentyfive years ago as we fight to-day-to preserve our Self-respect; and it is decadence to suppose that we lost, or could lose, that battle. We did not lose it. But some of us since have lost our sense of direction. The battle twenty-five years ago was won. Germany was stopped, thrown back, humbled, and disarmed. If the same enemy threatens the world again, the world in the meantime has had twenty-five years of peace, and those who would have been Germany’s victims, twenty-five years of liberty. It is a negation of reason to say that the last struggle was futile because it saved us for only a quarter of a century and not for ever. Nor is there any need to blush because we called the last war a war to end war. There is need to blush for the use to which we put our victory, none for the spirit, or even for the hopes, with which we entered the struggle and carried it on. War was not ended forever; but its end was brought appreciably nearer. When it will vanish no man knows, but the 1914-1918 struggle was the beginning of its end. It was the first war in history aimed at the abolition of war, and its achievement was the reluctance, the horror, and the burning indignation with which the civilised world took up arms again. 7 Whatever Anzac Day was becoming, it is ‘no longer a day for lamentation. Neither is it ‘a day for shallow boasting. It is a day for dedicating ourselves to the task that time has undone, for going on where the men of 1918 left off, for doing finally if we can what they did so gloriously once, but for doing it in any case, now, while the pestilence rages,