Anzac Day

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 96, 24 April 1941, Page 4

Anzac Day

T was not easy, when Anzac Day arrived last year, to avoid some bitterness of heart. Destiny, it was difficult not to feel, had made a mockery of all the sorrow and suffering endured twenty-five years earlier. The world had not been made safe for democracy, or for ordinary human decency, but had been plunged into a blacker and filthier mess than any it had known since the Dark Ages. That is how our minds ran till we really began to think; and they ran that way most readily if we were neither soldiers who had fought on Gallipoli nor the fathers and mothers of soldiers who had fallen there. For it is the paradox of all wars that they mean least to those who have been through them, who have faced all the issues over and over again in victory and defeat, and who know, because they have had to discover in black hours of enduring and waiting, why they fought at all. It is doubtful if there are a thousand men in New Zealand to-day, or five hundred, who think that they went through the last war for nothing. Nor is it likely that there are a thousand among the sixteen thousand homes bereft in that war which to-day shelter war-resisters. Returned soldiers know, their parents know, everybody out of swaddling clothes knows, that Anzac Day 1941 finds our Division facing as terrible an ordeal as anything experienced on Gallipoli, in Palestine, or in France. It would be a’ betrayal of them, of their courage, and of their need of our courage, to attempt to gloss over that fact. By a combination of circumstances which Britain has not been able to control, its armies on two fronts have been thrown suddenly into desperate positions. They have taken risks which the enemy has been quick to exploit, and in both cases already they are fighting, as British armies have so often fought, with the odds heavily against them. Those are the facts as Anzac Day returns to us, but the mood in which we meet them is no longer a mood of hasty and bitter cynicism. We all know now, as some of us may not have known: a year ago, that nothing can make the last war useless but failure in this extension of it. We know in short-and the knowledge has calmed and cleansed us-that the issues are victory when we can achieve it, next year, the year after, or ten years hence, victory or democracy’s blackout for a hundred years,