Anzac Day

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 149, 1 May 1942, Page 4

Anzac Day

NZAC DAY this year was not so much celebrated as remembered. There were few processions, few speeches, only a partial holiday, and no absolute abstention from work. It was chiefly religious services and the laying of wreaths that distinguished it from other Saturdays, and recalled its original meaning and purpose. But that was not such a change as it sounds. Anzac Day has never been devoted to pageantry. It was not instituted as a day of rejoicing and has never been celebrated as a day of triumph. It has recalled the failures and sorrows of war no less emphatically than the final victory. The war was won at a great price, and on Anzac Day we have never forgotten the price, or tried to forget it. We can certainly not forget it now when we are paying a second time. But we can comfort ourselves with the thought that this day at least has been kept worthily. We have done many foolish things since April, 1915, and many since November, 1918, but we have never, lost sight of the fact that war is in itself a disaster and a disgrace, and that only lunatics glorify it. We have been too sore to glorify it in New Zealand. We have not been able to forget that the peace we enjoyed for twenty-one years, the liberty and the ease, were paid for in blood and tears. Anzac Day has always meant first of all in New Zealand that blood and those tears. It has always recalled to us the sixteen thousand men who died on foreign soil and the thousands who came home broken in body or in spirit. _ To-day it means the same things, with all the waste of another war added. But if it recalls those things first, since we are human, and have human affections and fears, it recalls also, and more than anything else, the fact that victory did come in the end. How soon itewill come again depends on the patience, the courage, and the determination with which we fight for it. In other words it depends on the degree to which Anzac is a tradition with us and not merely a word. Victory ‘will come when we are worthy of it, and remembering the men who fought and won twenty-four years ago has helped to make us worthy,