Anzac in 1947

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 411, 9 May 1947, Page 5

Anzac in 1947

T is not in itself a good sign ] that Anzac Day was. celebrated as reverently in 1947 as in any of the 32 years since the landing. It is a good sign that we still reverence courage and self-sacri-fice; but in Australia and New Zealand Anzac Day is the national day of war remembrance-not mourning alone or victory aloneand it is possible to remember war unprofitably as well as profitably. It is no doubt true, all in all, that Anzac Day still means what it has always meant to those who are old enough to remember 1915. To them there is still more sorrow in it than rejoicing, and in their rejaicing still more humility than pride. Apart from anything else the fact that Gallipoli itself was a military defeat, that those who died won no victory and those who lived no -triumph, that fact still keeps us humble about military glory in general. Anzac Day to the Anzac generation would have been a mockery long ago if its central meaning had not always been that remembering virtue in others brings virtue a little nearer to ourselves. But each year the proportion of those who were not born in 1915 rises, without diminution so far in the proportion of those who have had bitter experience of war. The world has seen a more total war than anything it thought possible in 1915, and Anzac Day could easily become now a meaningless echo of a past that we would do well to forget or an excuse for further war-monger-ing. The first would make it a mockery faster than anything else, the second a very real menace, and the day it threatens to be one or the other it should be dropped out of our lives. It will not then be Anzac Day. It will be something that Anzac Day never was and must never be allowed to become. .