Anzac Day

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 463, 7 May 1948, Page 5

Anzac Day

HE fact that Anzac Day fell this year on a Sunday made it easier to maintain the distinction between a holy day and a holiday. But it did not make it easier to adjust the hopes of 30 years ago to the gloomy realities of the present day. If Anzac Day were not primarily a day of dedication it would in fact be impossible to observe it any longer. But it is dedication before anything else, and if we do not go on devoting it to that purpose year after year it becomes just a mockery and a sham: Those who wished to drop it from the calendar in 1939 would have been right if the day had ever been a celebration of conquest or military victory. But Gallipoli was a military defeat. The only conquest achieved there was moral; the only victory, triumph over weakness and fear. In a military sense those who died on the peninsula died to no purpose; those who survived came away frustrated and humble. They had lost their battle, their equipment, their ground; everything but their cohesion and courage. We might as well celebrate the battle of Hastings as the struggle on Gallipoli if we were seeking to make a military triumph of it. But Anzac Day has nothing to do with military glory. It is a day added to our calendar in memory of a bitter struggle in which thousands of our kinsmen won enduring moral glory. Because it is that and nothing else it is proper to keep the day holy. But it will never be .propér to keep it in any other’ way-toc make any kind of V-day of it or an occasion for boasting and swagger.