A time to remember

Anzac Day in New Zealand and in Australia, and one suspects in Turkey which also reverentially marks the bravery the three nations, is the only holiday we have where the day is respected, writes Phil Campbell, ditor Rotorua Review.

We fish and hunt or play sport at Easter, go heavily into debt over goodwill at Christmas, play sport on the Queen's Birthday likewise on Waitangi Day and-or anniversary weekends.

Today week, New Zealanders will mark the day in Australia and in Turkey (the Speaker of the House, Margaret Wilson, will be in Turkey this year), and Australians and Turks everywhere in the world will reflect a spell.

Anzac Day is, it appears, one day of the year New Zealand stops, reflects of a past, of an age in which the nation's finest examples of manhood set off to fight in wars that promised adventure and romance but dripped blood, reducing our men to skeletal waste.

Great grandparents, grandparents, parents, sons and daughters and grand sons and grand daughters now assemble in greater numbers each year on April 25 to remember the fallen, and those who survived subsequent conflicts from World War ll to the present day.

This year, Lt Col George McLeod will no doubt, in the briskness of autumn, under falling leaves which discolour on their way to the ground, as in previous years, bark crisply and good naturedly for the men fell in to fall out after parade at the RSA.

Lt Col McLeod is aiming for 50 years in this annual parade.

This parade of annual remembrance is the only day of the year New Zealand stops, where even national crime figures halt temporarily (the other times are during international All Blacks rugby telecasts) and bows its collective head. The day can be wrought with controversy, but mostly out of genuine concerns that outrages for which the day is commemorated don't recur.

The world's attentions are in the Middle East now, with a small peacekeeping New Zealand presence, likewise in Afghanistan.

War is far from these shores, whereas terrorism is imperceptibly edging closer.

The irony should not be lost that as we may be protected from conflict we are jittery about terrorism, and our defences in are arranged now try to contend with both.

The Anzac legend is well known. April 25 is marked as the anniversary of the day allied troops landed in Gallipoli.

The Anzacs (Australians and New Zealanders) then fought in such brutal conditions that the battle has gone down in infamy for its cruelty. The landing troops hit shore nearly 2kms from the intended site, and then had to engage the enemy 100m up sheer cliff faces against well-positioned defences.

On that first night, of the 16,000 men who landed, 2300 had perished.

Eight months later, after an honourable withdrawal, New Zealand, it was said, began its nationhood - a virtual 21st birthday beano, with the lurid present of lives lost in war to show for it.

The Turks never forgot the bravery of the combatants on both sides; from it admiration grew, as it did among the Greeks in World War ll when New Zealand troops fought at Crete and Cassino.

When months later Kemal Ataturk the great Turkish commander and later reformer for his country threatened Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, with menace, Churchill replied: "I'll send in the Anzac troops." Kemal kept his distance.