Brian Rudman: It's time to let Gallipoli's killing ground rest in peace

What a gloomy week it's been. And I'm not just talking about the weather.

It started with a public holiday - if that's the appropriate word - to mark the gruesome execution over 2000 years ago of someone who claimed his martyrdom would save mankind.

Now it's Anzac Day, when we mourn the tens of thousands of young New Zealanders and Australians, killed, maimed or traumatised on foreign shores in the great imperial wars of the 20th century.

By the time you read this, thousands of Aucklanders will have gathered for the dawn service at the War Memorial Museum and many others will be preparing for community services across the city and country.

Hopefully, National's foreign affairs spokesman, Wayne Mapp, will attend one. The experience may dampen his continuing ardour for wanting to send our troops to a place near Gallipoli to join in America's illegal war and occupation.

A letter writer in yesterday's Herald claimed "world wars of the last century taught us an important lesson: do not go to war unprepared".

To me the lesson is simpler than that. It's do not go to war full-stop. Not to the sorts of wars our former American allies have staged in places like Vietnam and Iraq at any rate.

The continuing ability of Anzac Day ceremonies to draw large and growing crowds nearly 60 years after the last big war ended is a strange phenomenon, particularly for a people not comfortable with public ritual and emotion.

Perhaps it has a lot to do, these days, with the age of the participants, young people encouraged, as I was in my day, to mourn young people not much older than themselves who had died for Queen and country.

My first and last dawn parade was as a shivering 13-year-old, part of a Boy Scout honour guard. It's odd what you remember. For me, it's not the lone bugler, or the skirl of the pipes that lingers, it's the metronomic clink, clink, clink of the medals, slowly rising in volume as row upon row of returned soldiers emerged out of the darkness on their way up the hill to take their positions around the cenotaph.

Scattered through the ranks were a few not much older than myself, wearing the medals of relatives who had not returned.

It was enough to put you off war for life. And an introduction to the lunacies of adult life, because in the weeks before we paraded, our religions were checked. Two of our troop were discovered to be Catholics and not allowed to attend.

Those were the days when the Catholic Church forbade worship with Protestants, and with Protestant ministers officiating and not willing to bow out, Catholic soldiers and supporters had to go elsewhere.

An earlier memory also lingers. It was being caught in downtown New Plymouth a few years earlier, at 11am on Armistice Day when the sirens went off. Mum had been rushing me to my first dental appointment, and I, naturally, had been dragging my feet and we were late.

Armistice Day marked the end of the World War I and in those days, when the sirens went off, the whole town paused, pedestrians stood to attention, hats off, cars and buses stopped and people got out and stood alongside. It was an eerie feeling. Unfortunately for me, the world only stopped for two minutes. Then it was off to the murder house.

In the 1960s, Anzac Day commemorations got caught up in the Vietnam War protests, thanks to Returned Services Association chiefs like Sir Hamilton Mitchell, who denounced we opponents as traitors. They even rattled their pro-war sabres at Anzac Day services.

Unsurprisingly, anti-war protesters responded in kind. Two were arrested for laying a wreath to the Vietnamese war dead at a 1967 Anzac Day ceremony and were convicted of disorderly behaviour.

It sounds silly and trivial now, but I've not bought an RSA poppy since.

While the blatant politicisation of Anzac Day is now behind us, the growing popularity of the pilgrimage to Gallipoli, and its new role as the birthplace of a New Zealand national identity, has me flummoxed.

Since the 1990, 75th anniversary hoopla at Gallipoli, presided over by the Governor-General, it's become a ritual for leading political figures or, as this year, the Governor-General, to join growing crowds of backpackers on the remote Turkish battlefield on Anzac Day.

What the Turks make of this annual pilgrimage of the descendants of invaders to the scene of a defeat, I don't know. They are certainly generous to allow it to take place.

I can't help feeling there must be a better foundation for our national identity than this battlefield. Also, wouldn't it be more respectful to let this old slaughter ground rest once more in peace.

Herald Feature: Anzac Day

Highlights of the 2002 Anzac photo exhibition: