Dialogue: On Anzac Day we need to do better

By JOHN ROUGHAN

There is an impressive generation coming of age in this country. It has been turning up in numbers on Anzac Day for several years now, though not always impressed with what it finds.

I know two who came home from the dawn parade on Wednesday disgusted.

It is an indictment of my generation, I think, that any member of it could manage to run an uninspiring dawn service at the Auckland Cenotaph. There can be few more wonderful places in this world at sunrise.

You enter the Domain in the fresh darkness before daybreak and come upon ghostly columns of elderly men moving up the hill. Their footsteps are the only sound they make.

They assemble on the forecourt of the War Memorial Museum and a crowd grows around them. The silence is broken with a roll of drums and the first strains of Abide With Me.

The service proceeds with prayers and hymns, the familiar Anzac dedication, the laying of wreaths. Then it falls to the Mayor of Auckland to give the address.

The city council was very pleased, said Christine Fletcher, at the announcement of the benefits for war veterans this week. It was something the council had long supported. She was also pleased that Vietnam veterans are recognised on Anzac Day. The council was considering an RSA proposal for a special march for them.

There was not much more. The ceremony was over and the people had drifted away by the time the first rays streaked the sky over Rangitoto.

How hard can it be to say something that chimes with the thoughts of an audience at a time like that? It is dismaying to realise how thin the level of leadership is in the country today.

Helen Clark is rising to the spirit of the coming generation admirably, in gestures if not words. Taking some school essay winners to Gallipoli last year, and to Crete next month, are master strokes.

But beyond the front benches of Parliament these days you look hard for inspiration. At the top of our largest local bodies there are conspicuous lightweights.

And it is no better in business, as the invisibility of the Qantas New Zealand directors demonstrated this week.

Those who made the speeches this Anzac Day were as out of touch with the mood of the young as their parents were with the temper of the 1960s.

Listeners in their late teens and 20s today find Vietnam-era themes as tedious as the speech-makers at the same age found the sentiments of the wartime generation.

The younger half of the population today has Vietnam in enviable historical perspective. You were on a loser, they say. Get over it.

They turn up to Anzac Day in awe of the supreme sacrifice people have made for others. It is something my generation overlooked in our obsession with the causes of war and the carnage.

And there is another change in Anzac Day that is not often acknowledged. Those who made the speeches and compiled the coverage this week still dwelt on wars that were over before even they were born. They supposed that the younger people were turning out to mourn fallen grandfathers they could not have known.

It is far more likely that among the young there is a sense of heritage developing about Anzac Day that is quite different from the personal experience of loss and has nothing much to do with any particular conflict.

When children were asked about it this week, they were conscious of honouring people who had somehow "died for us." That is about the size of it.

Adults cannot leave it there. They need to feel that the sacrifice was made for freedom or democracy or peace.

But political principles, as fine as they might be, do not drive many people to risk their lives. If freedom, democracy, peace or any consequence of war was the object of the exercise, the country would not observe the beginning of a battle - a battle it ultimately lost at that - it would reserve its celebrations for the anniversary of victory.

The reason that battles, not necessarily victories, move people is probably that we value the sacrifice far more than the cause. It is as natural and right for Germans to honour their dead in the two world wars as it is for the Allies.

In both cases people put their lives on the line for others. There is nothing more sacred than that.

The mistake made in the anti-war movement - and made again this week by the Minister for Disarmament, Matt Robson - was to suggest that the cause could invalidate the sacrifice.

It seems that the best that products of that era can muster on occasions such as Anzac Day is a doleful lament for death and suffering. Dame Silvia Cartwright said:

"Our servicemen and women helped to secure for us the peace and freedom we now sometimes thoughtlessly enjoy. Their lives will count for nothing unless we strive to construct the defences of peace.

"Of all the days in the year, this is the one most dedicated to peace. Only then can we best honour the dead and those who returned. We remember their service and their sacrifice."

Those of us lucky enough to have missed a war cannot really contemplate how a person can bring himself not to run from gunfire. It is possible to imagine circumstances in which we would face death to protect our family. It is not really possible, if we are honest with ourselves, to imagine dying for a wider allegiance.

But that is what servicemen and women have done and that is the reason most nations find their most valuable source of unity and inspiration in them.

Today's younger generation sense that. When it comes their turn to celebrate Anzac Day they will do it better.