KEY POINTS:
On the mantelpiece in the lounge of my home sits a flat, nearly-oval stone, about 10cm by 8cm. Three years ago today I picked it up from the stony beach at Anzac Cove at the foot of the Gallipoli Peninsula.
It is light brown, almost the khaki colour of the battledress worn by our soldiers as they stormed ashore 93 years ago tomorrow, under withering fire from the Turks on the cliffs and hills above.
Those who survived long enough to take cover would have laughed uproariously had someone told them that the ill-conceived landing in which they were taking part would provide the genesis of their country's concept of nationhood. And that on April 25 every year for generations to come they would be remembered at memorial services throughout the land.
Later that day in 2005 I stood atop the dusty, scrub-clad hill called Chunuk Bair, whose name holds the ultimate place of honour in our nation's history.
And on that sacred ground where many hundreds of New Zealanders fought and suffered and died, I heard echoing down the decades the yelling of orders, the screams of the wounded, the grunts as a bullet tore the life out of one of our men, the shrieks as the Turks charged our trenches again and again and again.
I heard the thunder of naval artillery, the crack, crack, crack of a hundred rifles, the stutter of machine guns and the murderous whirr of shrapnel that cut down the flower of a generation of this nation's young manhood.
I smelled the mud and the blood and the dysentery, felt the flies and the fleas and the lice, and could almost taste the putrid miasma of hundreds of bloated, rotting corpses - Turk and New Zealander alike - strewn on the slopes for kilometres around. The next morning I arrived at Anzac Cove just after 1am to find thousands of people already there, hundreds strewn along roadsides and in every available open space.
Wrapped in sleeping bags, they looked much as the wounded would have looked on that fateful morning when the Anzacs established their beachhead.
And thousands more - Turk, Kiwi, Aussie and innumerable others - came streaming into the cove like battalions on the march, missing only rifle, bayonet and ammunition, but fully equipped with food, drink and bed rolls.
As dawn crept over the waters of the Aegean, the 90th anniversary speeches were recited, the wreaths laid, the quotations quoted, the prayers prayed and hymns sung.
That afternoon at the New Zealand national service on Chunuk Bair, as padres and politicians prattled on about New Zealanders going to war because they wanted to bring peace to the world, I thought I heard laughter from the sky where the spirits of our men who fought and suffered and died there gathered above the imposing memorial monument. "Nah," I heard them say. "We didn't do it for peace. Some of us went because we were bored and wanted to see the world and have some adventure. Some of us did it to prove ourselves men. Others did it to get away from moaning wives, persistent girlfriends or screaming kids, to have a bit of fun with the boys well away from home.
"But most of us did it out of a sense of duty to King and Empire and country which had been drilled into us from the time we were born; and a lot of us went because our mates did. We didn't go to bring peace, we went to fight a war that was threatening Great Britain, the place we still called Home.
"Why don't they tell it like it was, instead of the way they would have liked it to be, these peace-obsessed people?"
So sometime tomorrow morning I will pick up my Anzac stone and give it a rub, and in my mind's eye return to the hills of Gallipoli.
I will recall the deep sense of kinship I felt for that place and reread the words of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, who cleverly led the Turkish defence at Gallipoli and later became president, which are inscribed on a memorial at Anzac Cove.
"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears. Your sons are now in our bosom and are at peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well." And I will praise God for that.
On the web: The Auckland War Memorial Museum has a Book of Remembrance on its website for people to post messages on to remember those who served and died in war.
