Russell Stone: A day when pride mingles with the sorrow of sacrifice

Anzac Day ceremonies in Auckland on April 25, 1923, when a cenotaph was erected outside the Town Hall as a tribute to the war dead. Photo / Supplied

On April 25, 94 years ago, the first Anzacs (soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) landed on the beach at Gallipoli to fight in the costly and ultimately disastrous Dardanelles campaign.

Yet Anzac Day, which commemorates that landing, survives in 2009 as the most honoured day in our national calendar. How Anzac Day was celebrated over the first 30 years helps to explain why.

A year exactly after the landing, the first Anzac Day parade was held in Auckland. The New Zealand Herald reported that 300 "men of Gallipoli", most of them wounded, drawn from units that had 'won undying fame and glory' moved in a procession from Quay St to the Town Hall.

Among the most battle-scarred were 50 who had been so badly wounded that they had to be borne in motor cars. We are told that they were met by a "vast audience".

A speaker during the service that followed told the assembly that "we must see to it that the 2500 lives lost [have] not been given in vain". Anzac Day was thought of at that time as an inspiration for victory.

People in Auckland, and indeed everywhere in New Zealand, had been so moved by these first gatherings in which, said the Herald, "pride was mingled with sorrow", that April 25 became an annual fixture known as Anzac Day.

After the war's end in 1918, with the return of the "diggers", as Kiwi soldiers had become known, Anzac Day was set aside as a public holiday to be observed as solemnly as any Sabbath: no trading, no sport, no entertainment. So it remained for many years.

The 1920s have been called the "Jazz Age". But for New Zealand they could equally be called the "Decade of Grieving".

Our losses were appalling. Casualties at Gallipoli had been bad enough, but those on the Western Front in Europe were far worse. Out a population of approximately one million, 105,000 served abroad, out of whom almost half were wounded and 18,500 killed.

Our dominion's generation of young men had been decimated. During the 1920s in all parts of New Zealand, returned men and nurses made Anzac Day their day of remembrance for fallen comrades.

In Auckland they marched up Queen St to the Town Hall, some with their children beside them. And alternative commemorative services were held in the suburbs, with gatherings around newly erected war memorials.

In 1930, the main public observance in Auckland gained a new focus with the opening in the Domain of the new gleaming-white War Memorial Museum.

Thereafter the city's main public service to remember the fallen was held around the Cenotaph in the centre of a Court of Remembrance, in which the next-of-kin had been gathered. For the first ceremony, over 2000 men who had assembled in upper Grafton Rd marched beneath regimental banners in columns of four, with over a dozen local bands interspersed, to a 3pm ceremony conducted around the Cenotaph.

The mood of the New Zealand community by this time was anything but warlike.

By 1930 there had been a surge of books by writers like Robert Graves and Philip Gibbs, and films like Journey's End and All Quiet on the Western Front that proclaimed war is hell and that, perhaps, the sacrifice on the battlefields was not worthwhile after all. But numbers at services held up, particularly with the inauguration of dawn parades, a concept taken over from Australian servicemen.

After the outbreak of war against Nazi Germany and later Japan, Anzac Day speeches indicated that war was no longer a grand illusion but a job to be done. As Polybius said over 2000 years ago: "War is a fearful thing but not so fearful that we should do anything to avoid it."

Those old enough to have attended school between the wars can remember an alternative commemoration of the dead that was observed on November 11 in those years. At 11am, school bells would ring and every pupil in the land would stand stock-still at his or her desk to remember those who had died in what was then called the Great War.

Teachers would tell their classes that we did this because "on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918" an armistice was signed that brought an end to the war that was to end all wars.

That's why, after 1939 with another war on our hands, Remembrance Day seemed to have lost its relevance. Since then it has not so much been discarded but absorbed into a broadened Anzac Day.

Anzac Day is now honoured as the time when we recall the ultimate sacrifice of men and women in all struggles that our country has called on them to take part in; both world wars, Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, and in other parts of Asia.

And it is fitting that we should continue to memorialise these deaths on Anzac Day, because that campaign in a faraway country long ago recalls when New Zealanders became proudly aware of the individual identity of their country for the first time.

* Historian and author Russell Stone is an Emeritus Professor, University of Auckland.