- Kemal Ataturk.
A young nation still finding its way in the world, sacrifices its young men on the shores of a distant land, for an empire that will not see the century out. Sounds like a horror story, but its not, for many New Zealand families in the years after the end of World War One it was reality. And the worst of it was, so many of these bright, clever young men went gladly across the oceans to a fate that they undoubtedly saw as not happening to them. They wanted to see the world beyond their small nation, and all too many of them only got to see the inside of an unmarked grave.
It seems all too far away. They are only smiling young men in fading photographs with the air of tragedy about them, because we know, from all the great wisdom that over ninety years gives us, that many of them would never see New Zealand's shores again.
Of all the battles and victories that New Zealand soldiers had in this theatre of war that engulfed so many nations, it's ironic that the one we remember most was a defeat. Stranger still that in a way this defeat defined New Zealand, knocked the edges off us, made us a little less new in the eyes of the world. When we emerged on the other side, we finally had shared something as a nation, a real and tragic loss. No family would be unaffected, no person could be isolated. A strange thing about humanity is that the death we do not witness personally is somehow made heroic. There would be many heroes remembered and otherwise made on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, in the country Turkey, and on the peninsula called Gallipoli.
New Zealand was not there alone of course. With the forces of Australia, we formed the Australia and New Zealand Army Corp, and the two nations would be bound together in a shared tragedy that is with us still. ANZAC day is a day of remembrance on both sides of the Tasman Sea, and well it should be. 25th April 1915 was the day the ANZACs and other allies landed.
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