This morning, many young people will have attended dawn services and heard something of the landing at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. A 10-year-old laying a wreath is marking an event of 108 years ago.
When I was 10, happenings of 108 years earlier seemed like very ancient history.
Events in 1848: the February Revolution in France, the beginning of the Californian gold rush, the arrival in Dunedin of the first settlers from Scotland. All memorable moments, especially if you happened to be there, but no big deal for a primary school kid more than a century later.
However, Anzac Day has remained centre stage since the first commemoration on April 25, 1916, when returned soldiers marched to the Dunedin Town Hall for a short service. Shops closed at 1pm and even the publicans voluntarily closed the bars between 2.30pm and 4.30pm.
At that time, no-one needed to be told what Anzac was all about, but four generations on we need reminders.
Most powerful among them are soldiers’ diaries and letters home.
As early as December 1914, when war news was being filtered through official channels, Evelyn Isitt, an expatriate journalist working in London, was writing in the Otago Daily Times: "future writers will depend quite in the old-fashioned style on private diaries or letters for their coloured narratives".
By September 1915, The Star in Christchurch movingly confirmed her prediction.
"The true epics of the war are the soldiers’ letters.
"At the front he is brought face to face with the realities of life and death and his mind is freed from the petty trifles and interests that are paramount in times of peace. Thus, his letters to friends and relatives are a true reflection of himself purified and deepened by the strain of exceptional circumstances. The man finds no purpose in cant or exaggeration. He is in the presence of death every day and conscious that he may soon go the way of the injured bodies that are carried constantly from the trenches. He has neither the humour nor the inclination to write for effect. His letters are simple records of his doing."
Such were the letters sent home and the diaries brought back at the end of the war. (Poignantly, some diaries returned early with the personal effects of men killed in action).
Some were lucky. Private Fred Hill wrote from Gallipoli: "Yesterday the Allies advanced over a mile, and today we can occasionally get a glimpse of them advancing and have been told to be prepared to move at any moment. Well, that’s how things are at present, and we have all seen war now, and I don’t think there is one of us who hasn’t had enough."
Fred was shot in the arm shortly afterwards and sent home as no longer fit for service.
The letters home were read and re-read until, along with the diaries, they became part of the family memory storehouse.
In recent times, many have found their way to museums and archives and some have been published. And readers, it seems, cannot get enough of them, even in one small town.
A few years ago, a chance conversation in the Patearoa pub led me to a trove of letters sent by soldiers to local girl Betty Lusher. They became a book, Patearoa at War, which went through several printings.
The same goes for the World War 2 letters of Patearoa farmer Jim Becker published by his son, Pete, a couple of years ago.
The latest book to come my way is from Tony Muirhead, of Dunedin, who has gathered the letters of his great-uncle, Arthur McLeod, of Caroline, in Southland. He was killed in June 1917 in the Battle of Messines. His diary, that had the final entry on June 6, "Here we are in the assembly trench. We go over the top shortly," was returned to his family to join the letters he had been sending since December 1915. Tony has complied a wide-ranging and moving account of his uncle’s life and death under the title A Soldier’s Rest.
Among the diaries perhaps none is more moving than that of Patearoa farmer George Hall. At Bellevue Spur on October 12, 1917, more than 800 New Zealanders died — the darkest day in New Zealand military history.
George wrote in his diary for that day, "Went over the top this morning. Losses very heavy. I got through all right."
What is special about George’s diaries are the later entries. For October 12, 1918, he wrote: "A year ago today. Oh H...!" In his following diaries, right through to his 80s, October 12 always read, "Still alive. Lucky."
George Hall died in 1988 at the age of 92.
He never forgot his war.
Nor should we.
Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
