With Anzac Day upon us, Ian Harris delves into the meaning of sacrifice, both ancient and modern.
One of the enduring values of Anzac Day is that it is rooted in a campaign defeat, not a victory. Another is that it honours those who died in this and other battles as individuals - sons and husbands, teachers and labourers, officers and other ranks, whose names are preserved on public monuments and on rolls of honour in churches and schools.
These two emphases help to keep the day as one of gratitude and remembrance, not of glorifying war.
It was not always so. For most of history the battles commemorated were victories that swelled the pride of nations. So the Arc de Triomphe in Paris celebrates Napoleon's victories, while London has its Waterloo Station and Trafalgar Square.
No public memorials list the thousands who died in those battles. They are the anonymous dead, remembered officially, if at all, only by the colours they fought under.
Just over a century ago, attitudes began to change. Those who made up the military masses came to be valued in their own right as individuals. One sign of this is the appearance of their names, not just the generals', on memorial plaques and columns. Another is the honoured place given to "the unknown soldier" in national memorials.
A further transition, not yet complete, began when growing numbers of people realised that war, far from being the noblest act of service men and women can rise to, is actually the stupidest of all ways to further national ambitions or resolve international disputes. Every military cemetery is testimony to its futility and horror.
Also, weapons of mass destruction are increasingly indiscriminate in the swaths they cut through civilian populations - and in an age of targeted terrorism that stretches deep into civilian heartlands, their deterrence value is much diminished.
On Sunday, those who died will be praised for paying the "supreme sacrifice", a term that carries the world of ancient religion into the modern consciousness. For to sacrifice means, according to its Latin origin, "to do a sacred thing".
When every nation or tribe had its own god, and the interests of the nation and its god coincided, it was only natural to say with the Roman poet Horace: "It is a sweet and seemly thing to die for the fatherland."
In our emerging global village, the gods of nationalism will always be way too small. As nurse Edith Cavell, facing execution by a German firing squad in 1915, said: "Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone." She had a bigger god.
Courage, too, is not enough. No feat of courage can validate an ignoble cause.
Germans fought courageously for the dominance of Hitler's master race. Japanese died valiantly for their emperor. The suicide bombers of Hamas and Israel's military assassins may be courageous, but theirs is a kind of courage the world can do without.
In the modern world, any cause limited to the aggrandisement of one's own tribe, country or religion, any cause less than the enlargement of human wellbeing as a whole, is unworthy. And there are better ways of achieving that than going to war.
Yet politicians still paint every military expedition in the idealistic colours of establishing peace or expanding freedom, even as they calculate the spin-offs in regional influence, investment opportunities, or oil.
That is why on days of commemoration the distinction must be drawn between leaders who were prepared to sacrifice others to further their aims, and those on the front line who, while not seeking death, were ready to accept it as the consequence of their engagement in battle.
Few probably thought of this as doing a sacred thing, but all illustrate the Oxford Dictionary's more secular definition of "giving up a valued thing for the sake of another". On the planet, there is nothing more valuable they could give than their lives.
Likewise, there is no better way of honouring that sacrifice than taking every opportunity to build a just and harmonious human community.
Two and a-half thousand years ago, the Hebrew prophets were already saying that their god did not want the sacrifice of animals: the proper way to do a sacred thing was for people to put right their relationships with others.
That might include giving up a valued thing such as time, money, status, pride - even elements of national sovereignty - if it would make their community and world a better and a fairer place, and therefore more secure.
They have yet to be proved wrong.
- Ian Harris is a journalist and commentator.
