As fast as a Leopard.

Lest we forget.

Jack:
What are your legs?

Archy Hamilton:
Springs. Steel springs.

Jack:
What are they going to do?

Archy Hamilton:
Hurl me down the track.

Jack:
How fast can you run?

Archy Hamilton:
As fast as a leopard.

Jack:
How fast are you going to run?

Archy Hamilton:
As fast as a leopard.

Jack:
Then lets see you do it.

If you’re about my age you’ll remember these lines from the movie Gallipoli. Not spoken to his trainer as earlier in the movie, but as calming words to himself before going “over the top” to charge machine guns in an utterly futile act.

More than the movie I remember the response of my mother weeping as we left the cinema at the insane waste of young lives taken for nothing.

I was born 26 years after the second war had finished, as opposed to the 76 years it is now. When I was a kid there were a lot of veterans around, many of the relatives and family friends I recall had been to war, and the world wars seemed much more like something connected with the present than they do now. ANZAC parades had many returned servicemen. One year, not long from now, there will be no more veterans.

I recall watching war documentaries with people that had fought in the battles being portrayed. As they do with Waitangi day Māori TV will no doubt have informative, interesting programming today - they are the real public broadcasters. Seriously why is TV One so crap at public broadcasting by comparison?

Why is it Gallipoli we particularly remember? Why not a battle on the Western Front, for example Passchendaele, where we lost many more troops?  Why not the end of the war? Personally I prefer the UK’s approach of recognizing Remembrance Day on 11/11, the end of the Great War.

The campaign that we choose to focus on seems to be based around a couple of legends that are simply not true.

The first - that Gallipoli saw the British commanders sitting around like buffoons, sending wave after wave of our brave ANZAC boys to their deaths, while they sat around drinking cups of tea.

Now I’m not for a moment denying the ineptitude of the strategy used. Stand at ANZAC Cove looking up at the hills that would have been defended and you can only reach the conclusion that sending troops to attack in this location was madness destined for failure.

But rest assured their commanders were not singling out our boys. No, they killed far more English and French troops than the lads from down under. ANZAC deaths were approximately twenty present of total Allied deaths at Gallipoli. This doesn’t really square with the ‘birth of a nation’ mythology communicated by the film or in popular legend.

Secondly - that our invasion of the Ottoman Empire had anything to do with defending our freedoms.

Of course the Gallipoli campaign, as with the rest of WWI, has nothing to do with standing up to tyranny or fighting for freedom, unless it was the freedom to give the Turk a jolly good punch on the nose for King and country (not our country). It was about imperialism.

It was not standing up to the militaristic ambitions of a mad man who would commit genocide like our involvement against the Nazis in the second war. Nor was it liberating French and Belgian villages and civilians on the western front in the first.

I remember the Maurice Shadbolt play ‘Once on Chunuk Bair’ about a valiant group of Kiwis taking an incredibly dangerous peak only to inevitably lose it being performed at my high school. I felt great sadness standing at the New Zealand memorial there year later where hundreds of kiwis had died – it is a very moving pilgrimage.

Fundamentally it doesn’t matter which day, which campaign, which war we remember. What matters is that we remember the utter futility and pointlessness, the barbarity and bloodshed. The best way to remember those who lost their lives is to make sure we never repeat the mistakes of the past.

I think it’s what they would have wanted.

It is of course impossible on this day remembering the horror of war not to think of those in the Ukraine fighting for their lives against an unprovoked military invasion right now. Dare I say it, also for the Russian soldiers  - demonizing those poor bastards who I’m sure would rather be doing something, anything, else, does not help.

I leave you with one of the pieces of music used in the film, one of the most hauntingly beautiful creations of human kind. We are capable of so much more.

One of my last memories of my grandfather, who fought in the second war, is of four of us - myself, my uncle, my father, and he - sitting together listening to this without talking.