Anzac and Ataturk

This is the touching inscription at the foot of the Ataturk Memorial. (click on the pic to make it bigger) It overlooks a rocky headland, where waves crash onto jagged rocks from opposing directions.
One of moving things about the memorial is its lack of religious symbolism or political bias. There is no attempt to give meaning to the tragedy via a traditional value system. Although of course there is a subtext here which expresses the values of secularism – the words being from the famous founder of a secular state. How unlike the memorials all over Normandy where only the allied dead of WW2 are remembered, without even a passing nod to the bravery or losses of the German troops.
A few days after NZ celebrated Anzac Day, we shed some private tears here, for the waste of all those lives. Anzac day is a public holiday and is fervently celebrated with dawn parades and services. Dawn, because that is when, on the 25th April, 1915, the troops were sent into at what is now known as Anzac Cove in Turkey, in the Gallipoli fiasco. In NZ, every village has a war memorial where groups of locals gather to commemorate the dead of both wars, but of that event in particular.
The national identity is strangely entwined with this anniversary. They needed to make sense of something utterly senseless and wasteful. All over the country, sons of farming families, much loved and no doubt much needed on the farms, were recruited and over 2500 never returned. There were also nearly 5,000 NZ wounded. So the waste and suffering was recast as heroism. And on the bedrock of that heroism was founded a sense of national pride. And maybe a sense of toughness, endurance, and injustice at the hands of the British, thus giving a sense of separateness to a budding nation.
Some commentators suggest that Waitangi day, which commemorates the Treaty (1840) which ended an ongoing state of war with the Maori, and gave them citizenship of the British Empire, would be a more appropriate Number One National Day. This seems to be mainly a Maori celebration. But with the centennial of the outbreak of WW1 only 5 years away there is undoubtedly something admirable about the determination to keep remembering.