Nau mai, haere mai.

The commemoration of old wars is always about more than remembering the “glorious dead”, and the always sad, sometimes noble circumstances of their demise. It inevitably raises questions about the nature of a specific conflict, and about war itself.

Anzac Day in New Zealand has long been imbued with a kind of spiritual dimension beyond its martial origins. Anyone who’s attended a dawn service knows this feeling – sadness for those young lives lost, a fleeting sense of comradeship with those around you that transcends the often transactional nature of the everyday.

But it also requires an intellectual response. There is the notion of our collective coming of age, of course, and the origins of a national identity. Other than that, though, we tend not to dwell on the causes of all that bloodshed – except to mourn the pointlessness of it all from our present vantage.

As Olli Hellmann writes today, “The question of why New Zealand soldiers ended up on Turkish beaches in April 1915 is typically not part of these commemorations. Rather, our collective memories begin with the moment of the early morning landing.”

In fact, the Anzacs were caught up in wider British imperial calculations designed to hasten the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and which still shape the Middle East today. “Most significantly,” Hellmann writes, “it is the violent conflict over Palestine that can be traced back to colonial power dealings during World War I.”

Anzac Day reminds us, then, that history is not something that can be confined to memorials and cenotaphs. It is a continuum, linking us to events before our time that nonetheless continue to define our world.