Radio Australia Today Editorial

A Time to Remember the Times

22 April 2008

The bad times that is.

This week every year Australians remember soldiers who died in conflict. Conflicts are not to be celebrated, because as historian Robert Macklin told us on the Club yesterday, war is an obscenity. Innocents die. Countries are destroyed. People learn terror.

Remembering is the very important thing here, because as generations change, and the soldiers from wars past pass on, there are very few people left to tell the stories.

Remembering is all that is left.

It will be a sad day when those young men who charged into machine gun fire at Gallipoli are forgotten. These men who may have been too young to have ever known love, confidence, success, failure. These men who were barely men, not old enough to vote, but were old enough to be sent to their deaths. Ordered to end their lives before their lives had even begun.

The men who learned a fear that we hopefully will never know. They suffered at a time when they should be discovering what life is.

The one thing they should never suffer is the indignity of being forgotten.

People who fought wars through history have been forgotten. Waterloo. Roman conquests. Hastings Hill. Greece in world war two. These are all hard fought times remembered by the title of the battles and the names of the leaders, but not the soldiers who perished.

With ANZAC Day we remember those soldiers.

It’s the least we can do.