Easter meets Anzac

Once or twice in a century, Easter and Anzac Day share the same date – it last happened in 1943 and will occur again in 2038.

But curiously, in the way we calculate Easter it cannot fall after Anzac Day, it must always be a forerunner, perhaps the template on which great tales of sacrifice and renewal are patterned.

The themes that run through both stories are rich and deep; of sacrifice, the death of innocence, companionship, compassion, and the birth of a new reality.

Historians have written of the spirit before the Dardanelles Campaign, how classically educated British officers reflected on the legend of Troy and its omens for a seagoing power attacking the fortifications of the strait.

One of the British casualties was the poet Rupert Brooke, who wished that in death we think only "there is a corner of a foreign field that is forever England".

Brooke got his wish, along with thousands of others as the opening salvos of global, mechanised, total war reached out in their consequences to embrace the whole world.

We are still processing the echoes of those events, just as we continue to work out the consequences of Good Friday and the great leap of faith which transformed that outwardly tragic event into Easter and 2000 years of hope and love.

When it doesn't intrude on Easter, April 25 is also St Mark's Day, celebrating the bleakest Gospel which originally ended with a stark vision of people traumatised by the empty tomb; "and they said nothing to anyone, for they were very afraid".

In the years that followed, someone clearly found the courage to speak and explain what else grew from that experience, the hope beyond despair which became Easter.

After the war, Australia was indomitably and justifiably proud of its military legacy. As CEW Bean, the Australian war correspondent and historian wrote:

"What these men did nothing can alter now … whatever of glory it contains, nothing can lessen. It rises, as it always will rise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men; and for the nation, a possession for ever."

But people were not good at dealing with such loss, with mass trauma, or with survivor guilt.

Some of the survivors of the conflict did not surface for many years, shunning the public ceremonies surrounding their feats. And it's only lately that we can look at those people with clear eyes, recounting their failings as well as their successes, embracing them fully.

Les Carlyon writes that the battlefields were simply so far away that people didn't even think to visit - certainly not for the first decade and more.

Yet when the first mourners began the pilgrimage to Gallipoli – a pilgrimage which continues to this day – they met the same man who had repulsed their sons and lovers on the heights above the Dardanelles Strait.

Kemal, later named Attaturk, was an outcast among the so-called Young Turk movement, whose star had waned until that fateful day.

His quick thinking created the long drawn-out stalemate which inspired the Anzac legend and put him back on track to become the founder of a modern nation.

Perhaps he saw parallels in the course of all three nations forged in the hell of Ari Burnu, Lone Pine, Chunuk Bair and Suvla Bay when he addressed grieving relatives from the Antipodes.

"You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears;" he told mourners. "Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

As an expression of grace it is even more poignant for coming from such an unlikely source, a ruthless ruler of steely determination who died an alcoholic in 1938.

Altogether the Australians lost 8700 men killed at Gallipoli and the New Zealanders 2700, compared with more than 80,000 Turkish dead. Britain lost 21,000 and the French 10,000.

Set against the rest of the war, these losses were light: Australia, lost 45,000 men fighting in France and Belgium during 1916-1918, and we number our war dead over the century as 102,000 and counting.

But Gallipoli was the moment of death and rebirth, a cross roads between ancient and modern worlds and the inspiration for new faith.

Among the many striking images on the peninsula is a memorial to a Turkish sergeant who risked all in the heat of battle to grab a wounded Digger, carry him to the Australian lines and deliver him to his mates.

He is matched by the salvific figure of John Simpson Fitzpatrick, whose grave is the most visited of all.

It's a testament to a misfit, a British migrant who joined up to get a free passage home, who carved his name with charity, carrying the wounded on a donkey, down from the perilous heights to the relative safety of the bay.

Simpson died in May 1915, but men who arrived months later swore they had seen him, such was the drawing power of his myth.

It says something about what those men revered that they embraced this humble figure with a donkey so wholeheartedly, and you have to ask: a man with a donkey symbolising courage, service and sacrifice: wherever can they have got that idea?