Editorial: High-impact reminder of wartime hell

It had been a pretty busy week and at the end of the old weekly toil it's always good to maybe burgle an extra hour or two of sleeping in on a Saturday.

But not today.

That can wait until next Saturday.

Year after year it seems the battalion of people who set the alarm to ring in darkness on April 25 is growing.

It is about paying respect to those who fell at Gallipoli, in what was, from the start, an ill-fated and poorly planned campaign - but bravely and stoically waged by young Kiwis.

It is also the day of remembrance of all those who served in all conflicts and the simple line "we will remember them" is strong and meaningful.

I was in Wellington briefly this week and steered a quick course toward the National War Memorial, where a Weta-created landscape of WWI had been created.

It was remarkable, although we were left wanting to see more as the 25-minute timetable of our scheduled tour kept us moving on - from next week visitors will be able to wander it all at their own pace, however - so a return trip is on the cards.

Getting within metres of a scarred and muddied great tank crossing a German trench, or the great field gun embedded in mud and with its operators clasping their ears was, to say the least, almost eerie.

Because they were so authentic (not replicas) and the scenes were utterly realistic.

Crikey, at the feet of one of the cavalry horses in another part of the display was, err, droppings.

And to see the shells filled with body-tearing ball bearings ... the feathered cannon darts which were fired up at passing airships ... the German helmets, some with clear damage ... and the coloured photos of the anguish, the pain and the terror of it all.

The group my son and I were with emerged from the travel through four years of war rather silent.

Just heads filled with thoughts of how it must have been for every man, woman and child of those terrible times.

It is a fitting memorial because, while many may argue that such times are past and merely part of history, the impact it left affected generations to come.

And with the loss of young lives (some of the marked graves of troops showed there were 19 and 20-year-olds out there) meant for some families there would be no generations to come.