By Sue Newman

Anzac Day has undergone a resurgence as a day of remembrance for an increasing number of New Zealanders.

Parades and services are now heavily attended and the knowledge of wars past is used as a learning tool for today’s youngsters, but there is also another day of remembrance that does not receive the same publicity, nor support.

 Armistice Day.

 This is the day, when at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month, the end of hostilities on the Western Front in Europe is marked.

 That day saw the end of World War One, the Great War that was to be the end of all wars, the Great War that was to signal world peace.

 Eighty-one years ago the war’s end saw millions of families counting the cost of hostilities in missing children, missing parents, destroyed homes and lives torn apart.

 Hopes were high that the losses incurred would be the final losses incurred in wars between civilised nations.

 Eighty-one years later we can count in millions more deaths, how fragile those hopes really were.

 The futile exercise of man killing man has been used for centuries as a way to gain territory, to advance civilisations and to eradicate a race perceived as less desirable.

 The manner of the killing may have changed, but the motives have not.

 With time, the machines of war have become sophisticated, the man on man combat has gone, but the philosophy of killing for gain has not.

 In the years since the end of World War One, we may have become more civilised on the surface, but below that surface the same hostilities simmer.

 They may be in a different form, over different issues, but essentially the greed, the anger and the desire to overcome is still there.

 There are few people now living who will have any recollection of the realities of life during World War One; memories for those still living will have faded or gone.

 However, there are still many for whom the realities of war, hammered home on the battle fields of Europe in World War Two, or on the home front, are still raw and real.

 Their wounds will never heal. Armistice Day might be a low key affair, but it provides another point to stop in our busy lives, to look back, to think about those who have gone before, and if we do nothing else, to realise that war solves absolutely nothing.