So wrote a lieutenant in the Army Service Corps, 1st Australian Division, on the evening of the first day of the invasion at Anzac Cove in Turkey in 1915.

He continued: “Guns boomed from everywhere and it was an awfully anxious time for us watching every lot of our boat parties getting ashore, and though shots and shells were coming out to us we were concerned more for those trying to land.  It wasn’t very long before boatloads of wounded were being brought back onto the hospital ships, and they had to pass through our lines.  I will never forget it – I felt sick and had to turn away.”

Another account said: “Of the 10,000 Anzacs who landed that fateful day, more than 2000 were killed or wounded before darkness fell.  The injured were first attended to at a dressing station on the beach, before being ferried out to the hospital ships lying offshore where lights blazed through the night.”

Even today, more than 100 years on, we are struck by the horrors the troops (on both sides) endured there and on other battlefields, repeated again and again up to today’s hideous conflicts in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, Myanmar and other places.

I was born a decade after the end of the Second World War, but I grew up with adults around me for whom this was a life-defining event.

I was born a decade after the end of the Second World War, but I grew up with adults around me for whom this was a life-defining event. Schoolchildren would buy small commemorative ribbons to wear on Anzac Day and paper poppies for Remembrance Day. I recall attending Anzac Day marches as a small child and seeing the last of the Boer War veterans walking in thin ranks down the street. The “returned men”, as they were known, often seemed to me to be morose and too inclined to drunkenness on these times of commemoration, but then what does a small child understand of the experiences I now know they had been through?

The existence of repressed pain came home to me as a teenager when my father told me about the response of one of his work colleagues to encountering a Japanese delegation behind the development of the Central Queensland coalfields. His workmate had been a prisoner of war in Changi and survived the War to emerge as a living skeleton on VJ day.

Nursed back to health on a diet supplemented by Vegemite dissolved in hot water he was not, under any circumstances, going to shake the hands of the businessmen whose countrymen treated him so cruelly. I don’t know if he was shocked by the depths of feeling that arose within him, but these were deep wounds unhealed by the passing of time. Who knows how the legacy of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine will play out in the years to come?

It is the nature of history that we can only look at events that we were not part of from the perspective and social constructs of our own time and place. It goes without saying that the people who endured such hardship and suffered such loss hoped for a better world to emerge out of the wreckage that they had emerged from. There were lessons aplenty for both the victors and the vanquished.

Modern commentary tends to judge the people of this era harshly as too monochrome, too British in their sensibilities. Yet, it was this generation of Australians who opened up the society they knew for people who had suffered the harsh experiences of the war, as refugees and migrants. I suspect that this was due to a lesson they had learned about shared humanity through the hard times they had differently endured.

“I have seen evidence in action that man is essentially a religious being.  When he is face-to-face with the eternal he turns to God as naturally as a flower turns to the sun.” – Chaplain Frank J Hartley

Chaplain Frank J Hartley, who served the men of the 7th Australian Division Cavalry Regiment in New Guinea, has left some powerful reflections of the battle that left 55 men of that regiment dead over a 10-day period in December 1942: “I feel that I know something of the deeper meaning of Christianity since our baptism of fire.  Things that were believed in sincerely are now believed in passionately.  I have seen evidence in action that man is essentially a religious being.  When he is face-to-face with the eternal he turns to God as naturally as a flower turns to the sun.”

The Old Testament has a powerful image in the book of the prophet Ezekiel, when God shows Ezekiel a valley of dry human bones and asks one piercing question, “Mortal can these dry bones live?” This question, in one form or another is always the question that broken and exhausted people need to answer after the devastation of war.

This question searched deep into Ezekiel’s heart as he pondered what future could possibly arise from disaster. His answer was ‘O Lord, you know.’ At the one time he made a recognition of God’s sovereignty and seized a hope for restoration when even his own imagination for the future of his nation had failed.

It is God alone who can bring healing between those who have been foes, God alone who can stir up compassion and empathy for the plight of citizens in formerly warring nations. Through God’s healing power and mercy the evils of one era are not the inevitable forces to shape the future.

By their nature, events of remembrance look back to the past – but they invite us also to look forward to the future and to our responsibility as the ones who carry the values of or society into that future.  In whatever role we find ourselves in, we can make our own the qualities we admire that we have read about or as we have seen them in others.

Philip Freier is the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne