I know, I know, ANZAC day is over. But this year, I didn’t get a chance to stand on the side of some road and watch the ever-dwindling group of fiercely blank, impossibly dignified old men march or shuffle along behind a pipe band. I was too busy.

My Granddad never went to ANZAC day events. ‘No use scratching up the past,’ he would always say. He spent four years in an Italian prisoner of war camp, escaped and basically walked home to Yorkshire – over the Italian Alps in mid-winter. He would never discuss it. But I wanted to know: I think we are all fascinated and horrified by ‘the spectre of war’, especially now. So we hungrily gaze at those old men, and try to imagine. And they look straight ahead, and try to forget.

Then last night I found this in the Sunday Star Times: an excerpt from Passport to Hell, written by Robin Hyde in 1936, based on her interviews with Private James Stark of the Otago Infantry Battalion of the NZ Expeditionary Forces. This was his story of reaching Gallipoli.

The way up Mule Gully was like the end of the world. Their warning of the shell's coming was a rush of air, a crash, a blinding blue flash amidst the chocolate fountain of the uptorn earth.

Shrapnel burst in a dazzling hail of steel - a crash where it struck the ground, then rip - roar - and the fragments tore the sides out of skulls, cut bodies in two, dismembered men as they marched.

Captain Dombey was in front of the column as the troops came in plain sight of 971, the entrenched hill of the Turks. In the harbour, British men-of-war, monitors, and destroyers began the barrage, dealing out to the Turks the death which was past the strength of the scanty British artillery.

When a battleship fired a broadside at the Turk trenches, the men on shore could see her rock in a trough of smothering foam like a vast grey cradle.

Those that lived, crashes and shrieks ringing in their ears as though the echo must last on for centuries, climbed blindly and helplessly up the Gully, and the cliffs pelted down death on them as they ran.

…

There was a tally of the men landed from the Redwing when they reached the top of the hill. Of about four hundred who left the troopship, less than a hundred men had come through unscathed.

Yup. For nearly all of us, a story we can’t possibly imagine becoming reality ever again. Let’s hope it stays that way. And here’s to my Grandad.

There’s a larger excerpt of Passport to Hell on the Stuff site. The book is available through Auckland University Press for $24.95.