Letter from New Zealand
Saturday, 25 April 2026
There is a stained glass window in a church in the New Zealand town of Cambridge — a modest market town in the Waikato, the sort of place where the main street still has a hardware shop and a good bakery — that depicts a scene not from scripture but from war. It shows a young soldier, in the uniform of the Great War, climbing a ladder set against a high stone wall. The town on the other side of the wall is Le Quesnoy, a small fortified town in northern France. The soldier is Second Lieutenant Leslie Averill. The date is 4 November, 1918. One week before the Armistice.
I thought of that window this morning as the pre-dawn cold settled over the country and New Zealanders, in their tens of thousands, made their way to war memorials in the dark. Anzac Day — the twenty-fifth of April, the anniversary of the 1915 landing at Gallipoli — is unlike any other day in the New Zealand calendar. It is not a day for flags and marching bands, not quite, though there are both. It is something quieter and more personal than that. The bugler plays the Last Post into a darkness that feels, in April in the Southern Hemisphere, like the real thing — not a ceremonial darkness but the actual cold dark of early autumn, with a sharpness in the air that concentrates the mind.
The landing at Gallipoli, which this year marks its hundred and eleventh anniversary, was a military catastrophe. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps came ashore on the wrong beach, climbed impossible ridges under fire, dug in, suffered, and were eventually evacuated having gained nothing. Approximately 2,779 New Zealanders died in the campaign. The country’s population at the time was just over one million people. That proportion — the scale of loss against the scale of the nation — is what sits at the heart of Anzac Day, the thing that makes it different in quality from, say, Remembrance Sunday in Britain, where the losses, though incomparably larger in absolute number, were drawn from a population ten times the size.
But the Gallipoli story, for all its power, is not the one that came back to me this morning. It was Le Quesnoy.
By November 1918 the New Zealand Division had fought its way across France and Belgium for more than two years. On the fourth of that month, with the war almost over, they arrived at a medieval walled town that had been under German occupation for four years. The walls of Le Quesnoy — seventeenth-century fortifications designed by Vauban, the great military engineer, the man who built the defences of Lille and Namur — were too high for artillery to be useful without killing the French civilians sheltering inside. And so the New Zealanders, in what one account called “the typical number eight wire way,” decided to go over the top by ladder instead. A thirty-foot ladder was set against the inner rampart at a narrow bridge spanning a sluice-gate. Averill climbed it first, under fire. The garrison surrendered. Some 1,600 French civilians came out of their cellars into the November light. Not one of them had died in the battle.
The people of Le Quesnoy have never forgotten. The town has a square named for the All Blacks and an avenue dedicated to New Zealanders. They hold their own commemoration every year, and a New Zealand Liberation Museum — Te Arawhata, meaning “the ladder” in Māori — has been established in the town, designed with help from the same Wētā Workshop responsible for the Lord of the Rings. It is, as far as I know, the only national museum one country has built on the soil of another to honour a moment of simple, practical humanity in the midst of industrialised slaughter.
This year’s Anzac Day carries a particular weight. Parliament has passed the Anzac Day Amendment Act 2026, which came into force on 21 February. The original Anzac Day Act dated from 1966 and listed specific conflicts up to the Vietnam War. For sixty years, that legal definition left contemporary veterans — those who served in East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, peacekeeping operations across the Pacific — in a strange liminal position: technically not among those the day was legally constituted to honour, even as they stood at the cenotaph in the cold with everyone else. The new Act replaces the old list with a broader principle. It was, in the words of the veterans’ minister, “well overdue.” This year — the twenty-fifth anniversary of New Zealand’s first combat deployment to Afghanistan, in 2001 — is the first Anzac Day on which the country’s national commemoration formally and legally recognises all those who have served in its name.
A British reader might find this legalism surprising. In England, Remembrance Sunday has always felt inclusive by convention if not by statute. But there is something characteristically New Zealand about the impulse to make the thing official, to pass an Act, to ensure the paperwork reflects the sentiment. It is a country that takes its institutions seriously, perhaps because they are young enough that their shape is not yet taken for granted.
What strikes a reflective observer about all of this — the crowds in the pre-dawn, the new legislation, the museum on the other side of the world in a French town that still remembers — is the strangeness of New Zealand’s relationship with distance and sacrifice. This is a country that lies further from the battlefields of the Western Front than almost any other nation that fought there. The journey from Wellington to Gallipoli, in 1915, took weeks by ship. And yet New Zealand committed, proportionally, more of its young men to that war than almost any of the combatants. More than 18,000 New Zealanders died in the First World War alone — from a population of just over one million. It is a fact that takes a moment to absorb.
Alistair Cooke, in his long years of writing about America, often noted that the great themes of national life tend to surface on the days set aside for remembrance — that a country shows itself most plainly when it is standing still and looking back. Anzac Day, in New Zealand, functions in much the same way. The crowds at the dawn services have grown larger in recent decades, not smaller. Young people attend in numbers that would surprise those who believe that collective memory fades with each generation.
Perhaps what draws them is not the specific history but the shape of it: the story of a small country that went a very long way from home, did something remarkable in difficult circumstances, and left behind — in the form of a thirty-foot ladder set against an impossible wall, with a man named Averill leading the way up — a memory that another nation has kept alive for a hundred and eight years and counting.
Whether that memory, and the values it is meant to embody, can be kept alive in a world that seems once again to be finding new walls to climb — that is the question that hangs, unanswered, in the cold April air.
Gibson Foster
25 April 2026