The ''unimaginable'' horrors of World War 1 and its unprecedented ''scale of killing'', including 20,000 New Zealand deaths, were movingly evoked in an address to University of Otago graduates.
Dunedin historian and writer Dr Ron Palenski was commenting in the first of two addresses, mainly to graduates in humanities, at a 1pm ceremony at the Dunedin Town Hall on Saturday.
Dr Palenski, who is also an Otago University graduate and chief executive of the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame, said the centenary of the start of World War 1 was being marked this year.
When he looked down on the ''smiling and expectant faces'' of the latest graduates, he recalled those who had attended an Otago graduation ceremony held in 1914.
The first student to cross the stage that day had been Frank Forrester Adamson, who gained an MA (Hons) degree and was appointed to a teaching role at Ashburton High School. A few months later, on May 2, 1915, he was dead at the age of 23.
He was one of 76 New Zealanders who died that day as a result of the war, and one of about 20,000 overall deaths in that war. World War 1 was ''unimaginable in its horror'' and was the ''first industrialised war''.
''Such big numbers'' of casualties were, for him, ''difficult to comprehend and therefore meaningless''.
He preferred to think about ''individual people'' affected by war.
Although there had been some dissidents, New Zealand had been a ''loyal and proud member of the British Empire'' and had willingly gone to war, most participants with ''hope in their hearts and a glint in their eyes''.
New Zealand's overall war deaths represented just under 2% of the population at the time - in today's terms, about 75,000 people.
He invited the about 260 graduates to ''imagine if you suddenly disappeared'', and said ''this part of the hall would be empty''.
''Your parents and friends up there in the gallery would be alone, alone and wondering and desperately desolate ... their lives and the lives of those who followed could not be the same again,'' he said.
Addressing a second graduation ceremony, at 4pm, Justice Christine French, a judge at the Court of Appeal and former Rhodes Scholar, urged about 200 law and health sciences graduates ''to avoid being paralysed with self-doubt''.
''Keep challenging yourself, get out of that comfort zone, seize every opportunity that comes your way, and if opportunity doesn't knock, then build the door.''
Graduates should believe in themselves, and ''self-confidence'' that was ''not the same as arrogance'' was crucial.
She was an Otago law graduate, but this was the first graduation ceremony she had attended. She had ''missed out'' in 1981 because she had failed to complete her dissertation in time for the ceremony.
She was no closer to discovering the meaning of life than she was in 1981 but knew with ''absolute certainty'' that life was ''terribly short''.
It was important to treasure moments such as the graduation, and dreams and dedication could be ''an extraordinarily powerful combination''.
She had long worked as a lawyer in Invercargill and said ''working in the provinces is not a disadvantage''.
She recalled being ''badly affected by self-doubt and nerves'' on one occasion when she had made submissions to the Privy Council, and noted one of its judges used to go by ''the nickname of Sid Vicious''.
She also emphasised the importance of integrity and kindness and urged graduates to avoid ''mystifying jargon and the use of big words''.