A new century marches on leaving behind those who witnessed the wars of the last.
Tomorrow morning, inevitably - and sadly - as the Last Post rings poignantly out over dawn gatherings across Otago, there will be fewer than attended last year's Anzac Day services.
Lest we forget, there are still elderly veterans from World War 2 - and from other conflicts: Korea and Malaya, Vietnam; and younger generations of servicemen and women who have proudly borne arms for their country - as peacekeepers - in latter day conflicts: Bosnia, the Solomons, East Timor, parts of the Middle East.
They will fill the gaps, as will, in ever swelling ranks, the intergenerational participants for whom this day has become a rare beacon of solemnity, commemoration and national pride; a resonating occasion in lives scarcely touched by ritual and otherwise fractured by frantic consumerism and secular abandon.
Many are barely old enough to have been schooled in the history of the occasion, and, given the little respect accorded "history" in the classroom today, it may have passed some by altogether.
But there is another kind of history at work here - oral, familial, cultural - that has entered the nation's psyche.
Tomorrow, we gather in celebration of selflessness and sombre thanksgiving for those whose "ultimate sacrifice" has allowed us to be who we are, as a people, today.
As the old soldiers die, the occasion seems to grow in importance rather than diminish, as if there is an ever more compelling, invisible thread drawing succeeding generations back though time to the anvil of our creation as a nation.
Follow it all the way to April 25, 1915, and you arrive, with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
There you will stay for eight horrifying months.
You will witness unimaginable savagery, unbearable agony, stupefying bravery and the deaths of more than 10,000 Anzacs - and several times that number of their Turkish opponents.
Turn around and retrace your steps towards the present, tip-toeing across Passchendaele and the Somme, and on into the path of Hitler's Third Reich - El Alamein, Crete, Cassino, Normandy - and the ferocious nihilism of the Empire of the Sun: Guadalcanal, Singapore, Thailand, Burma.
Many old soldiers would not talk about their wartime experiences, neither to loved ones to whom they returned, nor to their children.
It is as if there was no common language that could encompass nor contain the reality, the emotional nightmare, of what men at war do to one another - and the private stain of inhumanity many must subsequently have lived with.
And yet, with the passage of time, and the unfurling of new generations - grandchildren, great-grandchildren and the intuitive connections they managed to forge - the true meanings and far-reaching effects of war have begun to come home.
Tomorrow, lest we forget, is first a salute to the bravery and sacrifice of those who gave their lives in conflicts past.
But it is also a potent reminder that war is, ultimately, the failure of reason and diplomacy; and that it has terrible consequences which reverberate through generations.
They are all gone now, the veterans of World War 1 and Gallipoli - where we locate our most potent myths and memories.
Of World War 2, a young man of 20 in 1940 would now have turned 90.
They are few in number, too.
Taciturn, tough, unyielding - a no-nonsense generation that survived the Depression years and a terrible war - they bequeathed an entirely different world to their children.
At times they must have looked on at the "baby-boomer" generations in bewilderment and despair.
Mostly, we now do our best to make peace, not war, and many is the veteran who will thank God for that.
But we have arrived at this place on their shoulders, through their sacrifice, their courage, their pain - and that of those who went before, who came after, and come still.
This is the distillation of memory and experience we mark, in ever greater numbers, on this solemn but unifying day.
