The Last Bridge They Crossed

In July 1919, a year after the guns stopped, a letter appeared in The

Press. It was from a Christchurch woman named Wyn Irwin, and it proposed

that the city build a memorial arch over the bridge where its soldiers

had marched off to war. The public backed her, the money was raised, and

on 11 November 1924, Armistice Day, the Governor-General unveiled the

arch: the Bridge of Remembrance, spanning the Avon at the head of Cashel

Street.

The bridge itself was older and plainer. It had been built in 1873 by an

engineer named Edward George Wright, who was paid five hundred and nine

pounds for it, about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in today's

money. It was just a road over the river, two terraces joined. What made

it worth turning into a memorial was what had happened on it: soldiers

from King Edward Barracks on Cashel Street marched across this spot on

their way to the railway station at Moorhouse Avenue, on their way to the

First World War, then the Second, then Borneo, Korea, Malaya and Vietnam.

The arch was built over the exact place where they crossed the Avon, so

that the men who went to war came back under it.

Inscribed in the stone is the arch's single Latin line: Quid non pro

patria. "What would a man not do for his country?" The Latin was the

Empire's way of making a promise permanent, the same language as the

regiments' mottos and the gravestones the families of the dead had

already seen. The question in the inscription does not expect an answer;

every man who marched under it had already given one.

The arch took the earthquakes hard. Vandals sprayed it with graffiti in

February 2011, and a fortnight later the earthquake cracked it. Repairs

cost six point seven million dollars, and it was rededicated on Anzac

Day 2016, with the crowds in the mall standing silent under the arch the

way their families had stood silent a hundred years before.

Walk through it now and you cross the same bridge, over the same river,

between the same two terraces. The motor traffic was taken away decades

ago, and the arch is left to do what Wyn Irwin wanted it to do in 1919:

stand over the water and remember the men who crossed it and did not

come back under it.