Three days ago, they cleaned the bronze soldier statues in Martin Place, burnishing them to burnt butter cream. It was raining, but even then light reflected in the puff of trousers, the curve of bronze helmet, the busy emblems of a statue soldier's chest.

Two days ago, still raining, they put real soldiers in front of the statues, to practise their moves for the Anzac Day crowds. The soldiers wore rain coats and looked uncertain, small and pink. Even more so in the shadow of their massive, bronze comrades staring – stony and certain – ahead. One old man in a blue blazer toyed with the ropes that raise (and lower, one presumes) the flag.

They were all so much smaller than the statues, so much more inevitably short-lived.

I've never understood the argument that remembering war is celebrating war. The solidity of a statue or a monument is in stark contrast to the vagaries and fragilities of human flesh. Statues always make me think of death. War always makes me think of death.

I was told by an earnest friend once that 'M*A*S*H glorifies war.'

Funny, 'cos I grew up with that show. I watched it from childhood to late teens (Australia, apparently, holds the record for the longest-running showing of M*A*S*H, including repeats – the show was 11 series long, but we played it for, oh, 17 years? something like that). I can tell you the overarching message I took away from that show: war is hell.

War is hell.

We don't want to forget that.

Yesterday, I understand, in the heavy rains of an Anzac Day dawn, crowds gathered to commemorate the dead. Why the dead have to be commemorated at dawn, I'm not sure. An uncivilised hour of the day for an uncivilised act?

Some sixteen-year-old girl scrawled graffiti on the Bathurst memorial. 'Murderers,' she accused the soldiers & families come to remember (war is hell). It's all relative. How do you tell the criminals from the victims? How do you tell a fight for borders from a fight for ideals? How do you tell one human from another, one corpse from another?

Where do you find one free enough from sin to cast the first stone?

When the soldiers stand beneath the bronze statues, how do you tell fragility from strength, honour from cowardice, grief from gain?

Today there are flowers, those brief bursts of colour, littered around the soldiers' feet. Who thought that contrast could be anything but awful? (Flowers are always the worst part of a funeral, the very essence of the 'brevity of life', the sickening contrast life and death.)

Every war, I believe, is a crime. But not every warrior is a criminal.