Solemn silence will give way to raucous joy as New Zealand marks the centenary of the end of the First World War.
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Like counterparts around the world, Kiwis will commemorate with two minutes of silence, at 11am (NZDT) on Sunday, a century since peace on the Western Front.
But a campaign calling for a "roaring chorus" to end the quiet and replicate celebrations when the war finished has spread around the country, with a flurry of boisterous events planned for the big moment.
The phrase is taken from an article in the Wellington newspaper The Evening Post, which described "songs and cheers, miscellaneous pipings and blastings, and tootings and rattlings - a roaring chorus of gladsome sounds" when news of peace arrived in New Zealand.
Nurse Isobel Haresnape was among those celebrating in Auckland and, in 1968, recalled running into the street to join bands using makeshift instruments.
"I woke next morning to a tremendous noise of sirens, bells ringing and voices and feet running and everyone wanting to know what it was all about, and I was one of them. And I heard someone say 'It's peace'," she says in a recording held by national archive Nga Taonga Sound and Vision.
"People were very hysterically excited really, people who didn't know each other, strangers kissed strangers, went drinking with them in hotels ... danced with them, everyone was dancing."
On the Western Front, soldiers danced and celebrated too.
"I've never done so much dancing in me life," veteran George Puhi Nicholas recalled in 1985.
So two minutes after 11am on Sunday, chimes in Wellington will kick off cheers around the country.
Tens of thousands are expected to set off whatever horns and noise-makers they can bring along to commemoration events, while church bells throughout the nation will ring for 45 minutes.
Fire trucks and police will sound their sirens, ships will sound their horns and even the country's trains will take part.
"After four years of remembrance, we can now reconnect with the sense of joy and relief that swept the county when news of the end of fighting came through," the director of the country's official centenary programme, Sarah Davies, says.
Nearly 100,000 New Zealanders served overseas during the war (from a population of about 1.1 million) and 18,000 were killed.
Australian Associated Press
