We live under their shadow, but the disastrous fact is that there is less contact than ever before between the men who wield these weapons of war and the people of their own, let alone of other, countries. The Hood, cleaving the bright waters off Montevideo, may have been awe-inspiring, but she was beautiful. The men who came ashore were soon found to be similar to other men anywhere, with the same weaknesses and the same strengths. Although they moved the greatest warship in the world, they were also men who desired only to live in peace and in friendship with their neighbors. Year in, year out, over the oceans and in the seaports of the world the ship’s company of the Hood proved that power can be benevolent Such an achievement is rare.

It was in May 1941 that she sailed on her last voyage. It is another one of the curious signs of her fated history that it was also in May, exactly twenty-one years before, that she had set out on her first. On each occasion she went north, and on each occasion her port of departure was Scapa Flow.

The Flow was still being used as a fleet training ground and base in 1920, and the Hood as she stood out to sea—a new ship working up to her full efficiency—was to carry many lives in her hull, and influence many men, before she sailed again from those same islands for the last time. The rocks and inlets and cropped grass of the Orkneys are still the same under the spring sun as they were in 1941—or in 1920.

Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass;

Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass.

 

On June 21, 1919, the main units of the German High Seas Fleet, which had been interned in Scapa Flow, were scuttled and abandoned by their crews. The rust was still bright on their superstructures, which jutted from the water, when the new ship got under way. Passing the ruins of a fleet, she headed for the North Sea.

Flying the flag of Acting Vice-Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, the new battle cruiser left on the first of her many courtesy visits. She was accompanied by the Tiger, a battle cruiser that had joined Admiral Beatty’s flag in 1914. The two capital ships were flanked by an escort of nine destroyers. They were bound from the old Norse islands of the Orkneys for the birthplace of all long ships, Scandinavia. From Nynashamn, twenty-five miles from Stockholm, they would proceed to Copenhagen and thence to Norway. The kings of those countries would be there to meet them.

 

 

 

 

Mediterranean Cruise,

 

In 1955 I was sitting in the London Bar looking out along Main Street, Gibraltar, with tie people coming and going, and a pale sunlight gleaming on the wet road. Over by Algeciras the land was hard and gold and bright, but here the levanter cloud was only just lifting and the light was fitful, like an English June.

“I remember,” said old Gomez, “what it was like when we hear that time that the Hood is sunk.” He pointed at the photograph of her hanging behind the bar. "I am living in the Fulham Road, London. My wife and I are evacuated because we are too old to stay on the Rock during the war. We hear it over the B.B.C.

when we are sitting in a pub I think the world has come to an end! I truly think that we are finished, senor. If the Germans can sink her, then there is no more hope, I say to myself. And yet—here I am back in my old bar again!”

“You remember the Hood?”

“Of course! Often here before the war. I remember the first time I see her and she is the biggest ship I ever see. I’m working for the laundry in those days and we go aboard to collect the officers’ things. I remember how big she is and how the decks so dean you could eat off them. Clean like a polished window!” 36

He drew off a glass of sherry for himself. "Long time ago those days, ’Nother world, eh? You don’ remember, too young?” "Eighteen when the war broke out.”

"Same age as me first time I go aboard fie Hood. Everything s different then. Tell you how—not only the ships is bigger, there’s more "bull/ you know? More brass work, eh, more men scrubbing decks, officers very gentlemanly—they don’t do too much, eh? Now’days officers much the same as the men, not then. And when the ship’s com’ny comes ashore they drink more than now, but more discipline if they go back drunk. Today they comes here and they are not sailors like they was—mostly quiet young men.