The last time anyone laid eyes on her she was ablaze from stern to stern lighting up the night sky in what was quite literally her final blaze of glory.
It was Nov. 19, 1941, and German sailors were watching the crippled HMAS Sydney limp off to her watery grave off the Western Australian coast with 645 doomed Australians on board.
Nearly 70 years later the pride of the Australian Navy has flickered back into life on television screens across the nation, sitting stately under nearly three kilometres of sea water with the twin guns of her turret still defiantly pointed to port.
The discovery of the Sydney last March off Western Australia has stirred the embers of pride and nationalism in Australia.
It's also brought back strange echoes from a time when the entire world for six years appeared to ignore thoughts of commerce and industry and art, and set solely about the business of killing each other.
The Sydney, a 9,000-tonne Leander Class light cruiser armed with eight 152mm guns, was returning from a troop ship escort mission to the Sunda Strait on the afternoon of Nov. 19, 1941.
Just 200 kilometres from the Western Australian coast the crew sighted what appeared to be the Dutch merchant ship, Straat Malaaka.
It wasn't. It was the German raider Kormoran.
Accounts from German survivors suggest that the Sydney skipper Joseph Burnett demanded the "Straat Malaaka" confirm her peaceful intentions with a secret password.
By way of reply the Kormoran commander Theodor Detmers hoisted his German ensign and opened fire with 150mm guns, a 20mm cannon, small-calibre anti-aircraft guns and deadly underwater torpedo tubes.
The Sydney fired back and with the Kormoran's engine room destroyed and 20 men dead Commander Detmer gave the order to abandon ship, ensuring the survival of 317 of his 397 crew.
Things were far worse on the Sydney. Many of the crew were already believed to be trapped or dead in various sections of the ship as she limped away from the fight.
The Indian Ocean soon swallowed her. Not one of the 645 officers and crew survived.
The death toll was greater than Australia's entire losses in the Vietnam War (508). It was greater even than the legendary fight against the Japanese in Papua New Guinea on the now famous Kokoda Track (around 625).
"Lost No More" was one inscription on the photograph of youthful, earnest looking sailor Arthur John Andrews when a remembrance service was held at St. Andrew's Cathedral on April 24 in the ship's namesake city of Sydney.
The ceremony was held in precisely the same spot that Australians, not knowing the fate of the men, gathered on a December morning in 1941 to pray desperately for some celestial intervention to save the Sydney's crew and bring them home.
Among the mourners at the second ceremony was Bob Honor, who had the original service sheet from the 1941 gathering left to him by his mother.
Honor lost his own father in the Second World War.
"I remember my father walking away from our house in Adelaide," he said.
"He was wearing a flat cap and a silk scarf and carrying an old-fashioned kitbag.
"And that's all I remember."
Honor decided to keep the second service sheet from the second ceremony to go with the first.
"I would prefer not to have any."
The following day was ANZAC Day, a national holiday marking a hopeless battle on a Turkish peninsula in the First World War that cost the lives of more then 100,000 young men, nearly 9,000 of them Australian.
This year the nation also focused on Europe where thousands of Australians join thousands more Canadian, Americans, Britons and Germans lying in long-forgotten graves.
In the French village of Villers-Bretonneux, where an ANZAC Day service was held, the names and hometowns of 10,771 Australians missing in action on the Western Front are listed on a wall.
Standing at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on ANZAC Day morning, the fresh, youthful looking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd looked strangely incompatible with the ancient echoes of violence, the solemn tribal rituals honouring blood sacrifice.
A more able politician than poet, he still managed to summons up words to capture the awful, alluring mystery of war.
"We stand here today in this avenue of heroes... with its monuments of steel and of stone, silent still but speaking to us softly with the voices of 100,000 souls."
Michael Madigan is the Winnipeg Free Press correspondent in Australia. He writes about politics for the Brisbane-based Courier Mail.
PREVIOUS
