"The Honor and the Glory"

Fiction

On a bright and sunny summer morning an 83 year-old veteran of the Second World War sits in a wheelchair in a home for disabled veterans. He goes over his whole life and asks himself the following three questions: Have I done well by my wife? Have I done well with my life? And am ready to leave?

That morning. in his wheelchair, the hero, Tom Clark, goes back to his childhood in Kiel, in the heart of socialist Germany, shortly after the First World War. He relives the mutiny of the sailors there and his father's battles with his comrades against the Freikorps and other para-military groups in order to try and install a Socialist Government.

He then remembers the brutal repression of the forces of order, the way his father is hunted, their emigration to Montreal, and the painful emigration experience that follows. At the start of World War Two Tom joins the Westmount Fusiliers, an elite assault regiment, and is sent to England and then North Africa, before going through the campaigns of Sicily, Italy, France and Germany.

He experiences becoming an officer in North Africa, the unspeakable brutality of war in Sicily, the collapse of fascism in Italy, and the fall of Nazism in France and Germany. After the war Tom is sent back home where he has to make the difficult and painful adjustment to civilian life and look for a way to earn a living and have a stable and normal life.

Shortly after his return, he meets Lynne Lawson and they marry. Lynne has a positive and extraordinary spirit, but is in frail and precarious health. There follows his struggles to help her with her medical problems, his efforts to establish himself as a leader in the security industry and, when he is successful, his attempts to create an institute to train people in that field to become more professional and knowledgeable.

Tom Clark lives a long and healthy life until he is somewhat slowed down by illness and old age and asks himself, on that bright and sunny summer morning, the three questions that have become so important to him. How he answers them and comes to term with his life provides the climax of this long and complex novel that deals with youth, escape, the emigrant's experience, war, peace, and the difficult and painful transition to civilian life.