Pro Patria Mori

PRO PATRIA MORI is a story of friendship, rupture and healing. It deals with the fate of three friends: Trevor Howe, from London and Cornwall; Ernst Steiner, from Lubeck, Germany; and Etienne Bonnard, from Fontainebleau, France, all fellow students at Morton College, Oxford, in 1914, just before the outbreak of the Great War. Each enlists to fight for his country and suffers the physical and spiritual consequences of a war which ushers in a new kind of mechanized slaughter. The novel explores the consequences of various types of death for ones country and ends as the world is about to come apart with the outbreak of World War II. The book opens in November, 1938, with Trevor Howe in the midst of a recurring dream about the war wound to his left hand. He has received a letter from Kristina Steiner, the sister of his best friend from Oxford. She tells him that there is to be a memorial service for her brother at Morton College, Oxford, and that she hopes he will attend. Trevor is grieved and relieved to finally learn the fate of his childhood friend -- that he was killed in 1914 at the first battle of Ypres. The novel continues with the paralell stories of Trevor Howe and Kristina Steiner as they try to reconnect. Due to her Jewish grandparents, Kristina is unable to get out of Germany after Krystalnacht to attend the ceremony for Ernst at Oxford. Her fate becomes progressively more entwined with that of Herr Commandant Karl Hauptmann, a Nazi officer who has been assigned by the party to watch over her. The central problem of the protagonist, Trevor Howe is to come to terms with the wounds of his past, both psychological and physical, and to reconnect with his ability to love and create. He does this by trying to reconnect with Kristina Steiner, by reencountering another old friend, Etinne Bonnard, who had dealt with his wound by using his art, and by reinvolving himself with Bonnards sister, Genevieve. The novel explores the various types of death for ones country -- the physical death of Ernst Steiner, the death of the soul and creative spirit of Trevor Howe and Etienne Bonnards loss of a youthful and vibrant personality. Bonnard helps Trevor reconnect with his creativity and to write the memoir that liberates the artist in him, and Trevor helps Bonnard recapture some of his youthful joie de vivre, while Kristina Steiner suffers a more sinster fate. The book ends as the world is about to come apart again with the outbreak of World War II.

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