A Soldier’s Story-Family, Love & War

A Soldier’s Story-Family, Love & War
By Emma Gee
New Edition

Family
A family separates when The Great War begins in 1914. Robert Gee finds himself trapped in Canada while his wife Alice and seven children remain stranded in England. It is far too dangerous for his family to cross the Atlantic to join him in Canada where he is beginning to establish a better life for them. The German U-boats are lurking under the sea, waiting to sink any ship, military or civilian that attempts to sail the Atlantic. Robert Gee (Bob) must find another way to re-unite with his family.
Love
Young charismatic Robert Scott Howe (Rob) of Canada joins the Canadian Army to fight alongside Britain against the Germans. He becomes part of the Canadian Army Medical Corps. By chance, he meets a beautiful woman at a hospital in Hastings England. Is it love at first sight? Will they survive the horrible war to make a life together?
War
Millions of British soldiers die on the bloody battlefields of the European Western Front. The unbearable conditions of the Battle of Gallipoli on coast of Turkey take its toll on the brave young soldiers of England. The casualty count is high. Many do not return to their loved ones.
A Soldier’s Story-Family, Love & War, tells the story based on true accounts of how the Gee and Howe families endured the adversity of wars, the struggle against incurable illness, and the hardship of economic depression. The Family Saga weaves its way through history from the mid 1800’s in England to post World War two in Canada.
Bob Gee sails from Liverpool England aboard a British Settler ship as a steerage passenger headed to Canada in April 1913, with the good intentions of providing a better life for his wife and seven children. He has a job lined up at the Canadian National Railway, where he can start working right away.
The family is preparing to join him when The Great War begins in 1914, shattering all of their plans. The vast Atlantic Ocean, now swarming with German U-boats, making it very dangerous to sail from England to Canada, separates Bob Gee from his wife and children in England.
Young Bobbie Gee, aged 17, the oldest son of Bob and Alice, answers “the call to arms” and he joins the Lancashire Fusiliers of the British Army to fight for King and country.
Bob Gee joins the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Canada and heads back to England on a troop ship. The struggle on the home front for Alice and the children as well as the fight for survival of the soldiers on the battlefields begins.
John Howe, like his older brother Robert, joins the Canadian Expeditionary Force as a gunner to fight on the Western Front in France.
While husbands, sons and brothers fight on the battlefields, wives, mothers, and sisters work for the war effort on the home front on both sides of the Atlantic, as they struggle to hold their families together during dire times.
The Soldiers come home victorious from The Great War to better economic times of the 1920’s, but in 1929 with the start of The Great Depression of the 1930’s, brings them to their knees once again. The Great War was supposed to be the war to end all wars, but Hitler and his Nazis Party in Germany had other plans to dominate Europe and WW2 begins in 1939.
The next generation of the Howe and Gee Families in Canada and Britain join the battle against Nazi Germany to defend the free world. The families continue their struggle to survive on both the home front and the battlefields once again.
This historical fiction novel, based on true stories about family, love and war; the strong ties of two families, in England and Canada, who pay heavily in the tragic deaths of some of their young men during wartime and the heartbreaking loss of their young children who succumbed to diseases that have no cures.
Love and marriages of the survivors create new families that developed the future generations in Canada. They shape the foundation that helps to build Canada into the great Nation that it is today.