Lamone: A Novel About the Canadian Army in the Italian Campaign in World War II

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

This well-researched narrative of the battle for Lamone River is
interspersed with fictional events. One wonders if David Clark, clearly
an enthusiast about his topic, might have been better off writing a
straight history of the campaign instead. The book’s characters remain
just names, without physical descriptions or personality development
(which is odd, given that the author is a psychiatrist). Clark has the
disconcerting habit of introducing characters, then abruptly dropping
them, never to be mentioned again. Still, he tells a touching tale of
three Italian-Canadian brothers who volunteer for the Royal Canadian
Regiment and together endure the hell of infantry warfare. In Lamone, we
share the chaos of battle—the terror and dreadful stench, the
exploding shells and chatter of machine guns, the heat and rain, and the
screams of wounded men. To get those combat details right, Clark draws
on the battlefield reminiscences of the real-life gallant soldier, Col.
Strome Galloway, even to the extent of naming a character “Stenton
Galway.”

Tragedy overtakes two of the brothers, and the survivor’s life story
as a professional soldier takes up the latter half of the book. At the
end, Clark surprises the reader by revealing an unknown murder, solved
four decades later; a little more literary polish would have enhanced
this ingenious plot development. Clear maps of the region are included.