No Dawn for Men

by James Lepore

  Praise for James LePore:

  “Jim LePore is a great discovery.”

  – William Landay, New York Times bestselling author

  “An outstanding first novel, and a wonderful thriller.”

  – Blogcritics on A World I Never Made

  “James LePore has again written a novel of suspense showing his maturing style is in even better form.”

  – Crystal Book Reviews on Blood of My Brother

  “LePore had me hooked from the very first line, which is not hard to do when you’re asked to envision body parts showing up in a suitcase…. An absolute must-read!”

  – The Celebrity Café on Sons and Princes

  “Excitement from the first page to the last, Gods and Fathers by James LePore will capture your attention and keep it for the duration. In fact, you may not want to put this one down until you have devoured the last word.”

  – Single Titles

  “Mr. LePore makes his stance as a great writer and shows why he is here to stay!”

  – Cheryl’s Book Nook on The Fifth Man

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  The Story Plant

  Studio Digital CT, LLC

  PO Box 4331

  Stamford, CT 06907

  Copyright © 2013 by James LePore and Carlos Davis

  Jacket design by Barbara Aronica Buck

  Cover painting © 2013 by Karen Chandler

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-61188-073-1

  E-book ISBN-13: 978-1-61188-074-8

  Visit our website at www.thestoryplant.com

  Visit the author’s website at www.jamesleporefiction.com

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by US Copyright Law. For information, address Studio Digital CT.

  First Story Plant Paperback Printing: December 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank my friend Tom Connelly, polymath and sage, for reading and consulting on various subjects.

  – J.L.

  I especially would like to thank David Taylor who was there at the creation and ever since. My agent, Gayla Nethercott who is always there. Lucy Buckley for her encouragement and Jennifer Nevins for introducing me to Karen and Jim.

  – C.D.

  Dedication

  We dedicate this book also to the memory of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Ian Lancaster Fleming, for the boundless joy they have brought and will forever bring to the world.

  To Karen, the First Angel.

  – J.L.

  For Jamie, my son and sunshine.

  – C.D.

  PROLOGUE

  Ovillers, France

  July 15, 1916, 3:00 a.m.

  One minute the lieutenant was on all fours, breathing more smoke and tear gas into his lungs than oxygen, his face, legs, arms, and chest covered with the ubiquitous red clay mud of the Somme Valley, and the next he was in a shell crater lying face up along the hot, lathered flank of a horse. On the Roman road the day before, he had seen a multitude of horses and mules in motion, but coming to his senses, realizing he was alive and not in pain, he thought, impossible.

  “He bolted.”

  The young officer, startled, turned on his side and lifted his head. Behind the horse, in a ray of moonlight, as if stage-lit, leaning against the rear wall of the crater, was a British major, his mud-covered field tunic ripped open, exposing a milky bare chest. One hand was inside what was left of his blouse. His head was bare. His darkly handsome face was streaked with dried blood.

  “It’s a head wound,” the major said. “Superficial.”

  “Sir.” Indeed the lieutenant could see a two-inch open gash on the major’s forehead, just below a fall of wildly disheveled black hair. The gash, a pair of piercing dark eyes, and a full, straight mustache all ran severely parallel. In the soft moonlight, despite the blood and the mud and the ripped shirt, or perhaps as a result of them, he looked more like a London stage actor than a yeomanry major. Dashing came to the lieutenant’s mind; and then automatically, as Norse languages held a mystical place in his fertile imagination, he thought: from the Danish daske—symbolic of forceful movement. Of course.

  “What are you doing here, Lieutenant?”

  German trench mortar shells—sausage bombs his men called them—had been, until a moment ago, whizzing overhead and exploding all over the terraced hillside. One had pulverized, literally, one of his runners only seconds after his platoon had fixed their bayonets and plunged into the darkness. The blast from another must have flung him into the crater. How much time had passed? No matter. The major. What are you doing here? Shell shock, likely. But just how badly was he wounded?

  “My kit, sir,” the lieutenant said, reaching inside his muddy tunic for the first aid packet sewn into it. Good luck, it’s still there, he thought as he fingered the contours of the kit, which he knew contained a sterile dressing.

  “Don’t bother,” the major said. “The bleeding’s stopped. It’s just a gash.”

  “Sir . . .”

  “You can do something for me, though.”

  “Sir.”

  “The horse.”

  “Sir.”

  “It’s got me pinned down, I’m afraid.”

  The lieutenant got to his knees and crawled around the motionless but still breathing horse to where the major was leaning against the muddy crater wall. Thick clouds, the kind that raced like locomotives across the summer skies above the Somme and dumped endless torrents of rain on the poor souls waging war below, now blocked the moonlight from penetrating into the crater. The major’s left leg, to just below the knee, was under the horse’s torso. Rain began to fall. The lieutenant, who had lost his Enfield, his signaling gear, and his tin hat, put his boot against the horse’s quivering shoulder, and, with his back to the wet and crumbling wall, pushed, and pushed again, and then again. To no avail. The one-hundred-and-sixty-pound lieutenant was no match for the fifteen-hundred-pound horse. The rain now came down in earnest and he was quickly soaked, as was the major; black and brown dirt from the hillside mixing with the red clay to form a treacly mud that ran down their tunics to reach all the parts of their bodies. The German shelling began again. The hillside was crisscrossed with barbwire. Hung up on it like rag dolls, or crawling about looking for lost limbs, men were crying out all around them.

  “Just as I thought,” said the major.

  “Sir.”

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Sir.”

  “Do you have any word but ‘sir’ in your vocabulary, Lieutenant?”

  “I have a first in English language and literature, sir. Oxford.”

  The major barked out a short laugh. “I trust one day you’ll put it to use,” he said.

  “Sir.”

  “You’re a signal officer.”

  “Yes, sir.” The lieutenant fingered his insignia.

  “I was a mile away when the shelling started. Can you believe it? The barbwire did him in, or he’d still be galloping, with me hanging on.”

  They both looked at the horse in extremis, his mouth foaming, his breathing shallow, his eyes bright with fear. Barbwire had cut him in a hundred places. A steady nicking sound could be heard coming from deep within the huge animal’s throat.

  “I was t
rying to get a sense of this bloody advance. The moonlight tempted me. I dare say I should not have ventured out.”

  “How long have you been sitting here, sir?”

  “He speaks.”

  “Sir.”

  “A few hours.”

  “I’ll get help.”

  “You would be disobeying orders, would you not? No stopping for the dead or wounded.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What is your objective?”

  “A German trench at the top of the hill.”

  “You can do something for me.”

  “Sir.”

  “I’ve been scribbling.” The major took his right hand out of his blouse. In it was an oilskin pouch, which he handed to the lieutenant. “Give it to my wife if I’m found dead here.”

  “Sir.”

  “Eve Fleming. The address is there.”

  “I will, sir. And you are?”

  “Valentine Fleming. Queen’s Oxfordshire Hussars. Look at the casualty lists.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One last favor.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I seem to have lost my revolver. My horse needs to be put out of his misery—he has two broken legs. And I may need it if the bloody Huns send out scouting parties. Take one or two with me to hell. Free of charge.”

  “I’ll do it, sir.”

  “No, it’s my horse.”

  The signal officer’s revolver was still on his web belt. He unsnapped the leather holster, pulled out the gun and handed it to Fleming.

  “Thank you. Sorry about the ribbing.”

  “Sir.”

  “This rain may be a blessing for once.”

  “Sir?”

  “Loosen the ground. Ease my leg out.”

  The lieutenant glanced down at the horse, estimating its dead weight. There would be no easing out of the captain’s leg. On an impulse he reached behind his neck and pulled a medal he wore on a chain over his head. “Will you take this sir?” he said, handing it to the captain.

  “What is it?”

  “St. Benedict.”

  “Papist?”

  “I prefer Roman Catholic.”

  The captain took the medal and studied it, turning it over and over again. “What’s this on the back?” he asked.

  “Vedo Retro Satana.”

  “Get thee back Satan?”

  “The Hun, sir.”

  The two men, not far from each other in age, but miles apart in status—military and civilian—looked at each other, acknowledging with their eyes that, as close to death as they both were, formulaic religion meant nothing, and everything.

  “We’re rather free-form Protestants in my family,” the captain said.

  The lieutenant had no answer for this. There was no place for free form anything in Roman Catholicism.

  “It must be special to you,” Fleming said.

  “No, sir. I found it in a trench.”

  The captain bowed his head and slipped the medal around his neck. “Get on with it,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “The war.”

  The young signal officer crawled out of the crater. At the rim he heard a shot, just one of many he had heard and would hear among the sounds of exploding shells and cries of pain throughout that mad night, but one he would remember for many years to come.

  1.

  Berlin

  September 26, 1938, 2:00 p.m.

  Like a rabid dog, the young and handsome Reuters reporter thought as he sat balcony-left looking down at the top of Adolph Hitler’s bobbing head and snout-dominated profile, the iconic mustache a black smear above a thin, angry mouth. A mouth spewing spittle and fire. The perfect villain. The reporter and his colleagues from around the world had been given a translation of the Fuhrer’s speech that morning, which they had immediately telexed to their newsrooms. The speech, if you could call it that, was being broadcast live, with simultaneous translations generously provided by Herr Goebbels’ Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda to dozens of countries around the world. Everyone knew what Herr Hitler was going to say and what he was indeed saying. The reporter had come to the Sportpalast for the spectacle, not the words, and to take pictures.

  The front rows of the jam-packed arena were filled with the crème de la crème of the Nazi Party and the German military. Start there and work your way back, his SIS contact had told him. So, throughout Hitler’s “we will take the Sudetenland if you don’t give it to us” speech, the reporter snapped away with the tiny camera hidden in his opera glasses. Great fun, he thought, planning on what he might say if by some unlucky chance his camera, or its compact film canister, were discovered. There are more Germanophiles in England than you realize, old chap. Was Germanophile a word? No matter. He spoke better German than most Germans spoke English. The rough “low” Silesian dialect he affected in general conversation with Germans was something he had picked up during a two-week liaison with an arrogant but sexually inventive “reporter” for the Home Press Division of the Propaganda Ministry while they were both covering a Wagner festival in Leipzig in 1935. Adolph did not attend, but many of his high-level henchmen did, making for a huge harvest of pictures. The reporter, a top-and-bottom natural blond, said she was sleeping with Goebbels and needed a break from his neurotic fretting about his untreue to his wonderful Magda. “Wondervoll Magda my ass,” his friend had said. “She’s frigid and bony and he fucks her only out of guilt.” “I’m your man,” the reporter had said, the same twinkle flickering in his eye as when she smugly identified herself as a reporter. Korrespondent my ass, he had said to himself. Try reporting something critical of Hitler, or the Nazi party.

  “He doesn’t want any Czechs at all,” the American reporter sitting next to him said. “How fortunate for Mr. Benes.”

  “Yes, I like the ‘at all’ bit,” the reporter replied. “I suppose Benes is listening, poor chap. The Czechs are always in the way.”

  “And Chamberlain and Daladier,” the American said. “What will they do, do you think?” But the reporter was not listening. Fuhrer, command and we will follow! the crowd, on its feet en masse, was now chanting in one voice, fifteen thousand Germans baying in unison as their mad leader howled at the world. Panning the wildly cheering crowd, the reporter saw ecstasy on its collective face, its thousands of pairs of eyes on fire with lust. Orgasms, he thought, they’re having orgasms. These huge Swastika banners, the little dog foaming at the mouth. It’s an orgy.

  He stopped his panning abruptly to focus on a tall, handsome brunette in the tenth row center. She was not clapping, but simply standing still and clasping her hands in front of her. Was she grimacing? That would take courage. Had he seen her before? Yes he had. He never forgot a pretty face. She had been at the bar at the Adlon, his hotel, last night, having a drink with a rumpled but distinguished looking older man, Germany’s version of the Oxford don. Swiveling left and then right, the reporter snapped pictures of the handsome uber-Aryan men on either side of the brunette. Both were in SS gray, both square-jawed Nordic blonds, both clapping wildly.

  “Fleming,” his colleague said. “Put those silly glasses down. What do you think Chamberlain will do? He’s your Prime Minister.”

  “Are you a dog lover, Dowling?” the reporter replied.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I daresay most of you chaps are. Americans, I mean.”

  “Aren’t you Brits batty over your fucking hounds? The hunt and all that?”

  The reporter smiled. He himself did not like dogs, had indeed avoided them at all costs for as far back as he could remember. “We had a great pack of them,” he said. “Have you seen what they do when they corner a fox or a stag?”

  “We don’t get much of that in Chicago.”

 
“Does it matter what Chamberlain does?” the reporter said. He had, he knew, a reputation for flippancy in the international press corps, of which he was only sporadically a member. To them he was a dilettante, rich and pampered, a reputation he hoped was a result of hard work and not something he naturally exuded. “Look down there,” he continued, nodding first at the manic crowd below, and then at their bizarre, Chaplinesque leader, his right arm held high in the Nazi salute, the white-hot flame of the fanatic in his eyes. “In a few days, or a few months, the hordes of hell will be unleashed, no matter what decision Chamberlain takes.”

  “Madmen and cowards,” the American said. “Europe’s specialties.”

  Spot on, the reporter thought, wincing inwardly, surprised, as usual, that his faux arrogance had once again been taken seriously. Mustn’t lay it on too thick, old boy, you may need a friend one day, and who better than this burly Nebraskan with the blond forelock, the ham hands of a boxer, and, I must say, a keen insight into the continental soul?

  2.

  The Old Quad, Pembroke College, Oxford University

  October 3, 1938, 6:00 p.m.

  Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, John to his wife Edith, John Ronald to his friends, had just lectured on Beowulf, but his troubled mind had been on the handwritten manuscript on his desk on Northmoor Road the whole time. Torn between thinking about it and thinking about anything but it, he sat on a stone bench between two very old sycamore trees, a favorite spot of his. Buttoning his worn tweed jacket and wrapping his woolen scarf around his neck against the winter-tinged wind blowing across the quad’s expansive lawn, he sat under the red and yellow canopy formed by the autumn leaves overhead, trying to decide. Instinctively, he reached for his pipe and tobacco pouch and was about to set match to bowl when he noticed the newspaper weighted down by a rock at the far end of the bench. The wind was ruffling its pages. The rock did not conceal the headline: IT IS PEACE IN OUR TIME. He had heard the news of course, had read the Times’ front-page article on Saturday. This was the Daily Mail, a paper he rarely read. He picked up the rock, thinking to carry the paper home to read later, or, more likely, toss it into a dustbin along the way. Politics did not interest him, and war—another war—was something he could not bring himself to contemplate.