The King of Terrors

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I am not a squeamish man. That particular commodity was expunged from my being in the trenches of Paschendale during the Great War, where as a naive young man I beheld sights so dreadful and over such a lengthy period of time that I became (I am loathe to admit) all but inured to the daily horrors they presented. A body ceased to be a person. It was a dead thing, a frail, corporeal shell from which the spirit had flown. I developed the emotional tactic of mentally divorcing one from the other in order to better shoulder and carry out the duties and the responsibilities that my regiment and my country expected of me.

In my professional — and I might say quite successful — career in the police force, I found that my hard schooling in France and Belgium, my youthful immersion in the squalid depths that constitute human perversion, left me with a clear and reasoned mind free from the shackles of unnecessary emotion. A state of being which I have found on many occasions benefited my mind’s effective operation.

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