Originally Posted by Anthony Price
... it was here that he discovered the difference between silence and tranquility. He had been prepared for the dull days, when never a thought came to him unstamped by its passage through some other brain, and by now he was far too old a hand at the game to hope for anything spectacular. What he had not expected and what still ambushed him were the moments like this, when the weight of death and pain in the piles of dusty papers and long-forgotten diaries suddenly closed in crushingly on him, destroying his critical ability and breaking down his discipline and training.