QUOTE : I never saw the King—I did not expect to, yet a tiny part of me, the part which imagined him leading his troops with raven plumes blown back from a silver helmet, was disappointed. The King cloistered himself in his castle, it was said, surrounded on all sides by rivers, one white, and one black. It sounded like a child’s story, and in the days to come I wondered if there had ever been a King, if we were not simply marching and fighting and digging and eating horrors of worm and centipede and mud to keep starvation at our backs because someone, somewhere, had once simply dreamed of a King with a golden crown.