Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee

Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee is a character created by H. P. Lovecraft in his episodic story "Herbert West--Reanimator." A military surgeon on the Western Front during the Great War, Clapham-Lee is first a supporter of Herbert West in his reanimation experiments, and then--after he is used as a guinea pig in those experiments--becomes West's nemesis. 
Clapham-Lee is a major in the Canadian army during the Great War; he is described by West's associate (and Lovecraft's narrator) as "the greatest surgeon in our division." He received the Distinguished Service Order, a British military decoration awarded for meritorious actions by individual officers during wartime.Wikipedia, "Distinguished Service Order." 
He had at some point "secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West"; he was a "friend and fellow-scholar" who "knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them." Clapham-Lee used his influence to help get West his commission. 
In 1915, in response to heavy fighting, Clapham-Lee was transferred to the St. Eloi sector, where West and his associate were working. (Known in English at St. Eloi, Siint-Elooi is a village in Belgium where there was intense combat in March 1915, and again in March-April 1916; it was actually the 1916 battle that involved Canadians.)Wikipedia, "Sint-Elooi." His plane was shot down just as it was arriving, however, killing both Clapham-Lee and his pilot, the "intrepid" Lieut. Ronald Hill; the crash "yielded up the great surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition." 
Rather than trying to bring his friend back to life, West sees this as an opportunity to test his theory that consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the brain—that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in itself. In Clapham-Lee, West had the remains of "a man at once physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured." He finished severing the head, placing it in a vat of "reptile embryo tissue" he kept in his surgery tent, in order "to preserve it for future experiments." West then closed off the neck wound, using "engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer’s uniform," and then "injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body." The experiment seems to be a success: The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which was unmistakably one of desperation—an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient to prove every theory of Herbert West. But then West and his associate hear a sound that called into question West's interpretation: Clapham-Lee's severed head, crying out from the "hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue": “Jump, Ronald, for God’s sake, jump!” 
In the next instant, the tent is obliterated by German shell-fire, with West and the narrator as "the only proved survivors." Ever after, West was apprehensive about "the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead." 
These fears prove prophetic a few years later, when West and his associate are practicing and experimenting in Boston. First, their early victim Allan Halsey is broken out of Sefton Asylum by a gang of silent men, led by a menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it—for it was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Shortly thereafter, "a group of strange-looking figures" deliver a large square box to West's quarters, bearing the inscription, “From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders." West and his colleague incinerate the box without opening it, but as they do so, a horde of zombies breaks through the wall of their cellar, "led by a stalking thing with a beautiful head made of wax...who wore a Canadian officer’s uniform." The "tomb-legions" tear West apart, and Sir Clapham-Lee carries off his head.
==References==
Category:Humans
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Deceased (In Mythos)
Category:Other Supernatural Beings