In Nepal's eight-year war with Maoist guerrillas, no group has been harder hit than the police. They have lost more than 1,200 of their number. The police consistently suffer more casualties than the army, who were not used at all against the Maoists for the first five years of the conflict. To find out more about what the police have been through, I travelled to the isolated town of Beni, where memories of a recent bloody ordeal are raw. This district headquarters in west-central Nepal stands in rugged country at the bottom of a gorge. Less than six months ago,...