James Burke, Jim Burke, was a simple man. A huge, brutish, foul-mouthed lower-class Brit, he did what came naturally and joined the army to do some killing, and he never really quite stopped after that. The fact that he was also a Shadow Centurion can't have helped.
At the Battle of Waterloo, he fought side by side with Manfred von Richthofen, and they saved each others' lives in that chaos. But when just a little later he began killing some no-lifers on their side and blaming it on the Frogs out of boredom, was the posh Prussian nob grateful for before? No.
His single-minded brutality coupled with low animal cunning (but not so much long-term wisdom) may have let Burke get away with many heinous deeds, but it also made him few friends, whether among Centurions or their opposite numbers. He was right popular in certain parts of London, though, among certain men who were after his own heart. So he got by. No prison could hold him, though he hardly ever got as far as that, as no guard convoy could hold him either. He'd fight a lot of Centurions, and often he wouldn't even bother to kill them, preferring to maim them and leave them to suffer. Sometimes he'd kill them though. And sometimes he'd kill others and make them watch.
John Spencer once saw him beat a man to death with a column he ripped out of the ground, and another man with his own arm. Quite what John Spencer was doing at the time is unknown.
All that was a lark, but his life was not going to go on forever, he knew that - even though it did go on longer than most people might have expected. So he joined another army, the Shadow Federation. He knew he didn't have the brains to be one of the bosses, even though for a few moments that Masque poofter pretended to treat him as an equal. But he was quite content to be the muscle, and to beat up more Centurions, and maybe become immortal too, why not?
Despite the brilliance of this simple life plan, something nevertheless managed to go wrong. After he was wounded by an unknown attacker not long before the young Centurions arrived at Saint Haven, Dr. Mostro's enthusiasm had prevailed over Burke's self-preservation instincts for one dangerous moment, and in the name of getting, ah, better, and stronger than, ah, ever! he drank one of the doctor's experimental potions. Quite what that might have done in the long run is unclear; in the short run, it made him even bigger than before, and liable to regenerate from any wound, though in an imperfect way that made him progressively more monstrous - and physically unstable. Divining this property, Juan Juarez took Else Rommel and Ray Freedom's Freedom Ray along on a hunting trip to put the big man out of his misery. It was not easy, or safe, but in the end it worked out just fine, as the regeneration went horribly wrong and Burke blew up, dying a suitably messy death that was shortly concealed by falling debris.
The Burkenon Song: