Silver bullet
It is said that combat troops would often carry with them a single bullet with their own name engraved on it. A superstitious amulet; a warder-offer of the soldier's deepest fear: “the bullet with my name on it can’t hurt me, because I’ve got it”.
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- In such conditions, a sense of hopelessness overwhelmed many soldiers, leading them to believe that every incoming shell was inscribed with a man’s name. In the soldiers’ imagination, such a fate might be averted by having one’s name already engraved on a talismanic bullet — an especially poignant kind of trench art.
- — Trench Art: A brief History and guide, 1914-1939, by Nicholas J Saunders.
In financial services we have silver bullets, too. They are just as effective at warding off evil, but they are a certain caste of fellow employee. Hard to categorise, but easy to recognise when you see them: the weak gazelles.
They are (frail) flesh and blood; they are survivors, the bullshit artists, those who, in twenty-five years managing securities financing operations, have never quite got to grips with the idea that a stock loan is title transfer — who manage somehow to hang-on clutching dogged lichen to any rock on which they can anchor their mortal coil in the most inhospitable climes. He — who shall remain nameless, because I really don’t want to hex him — is my succour and my prayer for relief: as long as he is here, may own days may yet be without number, and my grim comfort is the belief that there is at least one warm body between me and the wall I will eventually be lined up and shot against.
Yet the fact that this chap — the one that says “due dilly” with a straight face, and throws around hymnal metaphors — that he is still here while so many better mean and women have slid limply down that whitewashed wall, leaving a coppery stain behind them, gives the lie to my belief, of course.
But still I have my silver bullet.