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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A bullet with Frank's name on it yesterday
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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, Nicholas J Saunders.

In financial services we have silver bullets, too, and they are just as good at warding off evil: not very.

The silver bullet is a certain type of fellow employee. Hard to describe in the abstract, but you know him when you see him: the weak gazelle.

He is (frail) flesh and blood; he is the survivor, the bullshit artist, the fellow who, in twenty-five years managing securities financing operations, has never quite got to grips with the idea that a stock loan is title transfer — the credit officer who doesn’t quite apprehend that a bank account involves credit risk, because your money isn’t just kept in a special jar with your name on it somewhere at the back of a huge vault — he who somehow, doggedly, hangs on to his job, like lichen, anchoring his mortal coil to cold inhospitable rock as Hurrican Right-Size rages about him.

This chap — who shall remain nameless, because I really don’t want to hex him: he is in his own way an unknown warrior, inexplicably not yet in his tomb — is my succour and my prayer for relief: as long as he survives, may my own days yet be without number, for my grim comfort is that there remains 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 — the fact that he is still here while so many better men and women have already limply slid down that wall, leaving a copper stain behind them on the whitewash, gives the lie to this conviction.

But still, however little it may practically be worth, I have my silver bullet.

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