Silver bullet
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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.
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”.
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 — credit officers who don’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 bank of a huge vault, who manage somehow, doggedly, to hang-on to their job, like 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, and he is in a way an unknown warrior, inexplicably not yet in his tomb — is my succour and my prayer for relief: as long as he is here, may my own days may yet be without number, for he is my grim comfort, that there is, still, 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 men and women have slid limply down that wall, leaving a coppery stain behind them on the whitewash, gives the lie to my belief, of course.
But still I have my silver bullet.