And it stands to reason that I tried the Munitions more than once.
It was my rare good fortune--luck pursued me on these patriotic
expeditions--to come face to face, at the Munitions, with the fons et
origo; the deputy fountain-head, that is to say; a very peculiar
private-secretary-in-chief for that department. He was a perpendicular,
iron-grey personality, if I remember rightly, who smelt of some
indifferent hair-wash and lost no time in giving you to understand that
he was preternaturally busy.
Did I know anything about machinery?
Nothing to speak of, I replied. As co-manager and proprietor of some
cotton mills employing several hundred hands for spinning and weaving, I
naturally learnt how to handle a fair number of machines--sufficiently
well, at all events, to start and stop them and tell the girls how to
avoid being scalped or having their arms torn out whenever I happened to
be passing that way. This life also gave me some experience, useful
perhaps at the Munitions, in dealing with factory-hands----
That was not the kind of machinery he meant. Did I know anything about
banking?
Nothing at all.
"You are like everybody else," he replied with a weary sigh, as much as
to say: How am I going to run the British Empire with a collection of
imbeciles like this? "We have several thousands of applicants like
yourself," he went on. "But I will put your name down. Come again."
"You are very kind."
"Do call again," he added, in his best private-secretary manner.
I called again a couple of weeks later. It struck me, namely, that they
might have acquired a sufficient stock of bankers and mechanics by this
time, and be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man
with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things--one who,
moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department
and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for
certain labours--once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and
anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as all that, was
one?
"I called about a fortnight ago. You have my name down."
"Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We have such thousands of applicants. I
remember you! A mechanic, aren't you?"
"No. And you asked me if I understood banking, and I said I didn't."
"What a pity. Now if you knew about banking----"
Nothing, evidently, had been done about my application, nor, for that
matter, about those thousands of others. We were being played with. I
began to feel grumpy. It was a lovely afternoon, and I remembered, with
regret, that I had thrown over an engagement to go for a walk with a
friend at Wimbledon. About this hour, I calculated, we should be
strolling along Beverley Brook or through the glades of Coombe Woods
with sunshine filtering through the birches overhead; it would have been
more pleasant, and far more instructive, than wasting my time with a
hatchet-faced automaton like this. That comes, I thought, of being
patriotic. I observed:
"Your department seems to require only bankers and mechanics. Would it
not be well to advertise the fact and save trouble and time to those
thousands of applicants who, you say, are in the same predicament as
myself? I came here to do national work of some general kind."
"So I gather. And if you understood banking----"
"If I did, I should be a banker at my time of life--don't you see?--and
lending money to you people, and giving you good advice, instead of
asking you for employment. Isn't that fairly obvious? As a matter of
fact, my acquaintance with banking is limited to a knowledge of how to
draw cheques, and even that useful accomplishment is fast fading from my
memory, under the stress of the times."
Being a Welshman--so I presume, from his name--he condescended to smile
faintly, but not for long; his salary was too high. As for myself, I
refrained from saying a few harsher things I was minded to say; indeed,
I made myself so vastly agreeable, after my own private recipe, that he
was quite touched. He remarked:
"I think I had better put your name down, although we have thousands of
applicants, you know. Call again, won't you?"
For which I humbly thanked him, instead of saying, as I ought to have
done:
"You go to blazes. The public is a pack of idiots to run after people
who merely keep them loitering about while they feather their own nests.
We are out to lick the Germans, and yours is not the way to do it."
Did I understand banking? The full ineptitude of this conundrum only
dawned upon me by degrees. Manifestly, if I understood banking, I might
do some specialised kind of work for the Government. But in that case I
would not apply to the Munitions. Granted they wanted bankers. Well,
there was my friend M----, renowned in the City as a genius for banking;
he could have saved them untold thousands of pounds. They would have
none of him. They sent him into the trenches, where he was duly shot.
How easy it is for a disappointed place-seeker to jibe and rail against
the powers that be, especially when he is not in full possession of the
data! For all I know, they may have discovered my friend M---- to be a
dangerous character, and have been only too glad to remove him out of
society without unnecessary fuss, in an outwardly honourable fashion,
with a view to saving his poor but respectable parents the humiliating
experience of a criminal trial and possible execution in the family.
If I understood banking ... why did they want bankers at this
institution? Ah, it was not my business to probe into such mysteries of
administration. To my limited intelligence it would seem that the mere
fact of a man applying at the Munitions was primâ facie evidence that
banking was not one of his accomplishments. It seemed to me,
furthermore, that there was no end to such "ifs"--patriotic or
otherwise. If I were a woman, for instance, I would promptly aid the
cause by jumping into a nurse's outfit, telling improper stories to the
Tommies, and getting myself photographed for the Press every morning.
But I am only a man. If I were a high-class trumpeter, I could qualify
for a job in one of the Allied Armies or, failing that, on Judgment Day.
But I can only strum the piano. And if the moon were made of green
cheese, we might all try to get hold of a slice of it, mightn't we?...
Such was my pigheadedness, my boyish zeal, my belief in human nature or
perverse sense of duty, that I actually broke my vow and returned to
that ridiculous establishment. Yes, I "called again," flattering myself
with the conjecture that, even if they had not yet obtained a requisite
amount of bankers and mechanics, and even if persons of my particular
aptitudes were still a drug in the market, there might nevertheless be
room, amid the ramifications and interstices of so great a department,
for a man or two who could help to count up or pack munitions, or, if
that proposal were hopelessly wide of the mark, for the services of
something even more recondite and exotic--an intelligent corpse-washer,
for instance, or half a dozen astrologers. I felt I could distinguish
myself, at a national crisis like this, in either capacity. Anyhow, it
was only one more afternoon wasted--one out of how many!
This time I saw Mr. W----. Though I had never met him in the flesh, I
once enjoyed the privilege of perusing a manuscript from his pen--a
story about a girl in Kew Gardens. A nice-looking young Hebrew was Mr.
W----. He had made himself indispensable, somehow or other, to the
Minister, and would doubtless by this time have been pitchforked into
some permanent and prominent job, but for that unfortunate name of his,
with its strong Teutonic flavour.
This, by the way, was about the eighth official of his tribe, and of his
age, I had come across in the course of my recent peregrinations. How
did they get there? Tell me, who can. Far be it from me to disparage the
race of Israel. I have gained the conviction--firm-fixed, now, as the
Polar Star--that the Hebrew is as good a man as the Christian. Yet one
would like to know their method, their technique, in this instance. How
was the thing done? How did they manage it, these young Jews, all
healthy-looking and of military age--how did they contrive to keep out
of the Army? Was there some secret society which protected them? Or were
they all so preposterously clever that the Old Country would straightway
evaporate into thin air unless they sat in some comfortable office,
while our own youngsters were being blown to pieces out yonder?
Mr. W----, I regret to say, was not a good Oriental. He lacked the
Semite's pliability. He was graceful, but not gracious. A consequence,
doubtless, of having inhaled for some time past the rarefied atmosphere
of the Chief, and swallowed a few pokers during the process, his manner
towards me was freezingly non-committal--worthy of the best Anglo-Saxon
traditions.
Had I come a little earlier, he avowed, he might perhaps have been able
to squeeze me into one of his departments--thus spake this infant: "One
of my departments." As it was, he feared there was nothing doing;
nothing whatsoever; not just then. Tried the War Office?