II
Other speculations were apt to visit your mind if, later on in the war, as a New Army officer, you watched, open-mouthed, the way that much of the Regular Army’s business was done. In civil life you might have had wild dreams of what business life would be like if its one great, black, ruling, quelling possibility were forever removed, if the last Official Receiver had gone the way of the great auk, and the two-handed engine of bankruptcy stood no longer at the door, its place being taken by a genie carrying countless Treasury notes and ready to come in and “make it all right” as soon as you gave the slightest rub to the electric lamp on your desk. How nobly free you would be from the base care of overhead charges! How pungently you would keep in his proper place any large customer whose tone displeased you! How handsomely, when in a generous mood, you would cast away the sordid preoccupation of getting value for money and indulge yourself with a sight of the smile-wreathed face of a friend to whom you had given the bargain of a lifetime! How dignified a leisure you would enjoy after all those years of answering letters on the day you got them! Or, if that were your line, how high you would wave the banner of an ideal precision, stooping to none of the slavish, supple complaisances of competitive commerce, but making everyone who wrote a letter to you mind his p’s and q’s, and do the thing in form, and go on doing it until he got it right, as long as the forests of Scandinavia held out to supply you both with stationery!
In the throes of a great war, and within sound of its guns, the genius of our race achieved, at any rate in some minor departmental Edens, this approach to a business man’s heaven. To the rightful inhabitants of these paradises the intrusion of an ordinary fallen business man, with his vulgar notions of efficiency, gave something of a shock. He seemed cold and clammy—a serpent in the garden. “At the War Office,” an old Staff officer plaintively said to one of these killjoys, “we never used to open the afternoon letters till the next day.” He felt that life would lose its old-world bloom if he had to do things on the nail. “After all, it won’t kill the British taxpayer”—that was another golden formula.