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peace.
     
    The innocent will be given their peace, and the unhappy will know more happiness than they have ever dreamt about, and poor muddled people will be given an answer they have to accept.
     
    Unlike many of the writers in his circle, Greene had never advocated pacifism. ‘If war,’ he wrote in the Spectator in December 1940, ‘were only as pacifists describe it – violent, unjust, horrible, useless – it would have fallen out of favour long ago.’ For him, the desire for war was a longing both for catharsis and for tribulation. By night, the Second World War provided both.
    During the day, Greene was pen-pushing in the Ministry of Information. If it were not for his nights as an ARP warden, he would have been embarrassed to play so small a part in the violence that he saw as the real business of war. At the start of the conflict, Greene wrote to his wife describing the ‘faint susurrus of the intellectuals dashing for ministry posts’, dismissing Stephen Spender who had ‘feathered his young nest in the Ministry of Information’, though in fact Spender worked as a schoolteacher before he signed up as a fireman in 1941. Greene himself initially refrained from accepting a desk job. Called for his interview with the Emergency Reserve in the winter of 1939, he was asked what role he envisaged himself undertaking in wartime by officials who clearly expected to hear the word ‘Intelligence’. As the interviewers leaned forward in their chairs, Greene had the impression that they were holding out to him, ‘in the desperation of their boredom, a deck of cards with one card marked’. He helped them by taking the marked card and announcing ‘the Infantry’, asking only for six months to finish The Power and the Glory , which was actually already completed.
    In fact in April 1940, two months before he was due to be called up into the army, Greene accepted a post at the Ministry of Information. He wanted to stay where he was, with time to write, even if working as a wartime civil servant would be boring. Greene was responsible for looking after the authors’ section and had a tiny office carved out within one of the Ministry’s rambling corridors, incongruously housed within the clean art deco lines of Senate House, normally the province of the University of London. According to Malcolm Muggeridge (now a colleague of Greene’s), there were still intimations of the academic function of the building: ‘scientific formulae scrawled on blackboards, the whiff of chemicals and dead dog-fish in one of the lavatories’. But now, like all Ministry buildings, this one teemed with people, moving about energetically. In a 1940 story called ‘Men at Work’, Greene described the ‘high heartless building with complicated lifts and long passages like those of a liner and lavatories where the water never ran hot and the nail-brushes were chained like Bibles’. The building even had the stuffy smell of the mid-Atlantic, except in the corridors, where the windows were open for fear of blast and he expected to see people wrapped in rugs lying in deckchairs. Here, ‘work was not done for its usefulness but for its own sake – simply as an occupation’. Propaganda, as far as Greene was concerned, was a mere means of passing the time.
    Meanwhile, determined to get to the front one way or another, Greene was proposing a scheme for official writers to the Forces, equivalent to the war artists. When Evelyn Waugh visited him at the Ministry of Information in May 1940, Greene tried to persuade Waugh to support the idea, announcing that he himself wanted to become a marine. While trapped in the soulless safety of Senate House, he and Muggeridge entertained themselves by reading the file of letters from writers offering their services to the Ministry and by dreaming up imaginatively ludicrous schemes to throw the enemy off course. Muggeridge later remembered Greene coolly exploring the possibility of throwing stigmata and other