They had ripped most of the clothes off him and were busy with first field dressings on his wounds when he recovered enough to take any interest in what was going on. The dressers were in a hurry because more shells were falling near; there was one vacant place in a motor ambulance, and its driver was in haste to be off and out of it. “You’re all right,” said one of the men, in answer to Copple’s faint inquiry. “All light wounds. Lord knows what you were carrying a lump of stone about in your pocket for, but it saved you this trip. Splinter hit it, and smashed it, and most of the wounds are from bits of the stone—luckily for you, because if it hadn’t been there a chunk of Boche iron would just about have gone through you.” “Stone?” said Copple faintly. “Strewth! That was my blessed elephant in my bloomin’ pocket.” “Elephant?” said the orderly. “In your pocket? An’ did it have pink stripes an’ a purple tail? Well, never mind about elephants now. You can explain ’em to the Blighty M.O.[1] Here, up you get.” And he helped Copple to the ambulance. Later on, the humour of the situation struck Private Copple. He worked up a prime witticism which he afterwards played off on the Sister who was dressing his wounds in a London hospital. “D’you know,” he said, chuckling, “I’m the only man in this war that’s been wounded by a elephant?” The Sister stayed her bandaging, and looked at him curiously. “Wounded by a elephant,” repeated Copple cheerfully. “Funny to think it’s mebbe a bit of ’is trunk made the ’ole in my thigh, an’ I got ’is ’ead and ’is ’ind leg in my ribs.” “You mustn’t talk nonsense, you know,” said the Sister hesitatingly. Certainly, Copple had shown no signs of shell-shock or unbalanced mind before, but—— “We used to carve things out o’ chalk stone in my lot,” went on Copple, and explained how the shell splinter had been stopped by the elephant in his pocket. The Sister was immensely interested and a good deal amused, and laughed—rather immoderately and in the wrong place, as Copple thought when he described his coffin masterpiece with the name-plate bearing his own name, and the dodge of starting on the elephant with a trunk at each end. “Well, I’ve heard a lot of queer things about the front, Copple,” she said, busying herself on the last bandage. “But I didn’t know they went in for sculpture. ‘Ars longa, vitæ brevis.’ That’s a saying in Latin, and it means exactly, ‘Art is long, life is short.’ You’d understand it better if I put it another way. It means that it takes a long, long time to make a perfect elephant——” “It does,” said Copple. “But if you begins ‘im like I told you, with a trunk each end——” “There, that’ll do,” said the Sister, pinning the last bandage. “Now lie down and I’ll make you comfortable. A long time to make a perfect elephant; and life is very short——” “That’s true,” said Copple. “Especially up Wipers way.”