The Art School was still flourishing when the unit was moved up from its peaceful and prolonged rest to take a turn up behind the firing-line. The removal from their clay supply might have closed down the artistic activities, but, fortunately, the Oughth had hardly settled in to their new quarters when it was found that the whole ground was one vast bed of chalk, chalk which was easily obtainable in any shaped and sized lumps and which proved most delightfully easy to manipulate with a jack or pen-knife. The new modelling material, in fact, gave a fillip of novelty to the art, and the coffins and crosses proved, when completed, to have a most desirable quality of solidity and of lasting and retaining their shape and form far better than the similar objects in clay.
Better still, the chalk could be carried about on the person as no clay could, and worked at anywhere in odd moments. Bulging side-pockets became a marked feature of inspection parades, until one day when the C.O. went round, and noticing a craggy projection under the pocket of Private Copple, demanded to know what the private was loading himself with, and told him abruptly to show the contents of his pocket. On Copple producing with difficulty a lump of partially carved chalk, the C.O. stared at it and then at the sheepish face of the private in blank amazement. “What’s this?” he demanded. “What is it?”
“It—it’s a elephant, sir,” said Copple.
“An elephant,” said the C.O. dazedly. “An elephant?”
“Yessir—leastways, it will be a elephant when it’s finished,” said Copple bashfully.
“Elephant—will be——” spluttered the C.O., turning to the officer who accompanied him. “Is the man mad?”
“I think, sir,” said the junior, “he is trying to carve an elephant out of a lump of chalk.”
“That’s it, sir,” said Copple, and with a dignified touch of resentment at the “trying,” “I am carving out a elephant.”
The C.O. turned over the block of chalk with four rudimentary legs beginning to sprout from it, and then handed it back. “Take it away,” he said. “Fall out, and take the thing away. And when you come on parade next time leave—ah—your elephants in your billet.”
Copple fell out, and the inspection proceeded. But now the eye of the C.O. went straight to each man’s pocket, and further lumps of chalk of various sizes were produced one by one. “Another elephant?” said the C.O. to the first one. “No, sir,” said the sculptor. “It’s a coffin.” “A co—coffin,” said the C.O. faintly, and, turning to the officer, “A coffin is what he said, eh?” The officer, who knew a good deal of the existing craze, had difficulty in keeping a straight face. “Yes, sir,” he said chokily, “a coffin.” The C.O. looked hard at the coffin and at its creator, and handed it back. “And you,” he said to the next man, tapping with his cane a nobbly pocket. “Mine’s a coffin, too, sir,” and out came another coffin.
The C.O. stepped back a pace, and let his eye rove down the line. The next man shivered as the eye fell on him, as well he might, because he carried in his pocket a work designed to represent the head of the C.O.—a head of which, by the way, salient features lent themselves readily to caricature. None of these features had been overlooked by the artist, and the identity of the portrait had been further established by the eye-glass which it wore, and by the exaggerated badges of rank on the shoulder. Up to the inspection and the horrible prospect that the caricature would be confronted by its original, the artist had been delighted with the praise bestowed by the critics on the “likeness.” Now, with the eye of the C.O. roaming over his shrinking person and protruding pocket, he cursed despairingly his own skill.
“I think,” said the C.O. slowly, “the parade had better dismiss, and when they have unburdened themselves of their—ah—elephants and—ah—coffins—ah—fall in again for inspection.”
The portrait sculptor nearly precipitated calamity by his eager move to dismiss without waiting for the word of command. And after this incident sculpings were left out of pockets at parade times, and the caricaturist forswore any attempts on subjects higher than an N.C.O.
The elephant which Private Copple had produced was another upward step in his art. He had tried animal after animal with faint success. The features of even such well-known animals as cats and cows had a baffling way of fading to such nebulous outlines in his memory as to be utterly unrecognisable when transferred to stone or chalk. A horse, although models in plenty were around, proved to be a more intricate subject than might be imagined, and there were trying difficulties about the proper dimensions and proportions of head, neck, and body. But an elephant had a beautiful simplicity of outline, a solidity of figure that was excellently adapted for modelling, and a recognisability that was proof against the carping doubts and scorn of critics and rival artists. After all, an animal with four legs, a trunk, and a tail is, and must be, an elephant. But there was one great difficulty about the elephant—his tail was a most extraordinarily difficult thing to produce whole and complete in brittle chalk, and there was a distressing casualty list of almost-finished elephants from this weakness.
At first Private Copple made the tail the last finishing touch to his work, but when elephant after elephant had to be scrapped because the tail broke off in the final carving, he reversed the process, began his work on the tail and trunk—another irritatingly breakable part of an elephant’s anatomy—and if these were completed successfully, went on to legs, head, etc. If the trunk or tail broke, he threw away the block and started on a fresh one. He finally improved on this and further reduced the wastage and percentage of loss by beginning his elephant with duplicate ends, with a trunk, that is, at head and stern. If one trunk broke off he turned the remaining portion satisfactorily enough into a tail; if neither broke and the body and legs were completed without accident, he simply whittled one of the trunks down into a tail and rounded off the head at that end into a haunch.
But now such humour as may be in this story must give way for the moment to the tragedy of red war—as humour so often has to do at the front.
Copple was just in the middle of a specially promising elephant when orders came to move. He packed the elephant carefully in a handkerchief and his pocket and took it with him back to the training area where for a time the Oughth London went through a careful instruction and rehearsing in the part they were to play in the next move of the “Show” then running. He continued to work on his elephant in such spare time as he had, and was so very pleased with it that he clung to it when they went on the march again, although pocket space was precious and ill to spare, and the elephant took up one complete side pocket to itself.
Arrived at their appointed place in the show, Copple continued to carry his elephant, but had little time to work on it because he was busy every moment of the day and many hours of the night on his hard and risky duties. The casualties came back to the Aid Post in a steady stream that swelled at times to an almost overwhelming rush, and every man of the Field Ambulance was kept going at his hardest. The Aid Post was established in a partly wrecked German gun emplacement built of concrete, and because all the ground about them was too ploughed up and cratered with shell-fire to allow a motor ambulance to approach it, the wounded had to be helped or carried back to the nearest point to which the hard-working engineers had carried the new road, and there were placed on the motors.
Private Copple was busy one morning helping to carry back some of the casualties. A hot “strafe” was on, the way back led through lines and clumped batches of batteries all in hot action, the roar of gun-fire rose long and unbroken and deafeningly, and every now and then through the roar of their reports and the diminishing wails of their departing shells there came the rising shriek and rush of a German shell, the crump and crash of its burst, the whistle and hum of flying splinters. Private Copple and the rest of the R.A.M.C. men didn’t like it any more than the casualties, who appeared