Last of all comes the Practical Joke Department.  It covers practically all of one side of Olympus—­the shady side.

The jokes usually take the form of an order, followed by a counter-order.  For example—­

In his magisterial days Ayling, of whom we have previously heard, was detailed by his Headmaster to undertake the organisation of a school corps to serve as a unit of the Officers’ Training Corps—­then one of the spoilt bantlings of the War Office.  Being a vigorous and efficient young man, Ayling devoted four weeks of his summer holiday to a course of training with a battalion of regulars at Aldershot.  During that period, as the prospective commander of a company, he was granted the pay and provisional rank of captain, which all will admit was handsome enough treatment.  Three months later, when after superhuman struggles he had pounded his youthful legionaries into something like efficiency, his appointment to a commission was duly confirmed, and he found himself gazetted—­Second Lieutenant.  In addition to this, he was required to refund to the Practical Joke Department the difference between second lieutenant’s pay and the captain’s pay which he had received during his month’s training at Aldershot!

But in these strenuous days the Department has no time for baiting individuals.  It has two or three millions of men to sharpen its wit upon.  Its favourite pastime at present is a sort of giant’s game of chess, the fair face of England serving as board, and the various units of the K. armies as pieces.  The object of the players is to get each piece through as many squares as possible in a given time, it being clearly understood that no move shall count unless another piece is evicted in the process.  For instance, we, the xth Brigade of the yth Division, are suddenly uprooted from billets at A and planted down in barracks at B, displacing the pth Brigade of the qth Division in the operation.  We have barely cleaned tip after the pth—­an Augean task—­and officers have just concluded messing, furnishing, and laundry arrangements with the local banditti, when the Practical Joke Department, with its tongue in its cheek, bids us prepare to go under canvas at C. Married officers hurriedly despatch advance parties, composed of their wives, to secure houses or lodgings in the bleak and inhospitable environs of their new station; while a rapidly ageing Mess President concludes yet another demoralising bargain with a ruthless and omnipotent caterer.  Then—­this is the cream of the joke—­the day before we expect to move, the Practical Joke Department puts out a playful hand and sweeps us all into some half-completed huts at D, somewhere at the other end of the Ordnance map, and leaves us there, with a happy chuckle, to sink or swim in an Atlantic of mud.