Kensington to find, and
I gave him up as apparently non-existent. With the representatives of
Latvia I had a troublous conversation and finally obtained another
useless visa for forty shillings. The Germans would not give a visa as
I was entering Germany from the other side of Europe. I spent about
ten pounds in London merely for the application of rubber stamps and
Consuls' signatures. In the course of my travels that passport became
an appalling wilderness of visas and remarks climbing out of their
legitimate spaces to get mixed up with wife's signature and the colour
of the hair. The most flattering of these remarks is no doubt that
affixed at Sofia station--"Not dangerous to society." But I had to
show that passport not only to the police and the military of all
nations, but also before entering the gambling halls of Monte Carlo on
the one hand and before entering the gates of the Cathedral of Sancta
Sophia at Constantinople on the other.

One of the worst places is Vintimiglia on the Franco-Italian line. The
French frank you out of their country; the Italians frank you in. You
step into a separate chamber and are searched and asked particular and
impertinent questions. Before leaving Italy the Italian police demand
your personal attendance and take a small due. In some countries you
are required to obtain police permission to leave the country; in some
not. No one tells you what you have to do. You can take a ticket and
proceed gaily to the frontier and then be turned back. This can happen
even in the enlightened State of Czechoslovakia. Greece, however, is
one of the worst international offenders in this matter. The traveller
has to spend a morning with the police, and he may be held up for some
days if Church Festivals intervene. If he goes to the frontier without
the police stamp on his passport he gets sent back. Two examples of
how this lack of international manners works out I append: A German
officer captured by the Russians in 1915, was sent to Siberia, escaped
and got somehow down to Tashkent, the ex-capital of Russian Central
Asia, struggled out of Asia and through Asia Minor in an utterly
indigent condition, and this year stowed away on a Greek ship and got
to Athens. So great was the interest in his case that a subscription
was made for him publicly, and he was given a first-class ticket to
Berlin, and a place in the sleeping car was reserved. Incredible as it
may seem, he was turned