off the express at midnight at Ghevgeli and
returned to Salonica by slow train because his passport had not the
Greek police visa. Of course he lost his sleeping-car accommodation
and resumed his journey homewards by ordinary trains. Another case was
that of a young Roumanian returning from the Far East after endless
vicissitudes in the Koltchak and Bolshevik adventures. He also was
turned off and had to go to Salonica to visit the police.

However, the British authorities could not throw stones at the Greeks.
It would be unwise. Constantinople under British domination is one of
the worst places of obstruction in Europe. You need a military pass to
get in; you need a good deal more than that to get out. The Australian
Colonel in charge of the work going on at the Dardanelles gave me a
letter to G.H.Q. Constantinople, asking D.M.I. (we still talk of
D.M.I.'s) to put my passport through quickly. Here I was met by one of
those drawling incapables who make England loathed on the Continent.
"I--don't--really--see," says he, and pauses, and looks at my
weather-beaten cap and tramping boots--"I don't really see----"
Inability is a guiding sign of the administration.

I went to the Allied Passport Bureau, British Section, where a tippable
man was keeping a queue of all the rabble of the East, and I was to
come tomorrow morning. When the British section had given the visa I
went to the French, then to the Italians. One loses one's patience,
being kept waiting so long, and one breaks into a room sometimes before
one is asked. It was so with the Italians. I stepped suddenly into
the room of the man who had to initial my pass, and he was tenderly
embracing a charming brunette. He signed tacitly and rapidly and I was
gone. . . . After the Italians you seek out the Greeks who are in an
entirely different district. Outside the Consulate is a string of
photographers with cameras and ricketty chairs. The Greeks require
photographs--you sit down on a chair on the open roadway, and in a
quarter of an hour you have a sheaf of wet pictures of yourself by
which it certainly would be hard to recognize you. Inside the Greek
Consulate rages a terrific hurly-burly. You wait and perspire in a
vapour of garlic. . . . Then for the Bulgars. The Bulgars have
certainly hit on a novelty. The rubber stamp is applied to your
passport in one office and the date is written but the visa has to be
signed in another office a mile away.