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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
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