Europe—Whither Bound?. Stephen Graham
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a week getting visas in London. I remembered his Excellency of Greece had changed his address. When the taxi-driver had located his new office in Great Tower Street we found that he was having a holiday, celebrating New Year's Day in orthodox Greek style about the fourteenth of the month. I returned in a few days' time and his Excellency was celebrating Epiphany. Next time I resolved to take a precautionary twenty minutes at the telephone and find out whether there were any other festivals on. The Poles, I remember, asked for answers to questions on two sheets of foolscap and charged thirty shillings for a visa that went out of date before I could get to their country. His Excellency of Bulgaria I made several trips to 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 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. Are we then through with everything? No. The Orient Express requires a doctor's certificate that you are free from vermin and infection. For this the doctors naturally charge a heavy fee. For my part I refused to see a doctor and carried the matter off with a high hand at the railway station, where they put me down as "officer in mufti." Apparently officers are exempted from all this. It is only if you happen to be one of the ordinary dirty and despised free citizens of Europe and not a member of any Commission or Red Cross or Y.M.C.A., or military unit—that you go through all this. Europe for the man in uniform!
So useful is the military uniform that some civilians carry their ex-khaki attire in an extra suit-case and put it on when they want to get along. I met an Englishman, ex-officer, in this get-up in the Serbian Constituent Assembly. He could beard whom he liked in Jugo-Slavia clad in an old uniform with ribbons. I heard of another in Austria who was arrested at the chief station in Vienna, having four millions of Austrian crowns on his person. Austrian crowns are worth much more in London than in Vienna, and it is illegal to take large quantities out of the country. But an observant speculator had concluded that a British uniform would give him immunity from search. In this probably he was right, but he had overdone it.
I found the Serbs and the Czechs to be the best people over passports in Central Europe. In Western Europe Belgium is most enlightened, having practically abolished the visa. France is striving to follow Belgium's lead. England in this matter, as in the matter of her charges for postage, telephones, and railway fares, seems to have completely lost that practical common sense which in the past has distinguished her from other nations. She charges foreigners heavily, keeps them waiting, and treats them impolitely. From Americans, for instance, there is a chorus of complaint on the ground of incivility. Not that Americans shine in this matter of passports for their own country. America sets Europe an unenlightened example of red-tape and venality.
What then, is the game in Europe? Why do free men and women spend golden forenoons in stuffy rooms, to fill in forms, to be brow-beaten by police and porters and clerks, treated like criminals or paupers, or unemployed come for an allowance? Perhaps they are paid for it? No, they actually have to pay, and pay heavily, suffering as it were injury on the top of insult.
It was partly explained to me in Munich by the British Consul-General. At Munich there is a Polish Consul and Vice-Consul, but there has been nothing to do, Poland having remarkably little business in Bavaria. The post languished. The Vice-Consul was recalled; the clerk was dismissed. One surmised the Consul himself might go and hand over his minute business to some other consulate which, no doubt, would have done it cheaply. But no. One day a solution occurred to the Consul. All Polish subjects in Bavaria ought to have Polish passports from the Polish Consul. Police orders to that effect were therefore issued. All who claimed to be Polish, or to have been born in those parts of Germany or Austria now Polish territory, were to put in an appearance. They would receive passports and would be duly charged.
But, having registered the whole Polish population, what then?
"Oh, I only give them visas for three months," says the Consul. "Every quarter they must come again."
So he converted his consulate into a revenue-paying establishment. What does it matter about the public? It is only asked to give one day in ninety to these formalities and has the other eighty-nine to itself.
The Polish passport office in Berlin fully confirms this point of view. Here are inordinate crowds whom politics have separated from kith and kin, trying to