EXTRA LEAVES
(i) On Passports and "Circulation"
Mr. H. G. Wells, in "The Salvaging of Civilization," has very pleasantly contrasted the States of America with the States of Europe—the Disunited States. America, where you can travel by through trains without showing passports, without customs-barriers, without change of currency and without police-inquisition; America where there is a free interchange of peoples and opinions, Europe lying in unexampled obstruction and stagnation; America with its cheap post and universally-used telephone service, Europe with its expensive, ill-managed posts and local and limited and expensive and contumacious telephone. At the time of writing you can send a letter from San Francisco to London for less than it costs to send a similar letter from one London suburb to another. In America you have inter-state telephone service, you have the constant extension of an elaborate and efficient system, whilst on our side of the water we intelligent Europeans are asking to have the apparatus removed as a hindrance and a failure.
Passports, railway-service, post, telephone, currency—all these may fittingly be considered as aspects of one vital matter, namely, circulation. All living organic unity is dependent on circulation. As the health of the human body is dependent on an unobstructed circulation of the blood, of the lymph, of the air, so the health of a nation or a state or a group of states is dependent on the free circulation of peoples, goods, opinions, money, and what not. A bad circulation results in "pins and needles," and we Europeans have so inverted common sense as to indulge habitually in a policy of pin-pricks. A bad circulation results in cold feet, in local stagnation, in lethargy. No circulation results in death. It means
to die, and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot.
It may almost be said that Shakespeare's formula for death describes Europe—she goes she knows not where, she lies in cold obstruction and she rots.
In reality it is not quite so bad as that. Though there is local paralysis of an alarming kind, there is also a sluggish circulation. How impeded that circulation is let the traveller judge.
In January, 1921, I took a general passport for Europe. The British passport office facilitated my struggles. For I am a well-known struggler there and am now excused the preliminary heats. I spent 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.