In January, 1921, I took a general passport for Europe. The

Produced by Al Haines

EUROPE--WHITHER BOUND?

(Quo Vadis Europa?)

Being Letters of Travel from

the Capitals of Europe

in the Year 1921

BY

STEPHEN GRAHAM

THE RYERSON PRESS

TORONTO

1922

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PREFATORY NOTE

The Author's gratitude is due to many people in connexion with this

book--to Bishop Nicholas of Zicca and the Rev. Hugh Chapman, of the

Savoy, and Col. Treloar and Major-General Sir Fabian Ware, and the

Editor of the "Narodny Listi," at Prague, and Mr. Hyka,--to these and

many others who helped a traveller on his way.

The letters from each capital were published in "Country Life" under

the general title of _Quo Vadis Europa?_ A few after-thoughts have now

been written on "Extra Leaves," and sewn in between these letters.

No effort at an exhaustive study of any country is made here. The

object of the author was to make a rapid tour from capital to capital,

"keeping the taxi waiting," so to say, and thus obtain an idea of

Europe as a whole. It is perhaps one of the first books of travel

written from the point of view of Europe as a unity, and it is hoped it

will help to make us all good Europeans.

CONTENTS

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

I. FROM ATHENS

EXTRA LEAVES

(i) _On Passports and "Circulation"_

II. FROM CONSTANTINOPLE (I)

III. FROM CONSTANTINOPLE (II)

EXTRA LEAVES

(ii) _On "Charity" and the Stagnation of Peoples_

IV. FROM SOFIA

V. FROM BELGRADE (I)

VI. FROM BELGRADE (II)

VII. FROM BUDAPEST

VIII. FROM VIENNA

EXTRA LEAVES

(iii) _On Money and League of Nations Currency_

IX. FROM PRAGUE

X. FROM WARSAW

EXTRA LEAVES

(iv) _On Nationality and an Armistice Baby_

XI. FROM MUNICH

XII. FROM BERLIN (I)

XIII. FROM BERLIN (II)

EXTRA LEAVES

(v) _On "Clay Sparrows" and the Failure of Freedom_

XIV. FROM ROME

XV. FROM MONTE CARLO

XVI. FROM LONDON

XVII. FROM PARIS

EUROPE--WHITHER BOUND?

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

I. FROM ATHENS

Europe, whither goest thou?--the poignant question of to-day. The

pride of Christian culture, the greatest human achievement in history,

with, as we thought before 1914, the seal of immortality set upon her,

is now perhaps moving towards dissolution and death. Europe has begun

a rapid decline, though no one dares to think that she will continue in

it downward until she reaches the chaos and misery and barbarity from

which she sprang. Affairs will presently take a turn for the better,

Europe will recover her balance and resume the road of progress which

she left seven years ago--prompts Hope.

"Europe must die in order to be re-born as something better"; "all must

be destroyed," say the theorists of revolution. "She staggers and

falls and falls and plunges," seem to say the facts with the

inexorableness of Fate.

Prophecy can be left to all men--it does not alter the course of

events. The historian in the future will ask what was the actual

condition of Europe at this time, and it is possible to assume that he

would grasp eagerly at an account of a visit by an impartial observer

to all the principal capitals of Europe in the year 1921. An effort to

record what Europe looks like now, a series of true reflections and

verbal photographs of swirling humanity at the great congregating

places, the capitals, cannot but be of value. So with the motto: "See

all: reserve your judgment," let us proceed.

The winds of the mountains traverse the well-shod civilization of a

great city. At the end of each of the long streets rises a mountain,

and on the mountain rest the clouds and the sky. You walk outwards,

and climb the nearest and most prominent of the heights to the

Acropolis, to the mighty slabs of the marble of the Parthenon, simple

and pure in the mountain air, a point of view where it is always

morning, and you look down from the ancient Athens to the new. Your

eyes rest on modern Athens all built in white stone, and extensive and

handsome in a setting of mountains and sea, but the heart refuses to

travel with the eyes. The heart remains in the ancient city, and

there, somehow, is perfect happiness, and it is a place in which to

abide.

Not without some sacred thought does one place one's feet upon the bare

rock where walked the bright spirits of ancient Athens. The morning

sun of Europe, the dawning vision of all that we Europeans could be or

mean, dawns again in the soul. As an old or invalid man, or one at

least who in middle years has sinned and gone astray, one looks back to

the innocence and promise of childhood. Here shone the light of our

being undimmed; here was kindled in Europe the faith of the ideal.

Yonder is Mars Hill from which St. Paul showed the new way when the

light was growing dim. For Greece identified man in part with the

Divine, but the new religion gave forgetful humanity its altar of

remembrance, affirming that we do not belong to the beasts that perish

but are affiliated to the Almighty.

It is perhaps strange that to-day the city which was the cradle of the

ideal is a city where there are no ideals at all--either old or new,

where Plato now means nothing, where even Bolshevism is not heard of.

S----, who took his bachelorate on divinity at Oxford, is writing a

sympathetic treatise on Nietzsche and Christianity for his doctorate at

the University of Athens. But what a mistake! What an unfortunate

choice of place and theme! Who was Nietzsche? "I have changed my

title to 'Nietzsche as the Devil'" says S----. "Ah, that's better,"

says his professor, "that we can understand."

You come down from the heights into the modern city, and you behold the

rising civilization of a new Greece. Here without question is a most

pleasant city, with acacia avenues and white houses and full-bosomed

abundant orange-trees hanging their golden fruits. Thus happily

bowered, merchants and bankers pursue their avocations, and shopkeepers

display their wares in a pleasant array of modern shops. On the

streets walk leisurely an indolent and elegant people; the dark women

are especially _chic_ and it must be said refined and restrained, and

not so seductive in appearance as the South would suggest. You see

also at the many open-air cafés and in the street a very

distinguished-looking type of man with finely cut features and

plentiful iron-grey hair. You surmise that you are looking upon the

most indolent people in the world--not lazy like Russians or Irish, but

elegantly indolent, walking so slowly, playing meditatively with their

beads--for nearly every man carries his string of jet or amber beads,

which he mechanically tells, though without a thought of prayer. They

walk with half-closed eyes, and whilst they seem to be thinking, they

are but taking a passive pleasure in existence. They sit down together

at their cafés which debouch upon the streets, and sip the sweetest of

coffee, and light their cigarettes, and regard the world which passes

slowly by. There are all manner of mendicants and of musicians

flitting to and fro in the sun, like shabby butterflies, and the

elegant Greek says "No" to them, not by sound of voice, but by the

slightest elevation of the eyebrows and movement of the eye. He sits

and looks occasionally at the wonderful hills above him, so fresh, so

virginal; but he does not, as an Englishman might do, pay quickly and

go out and go up. The modern Greek would never build so high as the

Acropolis.

You do not hear a good word said for the Greek by any race in Europe.

Italians, French, Serbs, Bulgars, Turks, and even British are all more

or less anti-Greek. Whilst it seems true to say that you scarcely find

any nation that likes any other nation, yet the antipathy towards the

Greek seems more marked than most others. Whatever illfeeling or

irritative may be in the air is readily vented upon the Greek. Despite

all this, however, the new Greeks are a slowly but steadily rising and

prospering people. One hundred years ago they obtained their

liberation from the Turk. The Turkish mind was shown to be incapable

of absorbing Europeanism. The light of the nineteenth century scared

the night-bird back to Asia, and there arose Serbs, and Bulgars, and

Roumanians as European nations, and Greece once more arose. Modern

civilization suits the Greek much more than it does the Turk. He can

understand it and utilize it. Because of it he has risen and perchance

will rise. The Greeks are by far the cleverest people in the Balkans,

and are perhaps the cleverest of the Mediterranean nations as well.

The Greek temperament swings between the dead calm and passionless on

the one hand, to the violent and maniacal on the other. The nation is

still convalescent, its development is slow, and it is impossible to

say how far new Greece will develop. But its strength lies in its

serpentine stillness and ancient unforgotten craft, and its weakness in

that absence of ideals and in the sudden violence of partizanship which

suggest pathological decay. What Greece does is generally subtle and

shrewd; what she says is often madness. She has little sense of

humour, and takes offence where other nations would laugh. Thus she

wins by statecraft and loses by politics. In thought, and in the

spoken word, Greece is outmatched for instance by the Slavs; but in

silent action and in administrative policy Greece more often excels her

neighbours. You will always hear odious comparisons made in the Near

East between Greek and Turk, to the disadvantage of the former. But it

seems rather absurd. The Turk, at his best, is a child or a legendary

hero--not one of ourselves--whereas the Greek is a serious European

with a race-consciousness of civilization thousands of years old.

Athens has quietened down after the political violence of the

restoration of Constantine. One sees pictures of the King

everywhere--a cavalry officer with high Greek military hat, bushy

moustaches, and rather horse-like face. He has large strained eyes

with a questioning, impatient expression. All these pictures were

hidden during the King's exile, but on his return came forth to light

again. Common also are posters of Constantine as St. George, and the

Venizelist administration as a three-headed dragon of which Venizelos

is the chief and certainly most loathly head. Venizelos has become

violently distasteful to the people--though possibly he may return to

power by as violent a reaction. The chief reason for his fall was that

he offended Greek national pride by being the puppet of the Allies.

The revolution which he accomplished at the instigation of the French

was highly resented. And all the mortification of the French contempt

for Greece was vented upon him. Although Greece won such a goodly

share of the booty of the war, she was treated throughout the war with

a brutal nonchalance. Venizelos had much respect, but Greece had none.

A comparison is often made between the machinations of the Allies in

Petrograd in 1917 for the deposing of the Tsar, and the intrigues which

forced Constantine to flee. Venizelos nevertheless was one of the

cleverest statesmen of Europe--granted one can be clever and not wise

at the same time--clever and even stupid, his chief weakness being a

crude violence of temperament which breaks out in his speeches:

On vient de vous dire, s'écria-t-il, qu'il n'y avait pas de

germanophiles an Grèce. Cela est vrai pour le peuple, pour les homines

politiques de tous les partis en grande majorité. Moi-même je viens de

l'attester à la conference de Londres. Mais cela n'est vrai du roi, ni

de son entourage. Ceux-la ne sont pas seulement germanophiles. Ils

sont Boches de la tête aux pieds! . . .

The good order, the low cost of living, the high value of the drachma,

the excellent condition of the army, the enhanced prestige of the Greek

nation after the war, all testify to the ability of Venizelos.

Venizelos won for Hellas territory which extends from Salonica all the

way to the Black Sea, and brought her almost to the gates of

Constantinople. The role of neutrality which King Constantine affected

would have left Greece without the coveted war-glory, and, of course,

without the dangerous responsibility she has now. Thanks to Venizelos,

Greece is almost an empire. And the Greeks are glad to have this extra

sway. No sentiment has stood in the way of Constantine's Government

retaining what its arch-enemy had won. "We may fall out in politics,

but where our material interests are concerned you will find complete

solidarity," said an Athenian journalist. And it seems true.

Not many signs of altruism are visible in Greece. There are few

Germanophiles. "Do not fear for us," said M. Kalogeropoulos, to the

French. "Greece will not ally herself to a corpse"--meaning Germany.

In fact, there is among the Greeks only Graecophilism. If superlative

and clamorous love of country is a virtue--they have it. For Greece,

when you are down, you are down. As for fallen Germany, so for Russia

in her humiliation Greece has no extra thought or care. Not a

humanitarian and philanthropic nation! One wonders how a Greek mind

would interpret the "big-brother-love" of the Americans, which prompts

the marvellous rescue-work now being done by the United States in all

the stricken countries of Europe. There, however, the indolence of the

Greek mind and the half-closed eye intervene. There is no curiosity

about philanthropy. But it is a Greek word by origin.

One longs to see some sort of love towards the neighbour. There is a

mortal enmity towards the Bulgar, a cool reciprocity of Italian

dislike, a non-comprehension of the Serb, traditional hatred of the

Turk--all these are intensified by egoism. New Greece, with her

hazardous northern frontier, needs to cultivate friendship, and will

have to employ all her strategy to gain any. Her mainstay is, of

course, England. For us Greece has the natural respect which a weak

country pays to a strong friend, but she has also a curious covert

regard for us as one nation of sailors for another, a petty maritime

State for a great one. Her weakness is in asking material favours at

the same time as she pays compliments. Greece is almost our ally in

the Near East. French rivalry has bound British and Greeks together.

In our employ are Greeks; in the French employ, Turks. There is no

question but our employees are the cleverer and the more capable, but

there is a continual clash on psychological grounds. The Greeks make

mistakes and the British are not ready to make allowances. The

Englishman demands that his friend shall be a "sportsman"--the Turk is,

the Greek is not. Therefore we cannot fit Greece into the jig-saw

puzzle which we call the comity of nations. The question is, can

Greece cut herself to fit--ought she to?

It is strange to come into the martial display of Athens and find the

old war still going on, see the numbers of worn soldiers weighed down

with all the impedimenta of "fighting order" coming home on leave or

returning to the front, to see the Turkish prisoners of war jobbing at

the station and on the streets, to see the handsome Evzones, the

soldiers of the King's bodyguard, strutting together in fine style

along the cobbled roadway. It is impressive, and shows Greece in a new

light. Then the Constituent Assembly with its new Turkish members in

their fezes rather takes the eye as a novel synthesis of political

interest in the Near East. Athens is a great capital where much that

is vital in the future of Europe is at stake. It stands somewhat aside

from the general misery of Europe, and for that reason more perhaps can

be seen.

Not that Greece has not its poor--its appalling beggars, its miserable

war-cripples, its refugees. An extensive strike was in progress in

February; it had to be settled by a threat of mobilization. "Any

workman not in his place on Monday morning will be called up for the

next draft to Asia Minor" proved an effectual way of meeting demands

for higher pay. Of the refugees, pity is first awakened for the

Russians. Just outside the city of Athens, in old barracks, lie the

survivors of the tuberculosis hospitals evacuated from the Crimea--pale

and haggard as death--strange wisps of humanity, attended by devoted

Russian doctors and nurses; but fed on the scantiest of dry army

rations, short of medicine and comfort of all kinds. One ward of dying

women with staring eyes, an unforgettable impression!

Whilst in Greece, every Englishman should visit our cemeteries in

Macedonia, and realize that we planted many thousands of our people

like seeds of a kind in this Grecian soil--that a flower of freedom

might grow. On a wind-blown moor, in sight of Mt. Olympus and the sea,

ranges one regular array of British crosses--now of wood, but presently

to be of marble, with a stone of remembrance in their midst. It will

be done well, in the British way. Even the dead might be pleased by

what is being done. But here is a strange phenomenon which seems to

make a mockery of our sacrifice. Around this wonderful burying ground

are growing up a miscellany of alien crosses, of all shapes and sizes,

stuck in ugly heaps of upturned earth. Every day a pit is dug and the

dead-cart arrives. There is no service, no ceremony. But forty or

fifty nearly naked bodies of women and children are shot into the pit

and covered over hastily and a cross put over them. They are Russians,

the so-called Russian Greeks evacuated from the Caucasus last year, now

stricken with typhus and almost famished to death, some 12,000 of them

in old army huts, living promiscuously together and attended by one

desperate doctor and a few devoted sisters. Europe is heaping her dead

around us.

This truly is not near Athens, but above the ruined ramshackle port of

Salonica, once a fair city, but now facing the sea with almost a mile

of fire-devastated streets. The refugees are confined to their huts,

and are under a sort of military control. All the people are

proletariat, and ought never to have been taken on board ships and

brought to Greece. A few would have been killed by Bolsheviks, but not

so many as will die here by disease. They cannot help Russia outside

of Russia, and it is beyond belief that little countries can look after

them indefinitely. It is pathetic to look into their huts, strung from

wall to wall with crusts of bread, the floors multitudinous with people

and especially with children; every serious person engaged in the

hopeless task of destroying the lice. Even if these people were at

once put on transports and taken to Russia half of their number would

be destined to death.

The Russian scenes and episodes in Greece foreshadow the immense

tragedy to be witnessed in Constantinople and on Gallipoli and at

Lemnos. What touches the heart at Athens will ravage the whole being

at Constantinople. But of that anon. An episode at Athens on the day

of arrival had a spice of novelty in it which soon dulled on the palate

in a rapidity of repetition:

It is Sunday afternoon, and on the pavement of a quiet street stands a

mute and gloomy man with an armful of what appears to be paper-money.

He is holding it out in his two hands.

Impossible that it should be money!

But it is. He is holding about half a million roubles in his hands.

Yes, they are for sale. This for so much, this other for so much.

"I am sorry I have no Greek money, but please take five liras Italian

and give it to your comrades. You must be very poor."

A smile appeared on the man's face.

"But you'll take some roubles," said he.

"Well, if you like, just a small note for remembrance. It doesn't

matter what."

"Here's ten thousand roubles!"

And he handed out a handsome new note for that amount. It fluttered

from his hand to the pavement and was caught on the wind.

"Pick it up quickly! It's ten thousand roubles," one wished to cry

anxiously to the passer-by.

Only ten thousand! And for something less than sixpence!

"Europe won't get right before the Russian business is straightened

out," said an American commercial traveller at the hotel. He, for his

part, was engaged in the profitless task of disposing of large margins

of goods at fifty per cent below cost of production whilst the

leisurely, crafty Greeks kept him waiting from day to day in the

expectation of getting another ten per cent reduction.

"The whole world's out of gear," said the American in disgust. "The

war and the Russian revolution are the cause. They have ruined the

meaning of money."

I was to find his words true to this extent that at every capital the

European problem proved to be inextricably involved in the Russian

problem also.

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.

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 get passes to go home, to live, to exist. The

door-keeper smokes a cigar; the first clerk makes eyes at the women

applicants, the girl clerks suck sweets, the Consulate clock runs on,

and you pay hundreds of German marks each for the upkeep of the

business.

The Poles, or indeed, the British, or the Americans, for we are all

tarred by the same brush, might take a lesson from the Czecho-Slovaks,

who have at Vienna a bureau which will get your passport visa and your

railway ticket for you, and reserve you a room in a hotel in Prague

without any fee. The enlightened Government of this new republic

understands that that is the best propaganda for their country which

can be done. Not that Czecho-Slovakia does not charge for a visa and

charge for permission to go out of the country. At Cheb I nearly

missed my train whilst an official was weighing up in his mind how much

he should charge for allowing me to go through without a visa.

Another aspect of the passport trouble in Europe is local nationalism

which at Budapest takes the form of insisting on asking you questions

in Hungarian and refusing to understand any other tongue. As you have

to spend hours with the police in the Magyar capital before you obtain

permission to stay there and again before you obtain permission to go

away, this is peculiarly distressing.

Under such circumstances is it surprising that there is stagnation of

peoples in Europe? This stagnation is great, and it is noticeable in

almost every great city of the continent. It is a rich time for the

hotel-keepers. There is scarcely a capital in Europe where you can

reckon on finding a room without trouble. The following experiences

are symptomatic enough: at Rome I visited about twenty hotels; shut out

for the night, got into a "strange place" about three a.m.; Stuttgart,

out all night; Sofia, visited all hotels, all full, slept in guard-room

of town-patrol; Sofia, second time, shared a room with an officer;

Vienna, toured city in a cab and found nothing; Warsaw, spent nine

hours going from hotel to hotel, got a room for a thousand-mark tip.

In Constantinople you can find cases of three families in one

apartment. Wherever you go you are going to have adventures in finding

a room, unless you are an officer or a member of an Allied Commission,

or belong to the Red Cross or Starving Children's Fund, or some

organization that has facilities for looking out for itself.

Poor old Europe! She was more of a unity in the days when we were "an

armed camp." We have broken the power of militarism. There has been a

revolution in Russia. A British statesman in the House of Commons, in

1917, said it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven.

Some millions of young men died before Armistice Day, 1918. Since then

there has been great work clearing away barbed-wire entanglements along

the old front. But it seems to be a nightmare task: entanglements

multiply upon us faster than we can clear the old ones away. You

cannot get across Europe because of the obstructions: you cannot

circulate.

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

II. FROM CONSTANTINOPLE (I)

It has been a bleak early spring with snow on the uplands of Thrace.

For those who travel from Paris to Constantinople on that Western

moving shuttle, the Orient Express, there would be nothing to trouble

the mind unpleasantly--except in that the more comfortable we are, the

more we demand and the more we grumble. But if you travel by the

ordinary unheated train, where even the first-class carriages are more

or less bereft of glass and have the windows loosely boarded up with

bits of old packing-cases, you taste something of the persistent

northern wind which blows down sleet and rain from the Black Sea, from

Russia, as it were Russian unhappiness it was blowing down.

You arrive at Sofia at midnight in torrents of rain. You take a cab

and visit every hotel, large or small, in the Bulgarian capital, and

are refused. People are already sleeping three or four in a room,

sleeping in outhouses and bath-rooms, refugee Bulgars from the lost

Bulgar territories, refugee Turks, refugee Russians. You return to the

station and it is closed for the night, and you have a wordy discussion

with the eternal cabman as to whether you shall pay a hundred or two

hundred francs--Bulgarian francs or levas which are, however, worth a

bare three-farthings each to-day. You find shelter in a wayside café

which is half café, half guard-house for the town patrol. Soldiers are

stretched out snoring on the floor. Five levas to sit up, ten to lie

down! By that time of night you are fain to lie down.

A dreary journey on to Philippopolis and Svilengrad, with the wind

lashing the train, lashing it all the way to the Chataldja lines and

the zone of Allied control. Eight passport examinations, eight

examinations of your baggage, plentiful two, three, and four-hour

stops, a land of ruined railway stations and bare hills, and only late

on the second evening after Sofia do you creep into the imperial city.

It is Stamboul at night, agleam with lights, running with mud, flocking

with dense crowds. You change some money to piastres at a small booth,

and your pocket is at once picked--a common experience. The Pera tram

is so crowded that you escape being asked for a fare, which is

fortunate, seeing that you have no Turkish money. So across the

wonderful bridge on which all the nations of the world are seen

walking, up to the so-called pleasant heights of Pera and its hotels

and palaces. Here for a dirty little room one pays more than in a

first-class hotel in New York. You are fortunate if you find even that

soon. A Greek-owned hotel. You scan the names of the occupants--they

are of all nationalities of Europe. Russians and Armenians seem most

to abound. There appears to be a Scotsman among them, a Mr. Fraser,

but he is a Scot resident in Smyrna and smokes a narghile every evening

after supper. The lounge of the hotel looks like a crèche for the

children of refugees. But couples are seen here on the couches

interested only in themselves, and a long-haired Russian is at the

piano playing Scriabine devotedly and with deep concentration, as if

the boisterousness of the children were unheard.

Constantinople has five times as many people as it can house, a city

now of appalling unhappiness and misery, and of a concomitant luxury

and waste. A scene at night: two children, a boy and a girl, lie

huddled together on the pavement sleeping whilst the rain beats down

upon them. The crowd keeps passing, keeps passing, and some step over

them, many glance questioningly downward, but all pass on. No one

stops. I stood at a corner and watched. Then I walked up to the

children and wakened them and tried to make them speak. But they

stared with their pale faces and said nothing. At a neighbouring

pastry-cook's I bought two cakes and brought them to them, and stirred

them up to take them, which they did eagerly, each grasping tightly a

cake in the little hand. I stopped a Russian woman who was hesitating

as she passed. "There are many," said she. "It is quite common. You

see plenty babies lying in the rain. When you come? You come off a

ship? . . . The only way to help them is give them piastres." I did

that, and by that time a little crowd had gathered and every one began

to fret and give a little money to them. So the crowd changed its

mind, and the children began to have little sheaves of paper-money in

their hands. And still they lay in the rain and no one could take them

in.

The Russians have got Constantinople at last. It is an irony of Fate.

There are a hundred thousand of them there, the best blood of Russia,

and the most charming and delightful people in Europe in themselves,

though now almost entirely destitute of means. A large Russian army

without arms is not very far away, and a Russian generalissimo without

power stays in his yacht at Galata. The great city has been outwardly

transformed by the Russians who seem at first to have taken over all

the business and to have dispossessed innumerable Turks and Greeks.

Russian is the predominant language; all the best restaurants and many

of the shops seem to be Russian, and Russian pedlars in scores cry

their wares in the streets. Greek and Turkish business is modest and

retiring, but everything Russian is advertised by large artistic signs.

The gleaming lights of innumerable "Lotto Parlours" catch the eye, you

pass with the rolling crowd into the cabaret, the music-hall, the

theatre, the café, the restaurant, the book-shop--all Russian. You see

the establishments of Russian doctors, lawyers, dentists,

dancing-masters. In an improvised wooden hut you see a celebrated

portrait-painter sitting, ready to paint you whilst you wait or execute

commissions of any kind. The restaurants all have Russian names and

sometimes refer back to business left behind in Russia--the restaurant

"Birzha" from Rostof, "Kievsky Ugolok" from Kiev, "Veliky Moskovsky

Kruzhok," the "Yar," and the like. These are very tastefully arranged

and the cooking is excellent, being under the supervision of celebrated

Russian chefs. Thus at the "Kievsky Ugolok" it is well known that the

cook of Prince Vorontsof is in charge, and the restaurant does not

merely live by reputation but an excellence of cuisine testifies in

itself to some master-hand. The waitresses at most of these Russian

establishments are often women of society, and some of them very

beautiful in the simplicity of uniform. There is a fascinating added

pleasure in being waited upon by such gracious women, but the heart

aches for the fate of some of them. On each table is a ticket with the

name and patronymic of the waitress, thus, Tatiana Mihailovna, or

Sophia Vladimirovna. They are on a level with those they serve, and

the women embrace them, the men kiss their hands. Naturally there are

no such things as tips; service is charged for in the bill. Elegance

mingles with melancholy. Russians meet and talk endlessly, and sigh

for Russia, and the Russian music croons the night long from the

musicians' gallery or orchestra.

The saddest shops are those which, no doubt, belong mostly to Armenians

and Spanish Jews, where "valuables" are exposed, the miscellaneous

collections of the things the Russians have sold or wish to sell. Here

are rings, lockets, bracelets, fur-coats and wraps, gold vases,

trinket-cases, odd spoons of Caucasian silver, cigarette-holders,--like

so many locks of hair cut from diverse humanity. Here lie intimate

possessions, prized, not likely to be sold, seemingly quietly

reproachful under the public gaze, baptismal crosses, jewelled girdles,

gloves, Paris blouses, English costumes. The refugees must sell all

that they have, and some have sold all. I met the wife of a colonel of

Life Guards. She was dressed in a cotton skirt, a cream-coloured

"woolly," a waterproof, and a wretched cheap collar of fur. Once she

never stepped out of her house but into a car. Now in weather-beaten

thin old boots she must tramp from place to place over the cobbles,

living in one room with her family, washes the clothes herself, scrubs

the floor, has no money. The women have won the unbounded admiration

of the British in Constantinople. For pluck these Russian women would

be hard to rival. But what a destiny! They spend their money, they

sell their jewels and rings, they sell their clothes, they take out

trays of chocolates to sell in the streets and shiver at the

street-corners; to feed their children they sell more clothes.

Hundreds of cases have been discovered in which the women are confined

to their rooms, having sold almost all their wearing apparel, and

having nothing in which to appear on the streets.

The refugee peasantry and working class are mostly confined in

barbed-wire internment camps outside the city, and guarded by

Sengalese. Twenty per cent get permission to go into the city each

day. The seventy or eighty thousand indigent Russians in

Constantinople belong mostly to the upper classes. Very many belong to

Petrograd society, and are people who fled to the Crimea and the

Caucasus, were caught up in the Deniken or Wrangel panic, and

transported hither. They are well-educated people, speaking English

and French, and well-read and accomplished. But how little are those

modern accomplishments when it comes to the elemental realities of

life. A beautiful young countess is employed in a bakery to sell

bread, and is lucky. An erstwhile lion and ex-general has a job in a

laundry. Pride intervenes only to stop them begging. How few are the

beggars! But you see the nicest of girls with pinched white faces

trying to sell _loukoum_. Even hard Scotsmen passing by are fain to

give them money and take nothing in return.

You see the strangest vendors--children standing at a street corner

trying to sell a blouse and a pair of boots, tatterdemalions trying to

dispose of unsaleable rags, ex-students with heaps of textbooks trying

to sell to those students who, despite everything, are still carrying

on.

When new boat-loads of refugees arrive, the street-selling is naturally

augmented by a more hopeful crowd, and it was possible to see one day

little bears with scarlet ribbons round their necks being offered for

sale on the pavement, tiny baby-bears with pink noses and sprawling

feet, fed with milk from wine bottles:

"_Dvadsat lira, dvadsat lira!_"

Alas, the temptations are great. Need becomes more and more incessant.

Starvation stares thousands in the face. One sees those who keep their

heads up still, but we lose sight of many who are utterly cast down and

lost. Many a Russian has gone down here in this great city and been

lost, vanished into the hideous underworld of the Levant. They sell

all their jewels and then sell the last jewel of all. In the cabarets

and night-halls of low amusement there is nude dancing and drink,

lascivious Greeks, drunken American sailors capable of enormities of

behaviour, British Tommies with the rolling eye, "seeing the world and

being paid for it" as the posters say. The public places are a

scandal, and the private dens got up in all sorts of styles with

rose-coloured shaded lights and divans and cushions for abandonment to

drugs and sensual affections must be explored individually to be

described. A part of old Russia has come to Constantinople--to die.

In charge of this imbroglio is a British General. The city is under

Allied control, and is patrolled by the troops of four nations, but the

British is the main authority. G.H.Q. Constantinople occupies a large

barracks which faces a parade-ground. Indian sentries march to and fro

outside and enjoy thus serving their King, a picture of polish and

smartness. Facing the barracks is a smaller building called "The

Jockey Club" where the Commander-in-Chief himself and many of his staff

meet to lunch or dine, play billiards, or chat pleasantly over their

liqueurs in English style.