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.