view of her conflict with the petty bully of the passport office I could not ascertain, but it clearly loomed before her as a tragic and insuperable obstacle to her child's happiness. Although I was able somewhat to reassure her, it was evident that the little wedding would have to be postponed. I undertook to explain the crisis to the bridegroom, and at length the old woman tottered down the broad stone staircase and out into the bright Baltic sunshine to begin her weary homeward trudge.

66

The episode remained in my memory because it was typical of post-war Europe. I have encountered similar pitiful little episodes in a score of such arid and inhospitable passport offices between Rhine and Dwina. Everywhere in the reconstruction of Europe after the war, bureaucracy, as Roosevelt once remarked of European peace, rages with its accustomed ferocity," but to an extent and with a tyranny never hitherto approached in European history! In comparison with the working out of the Peace Treaty and the re-establishment of intercourse between communities, the war a simple and straightforward process! How little the Treaty-makers -ardent, light hearted, or merely slap - dash realised what a flood of petty officials they were letting loose upon tired and harmless peoples who wanted nothing more than to be left alone to get the world

was

working again! Every readjustment of territory, every grandiloquent project of selfdetermination and ethnographical frontiers, every commercial clause, gave hundreds of delighted bureaucrats the chance of wielding a little brief authority and earning a salary for interfering in the affairs of other people! Imagine the hundreds of thousands of property claims and problems of nationality that come up for settlement when a frontier, however small, is arbitrarily adjusted! I have met a farmer who suddenly discovered that whilst his house and vegetable garden remained in the land of his fathers, his barns and pasturage had been transferred to another country with which his own was still technically at war. I know a village in which the population found itself on one side of a Peace Treaty frontier, whilst the church, the general shop, and the inn were on the other!

But of all the happy huntinggrounds of the petty official bully, the visa office affords him the greatest sport. Here he is thoroughly happy in the untrammelled exercise of his crudest instincts. In these days European travel is still very far from comfortable, and after eight consecutive months of it I frequently feel inclined to echo 'Punch's' advice to those about to be married and say: Don't. But to those informed by the spirit of adventure difficulties and discomfort bring few alarms; travel they must,

and if they will remember to carry with them food and drink, Keating's powder, soap, towels, candles, and a corkscrew, travel indeed they shall! They must, however, bear in mind that trains generally are few. In the new country of Lettland, which is larger than Denmark, Switzerland, or Belgium, there are only six locomotives left from the loot of enemies, and out of the five thousand locomotives in Soviet Russia, four thousand have been taken over by the army. Moreover, trains in Central Europe have a deplorable habit of starting at six o'clock in the morning, and they always appear to do their best not to arrive at their destination until eleven o'clock at night. There follows a mad rush into the night of travellers, rendered unscrupulous by fatigue and hunger, to swamp the nearest hotels; and he who lags in the race may very likely be forced to choose between a few hours' rest on a slippery horsehair sofa in the smokingroom, or a dismal vigil seated on his baggage in the crowded and unventilated station waiting-hall.

Yet all this is humorous and intriguing in comparison with the long-drawn-out process of getting the visas without which European travel is now impossible. To tackle this a constitution is necessary able to endure long hours of waiting in stuffy, dirty, and crowded passport offices. Temper is essential that is proof against the peevishness and imperti

nence of innumerable young men who write intimate remarks about one's personal appearance in heavy ledgers, and finally, for a consideration, place on one's passport an official stamp and scratch hieroglyphics round it. Also the traveller will need a fat purse. My latest collection of visas enabling me to travel for a few months, ostensibly without let or hindrance, through France, Belgium, and Germany, cost me over £7; and for the price of another set of visas necessary for a journey from Riga through Berlin to Paris I could have rented for a month in the pleasant town of Riga a spacious and comfortably-furnished flat with butler, cook, and housemaid. I had to obtain a visa to enter Lettland. Two more permitted me to sojourn there. A fourth allowed me to leave.

Visas were necessary

for the passage through Lithuania and the Polish Corridor, and another was required authorising me to enter Germany. On arrival in Berlin I had to obtain official permission to stay there, and before I could move on to Paris I had to buy visas permitting me to leave Germany, to pass in a train through Belgium, and to enter France. Moreover, as the Poles were busily engaged in invading Lithuania, it was quite on the cards that passenger traffic in that unlucky little country would be peremptorily interrupted. In that case I should have to make a detour through Memel. But Memel is at pres

ent under control of the French. So yet another visa had to be bought!

It is time that this farcical and costly official parade should be abolished. Nothing works with more disastrous effect against the tranquillisation of war-weary and restless communities or the re-establishment of commerce and industry than the pompous ritual of unnecessary officialdom. It is absurd to regard this visa business as in any sense a safeguard, for at least half the scrutinisers of passports en route on the Continent are illiterate, and many are corrupt. Dozens of times has my passport been examined in the semi-darkness of badly-lighted trains or station buildings by shabby men, unable to read, who turn it over with a ridiculous pretence of knowingness, and never attempt to discover the particular visa which concerns them. I have known of men bluffing their way half across Europe waving baptism or share certificates and bribing tactfully.

Certainly the visa fetish of pettifogging bureaucracy brings a certain amount of ready cash to small impoverished countries and do-it-while-you-wait photographers. Moreover, passport offices practise sublime disregard of the convenience of the public, as indeed does bureaucracy generally, and, as a rule, are only open from nine to one.

It therefore frequently occurs that travellers are obliged to stay for one or even two nights in towns where visas have to be picked up, and innkeepers benefit accordingly. Meanwhile thousands of business men, many of them British, are daily subjected to delays and annoyances as they travel over Europe endeavouring to open up once more the old trade routes and reconstruct the business world. The visa punctilio is a direct discouragement to tourist and, indeed, railway traffic generally, and thus every country suffers directly or indirectly. Great Britain is at present the only country which has had the common-sense to slacken off its visa restrictions. Europe will not advance far until other countries follow suit.

I recall with sinister glee, though I dare not print, the opinion of Continental obstructionist officialdom expressed by a shrewd Scots merchant whom I encountered in a Memel restaurant. He had come from Wick, and was endeavouring to link up again old connections on the Baltic seaboard in the herring trade. Everywhere he had run up against petty bureaucracy, stupid formalities, and pound-foolish punctilio. Although I had been educated at the University of Edinburgh, I do not think I had ever till then fully realised the inherent vigour, wealth, and elasticity of the Scots tongue!

WITH the exception perhaps of the uprising in 1640, there has never been an occasion when the Irish have made serious headway against the British Government: their record of rebellions is a record of failure. The principal reason for this is their utter inability to work together in harmony : if they understood the value of concord, they would long ago have appreciated the benefits of loyal co-operation with Great Britain. And if a second reason be sought for, it is that an Irishman seldom knows his own mind. He has been aptly defined as "a man who doesn't know what he wants, and won't be happy till he gets it."

These reflections are comforting to people who live from day to day in the expectation of alarms and surprises. They are prepared for outbursts and for even bigger things; but they are confident that a body of well-disciplined and determined men are, even if numerically inferior, quite sufficient to cope with any uprising of which the Sinn Fein organisation is capable.

During the war false alarms were, in the main, the exception; during the "civil war " in Ireland they are the rule. The official reprisals, in the

form of arrests of ringleaders, which followed the succession of murders, would, it was thought, be revenged by Sinn Fein enterprises on a large scale, and more than usual precautions were taken in consequence. The idea that the insurgents would endeavour to carry out carefully-planned and detailed attacks on barracks always seemed very much on a par with the German invasion of England. Both contingencies were equally unlikely. But this is not equivalent to saying that precautions against a sudden emergency should be neglected. And, at the time, the possibility of Sinn Fein embarking on some big military operation far beyond the scope of anything they had attempted before was uppermost in everybody's mind.

Whenever a sentry, after marching to and fro for a weary hour, saw a cat slinking over the top of a wall, conviction filled him that the fated moment had come. He challenged loudly, called to the other sentry, held a consultation with him in eager undertones, told the sergeant of the guard when he came round with the relief, and the next sentry told the orderly officer when he arrived on visiting