“pass,” shakes his head sagely, and with a curt “Come with me!” orders you to follow him.  You protest energetically, and point to the signature.  He shakes his head emphatically as he growls “No!  No!” and continues, referring to the owner of the signature on your “pass,” “we know nothing about him!  You must see my Commanding Officer.”  Reaching this official, who regards you as a criminal who has escaped, you suddenly learn that the “pass” is not a passport for your movement through Germany, but is valid only for the Army Corps in which it was issued!

Consignment to prison is the inevitable sequel.  You may protest until you are black in the face, but it makes no difference.  The papers which you signed day after day until you became sick at the sight of them, but which were necessary to secure your first “pass,” commence their lengthy and tedious trip through the German Circumlocution Office, the trip occupying weeks.  During this time you are kept in prison and treated as if you were a common felon, until at last, everything being declared to be in order, you receive a new “pass” for the Army Corps in which you have been arrested.  The moment you venture into another Army Corps, even if you return into that from which you were first released, arrest follows and the whole exasperating rigmarole has to be repeated.  The Army Corps are as arbitrarily defined as anything to be found in tape-tied Germany.

I do not think that such a wildly humorous feature of organisation to compare with this is to be found in any other part of the world.  Had it not been for the deliberate misleading, or to term it more accurately, unblushing lying, upon the part of the respective commanding officers of the respective Army Corps, the British tourists who happened to be in Germany when war broke out would have got home safely.  Being ignorant of German manners, customs, and military idiosyncrasies, and placing a blind faith in German assertion and scraps of paper, the unfortunate travellers fell into the trap which undoubtedly had been prepared to meet such conditions.

The British tourists who were caught in eastern Germany, after their first arrest and release upon one of these despicable and fraudulent passes, being reassured by the intimation that they were free to go where they pleased, naturally thought they would be able to hurry home, and straightaway moved towards the coast.  But directly they entered the adjacent Army Corps they suffered arrest and imprisonment until their papers were declared to be in order to permit another “pass” to be issued.  Thus it went on, the tourists being successively held up, delayed, and released.  Under these conditions progress to the coast was exasperatingly slow, and finally was summarily prevented by the drastic order of the German Government demanding the internment of every Britisher in the country.  It was this senseless and ridiculous manifestation of German scientific organisation gone mad which contributed to the congested nature of the civilian internment camps in the country, and one cannot resist the conclusion that the practice was brought into force with the deliberate intention of hindering the return of Britishers who happened to be in the country when war was declared.