Part 5

Vivid as these scenes of destruction were, they had little effect on the anti-tunnel forces. Already, in February, another attack on the tunnel scheme had appeared in the literary magazine _The Nineteenth Century_, signed by Lord Dunsany. The article, repeating the claim that the tunnel project was a menace to Britain's security, referred to the capacity of the Dover fortress system to defend itself against a modern invading fleet as "contemptible." Lord Dunsany wrote that he had gone down to Dover to examine the famous fortress and had found that with the exception of the two recently installed turret guns on the Admiralty Pier, the guns "generally speaking were of an obsolete pattern—popguns, in fact." And he asserted that when he had remarked on the relatively modern appearance of one of the larger guns in a particularly commanding position of the fortress, "I was told by an artilleryman that there were orders against firing it, as it would bring down the brickwork of the rampart."

Soon after this, an anonymous article in the _Army and Navy Gazette_ declared that "The Island has been invaded again and again" and it reminded the _Gazette's_ readers that "The present constitution of the country depends on the last successful invasion by a Dutch Prince with Dutch troops, and the overthrow of the King, by an army largely composed of foreigners." The article took Lieutenant-General Sir John Adye severely to task for having found the tunnel a good security risk, and it even went so far afield in its criticism of him as to find fault with the General for what it called his "deliberate, vehement, and long-continued resistance to the introduction of the breech-loading system in our artillery that placed us at the fag-end of all the world, when we ought to have been first."

Then, in March, 1882, _The Nineteenth Century_ carried an article against the tunnel by Professor Goldwin Smith, who wrote that the protection of the Channel, by exempting England from the necessity of keeping a large standing army, had preserved the country from military despotism and enabled her to move steadily in the path of political progress. The Channel, Professor Smith wrote, in the past had preserved England from the Armada and from the army of Napoleon I; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had preserved the Reformation; and in the eighteenth century it had preserved her from the spread of revolutionary fevers and from subjection to foreign tyranny. Now, he said, it was the barrier between Britain's industrial people and military conscription, and he went on, in an echo of Mr. Gladstone's earlier remarks in the _Edinburgh Review_, to declare of the Channel that "A convulsion of nature which should dry it up would be almost as fatal to England as one which should ruin the dykes would be to Holland."

Under these circumstances of increasing controversy, the attitude of the Board of Trade toward the tunnel project became one of further reserve. In February, the Board informed the War Office that the military question of the tunnel had assumed such magnitude that a decision on it should be taken not on a departmental level but on the higher governmental policy level, and it suggested that the War Office start its own investigations on the military aspect of the matter.

Commenting on the prevailing French attitude toward British fears about the tunnel project, the Paris correspondent of the London _Times_ observed mildly that "the political uneasiness which the scheme has raised on the other side does not exist here.... No Frenchman, of course, regards it as jeopardizing national security. Frenchmen see in it a greater facility for visiting the United Kingdom, and for relieving the monotony of Swiss tours by a trip to the Scotch highlands."

In satirical fashion, a paragraph in _Punch_ undertook to summarize the reaction in another European country:

Bogie! The Italian Government are so struck by the alarm exhibited by Sir Garnet Wolseley at the prospect of a Channel Tunnel, that they have closed the Mount Cenis and St. Gotthard Tunnels, and left travellers to the mountain diligences. Their reason for doing this is the fact that Napoleon really crossed the Alps, while he only threatened to invade England.

As for reactions in Germany, the British chargé d'affaires in Dresden reported in a dispatch to the Foreign Office that he had questioned the Chief of Staff of the 12th (Saxon) Corps—"an officer of high attainments"—on his attitude toward the possible invasion of England through the Channel tunnel, or through sudden seizure of the English end from the outside.

He wrote that General von Holleben, the officer in question, had observed, in connection with the practicability of landing a Continental force and taking the British end, that although such an operation was not impossible, "that [it] would succeed in the face of our military and moral resources, railways and telegraphs, he should believe when he saw it happen."

General von Holleben then remarked that the idea of moving an Army-Corps 25 miles beneath the sea was one which he did not quite take in. The distance was a heavy day's march; halts must be made; and the column of troops would be from eight to ten miles long. He was unable to realize all this off hand, and he did not know but what we were talking of a chimoera.

I observed that no one appeared to have asked what would happen to the air of the tunnel if bodies of 20,000 or even 10,000 men were to move through at once. The General said that this atmospheric difficulty was new to him, and it did not sound very soluble.

But the fears of the War Office were not stilled by such observations as these. On February 23, the War Office announced that it was appointing a Channel Tunnel Defense Committee, headed by Major-General Sir Archibald Alison, the chief of British Army Intelligence, to collect and examine in detail scientific evidence on "the practicability of closing effectually a submarine railway tunnel" in case of actual or apprehended war.

The Board of Trade, in the meantime, did its best to hold Sir Edward Watkin and his project off at arm's length. On March 6, 1882, the secretary of the Board of Trade, which had been keeping an eye on newspaper accounts of the progress of the tunnel, wrote to remind Sir Edward of the vital fact that all the foreshore of the United Kingdom below high-water mark at Dover was "_prima facie_ the property of the Crown and under the management of the Board of Trade," and that while the department did not wish to impede progress it distinctly wished to give notice that the Government "hold themselves free to use any powers at their disposal in such a matter as Parliament may decide, or as the general interest of the country may seem to them to require." In other words, the Board told the Submarine Continental Railway Company that it could not drive its tunnel toward France without trespassing on Crown property extending all the way from high-water mark to the three-mile limit of British jurisdiction—the traditionally accepted limit of the carrying power of cannon.

The claim of the Crown to the foreshore in this case was, however, one that Sir Edward Watkin disputed. He claimed that through an arrangement with a landowner near Shakespeare Cliff, and by certain purchases of land from the Archbishop of Canterbury as head of the Church of England, the tunnel proprietors had come into possession of ancient manorial rights, originally granted by the Crown itself, that permitted them to exploit the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff as they saw fit, including the right to tunnel under it. Sir Edward had claimed that he was having made an extensive legal search of the title in question, which would take a little while.

But the notification from the Board of Trade was an ominous development for Sir Edward and his scheme; and even more ominous signs were to follow. During March, anti-tunneling forces in Britain circulated a great petition among prominent Englishmen against the scheme, for presentation to Parliament. The petition, recording the conviction of the signatories that a Channel tunnel "would involve this country in military dangers and liabilities from which, as an island, it has hitherto been happily free," was published in the April issue of _The Nineteenth Century_, and it was signed not only by military people but by many of the most diversely eminent literary, scientific, and ecclesiastical men of the day—including Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, Professor T. H. Huxley, Cardinals Newman and Manning, and the Archbishop of York—as well as a great cloud of names from the nobility and the landed gentry. In an eloquent article accompanying the petition, the editor of _The Nineteenth Century_, James Knowles, implicitly added the name of William Shakespeare to the list of anti-tunnel signatories by invoking the John of Gaunt speech from _Richard II_:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-Paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands....

The editor went on to declare, more prosaically, that "To hang the safety of England at some most critical instant upon the correct working of a tap, or of any mechanical contrivance, is quite beyond the faith of this generation of Englishmen."

Almost at the instant that the heavy blow of the petition in _The Nineteenth Century_ fell upon the tunnel promoters, the Board of Trade sent down a real thunderbolt upon their heads. On April 1, the Board of Trade wrote Sir Edward Watkin that, whatever might be the title to the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff, there was no doubt as to the title of the Crown under the bed of the sea below low-water mark and within the three-mile limit. It informed him that according to the department's calculations, based on a tracing of the tunnel route previously obtained from the Submarine Continental Railway Company, the boring of the tunnel now must necessarily be close to the point of low-water mark. And, as a consequence, the Board of Trade instructed the company that, pending the outcome of the Government's deliberations on the military security of the tunnel, it must suspend its boring operations forthwith and give the Government assurances to that effect.

[Footnote 1: An Anglo-French Joint Commission formed to set up agreements on the jurisdiction of the two countries over the Channel tunnel in 1876 actually drew up a protocol for a channel-tunnel treaty between England and France. The Commission agreed to the jurisdiction of each government ceasing at a point to be marked in the center of the tunnel and it recommended that the tunnel be regulated by a specially appointed international body.]

All at once, it seems, the entire British press was in an uproar of criticism against the Channel tunnel and its unfortunate promoters. The _Sunday Times_ pretty well expressed a common reaction of newspapers and periodicals to the latest developments when it said, in an editorial, "We confess to experiencing a feeling of relief on hearing of the interdiction of [Sir Edward Watkin's] progress" in his "working day and night to put an end to that insular position which has in past times more than once proved our sheet anchor of safety. We sincerely hope that Sir E. Watkin's project will shortly receive its final _coup de grâce_. No doubt," it added presciently, "he will not yield without a resolute struggle."

Some hard things were said in the press about the great tunnel promoter. He was accused in various publications of "adroit and unscrupulous lobbying" and of dispensing "profuse hospitality ... persistent and continuous" in pursuit of his scheme. In the May issue of _The Nineteenth Century_, which contained a further number of attacks on the tunnel, Lord Bury reported bitterly on the softening effect that Sir Edward Watkin's public-relations technique had had on a friend of his. Asked if he had signed the great petition against the tunnel, the friend was said to have replied, "No, I have not; I am strongly against the construction of the Tunnel, and I told Watkin so. But he gave a party of us, the other day, an excellent luncheon, and was very civil in showing us everything; so I should not like to do an unhandsome thing to him by signing the protest."

An editorialist in a periodical called _All the Year Round_, which formerly had been put out by Charles Dickens, wrote of the "extraordinary vigor" with which Sir Edward was pushing his tunnel. The editorialist dwelt in satirical fashion on the manner in which prominent persons were "perpetually being whisked down to Dover by special trains, conducted into vaults in the chalk, made amiable with lunch and sparkling wines, and whisked back in return specials to dilate to their friends (and, incidentally, to the public) on the peculiar charm of Pommery and Greno consumed in a chamber excavated far under the sea." The writer found Sir Garnet Wolseley's argument, that the English end of the tunnel could be seized, "on reflection to be perfectly feasible." He asked, "Can anyone suppose that if such a government as that which was formed by the Communists were by any chance ... to rule France, the danger that the temptation to make such a grand coup as the conquest and plunder of England would be too much for them would not be a very real and very present one?" And he wound up by warning "that French troops might checkmate our fleet by simply walking underneath it, and ... take a revenge for Waterloo, the remote possibility of which must make every Englishman shudder."

The probable future effects of the Channel tunnel upon the nervous systems of Englishmen were the subject of intense speculation in most of the press, as a matter of fact. Almost without exception, the prognosis of this hypothetical nervous condition was grave. If, nowadays, the capacity to maintain extraordinary spiritual fortitude under conditions of national emergency has come to be regarded almost as a basic characteristic of the British people, it is a characteristic that the Victorian British press seemed not to be aware of. Almost unanimously, the press warned that part of the price of constructing a tunnel would be the occurrence of wild periodic alarms among the population. "Perpetual panics and increased military expenditure are the natural result of such a change as that which will convert us from an island into a peninsula," an editorial in _John Bull_ declared. The London _Daily News_ demanded to know whether "anyone who is in the least acquainted with English character and history" could deny the country's susceptibility to periodic panics. The _Daily News_ dwelt apprehensively on the inevitable result of panics arising out of the construction of a Channel tunnel:

We should be constantly beginning expensive and elaborate schemes for strengthening the defences according to the fashionable idea of the day.... They would be about half carried out by the time the next panic occurred, and then they would be obsolete.... Now it would be elaborate fortifications at Dover itself; now a great chain of forts to hem it in from inland; now the old scheme of the fortification of London; now the establishment of forts out at sea over the tunnel.... Is it worth while to run the chance...?

The most diverse arguments were advanced in the press against the construction of the tunnel. In the May issue of _The Nineteenth Century_, Major-General Sir E. Hamley raised the question of whether the French, invading Britain by train through the tunnel, might not seize some distinguished English people and carry the captives along on the engine as hostages, so that however thoroughly the officer in charge of the defensive apparatus at the English end were alerted to their presence, "still he might well be expected to pause if suddenly certified that he would be destroying, along with the enemy in the Tunnel, some highly important Englishmen." Another writer, referring to the responsibility and possibly also to the character of the officer in charge of the tunnel defenses, observed thoughtfully that "the commandant of Dover would carry the key of England in his pocket." Still another commentator wondered if responsibility for making a decision to blow up the tunnel might not be too much even for an English Prime Minister:

The Premier might think himself justified in destroying twenty millions of property ... but also, he might not. He might be an undecided man, or a man expecting defeat by the Opposition, or a man paralyzed by the knowledge that the tunnel was full of innocent people whom his order would condemn to instant death, in a form which is at once most painful and most appalling to the imagination. They would all be drowned in darkness. The responsibility would be overwhelming for an individual, and a Cabinet, if dispersed, takes hours to bring together.

In his article in _The Nineteenth Century_ Lord Bury, going under the assumption that a Prime Minister in a period of gravest national emergency would indeed be able to haul his Cabinet colleagues and military advisers together in reasonable time to consider having the tunnel blown up, asked his readers to conjure up the painful scene at Downing Street:

Imagine him for a moment sitting in consultation. His military advisers tell him that the decisive moment has come. "I think, gentlemen," says the minister, turning to his colleagues, "that we are all agreed—the Tunnel must be immediately destroyed. Fire the mine!" "There is one other point," says the officer, "on which I request instructions—at what time am I to execute the order?" "At once, sir; telegraph at once, and in five minutes the blasting charge can be fired." "But," persists the officer, "trains laden with non-combatants are at this moment in the Tunnel. They enter continuously at twenty minutes' intervals; there are never less than four trains, two each way, in the Tunnel at the same time; each train contains some three hundred persons ... I could not destroy twelve hundred non-combatants without very special instructions."

And Lord Bury asked, "What would any minister, under such circumstances, do?"

As for the proposed defensive measure of flooding the tunnel in case of invasion, General Sir Lintorn Simmons, writing in the same issue of _The Nineteenth Century_, considered it to be a dubious one at best, since, he observed, "it is not to be believed that a great country like France, with the engineering talent she possesses, could not find the means" of pumping all the flood waters out again.

An assertion by Dr. Siemens, the electric-lighting expert, that the tunnel could easily be rendered unusable to invaders if its British defenders would pump carbonic-acid gas into it to asphyxiate the intruders, was similarly challenged, in the correspondence columns of the _Times_, by a scientific colleague of his, Dr. John Tyndall. Dr. Tyndall offered to wager Dr. Siemens that the latter could in six hours devise countermeasures that would enable troops to pass unscathed through the tunnel, gas or no gas. Dr. Tyndall illustrated his point by describing an experiment he said he had made on the very day of his letter, while coming down home from London by train, on a part of the South-Eastern line where the speed was thirty miles an hour:

I took out my watch and determined how long I could hold my breath without inhalation. By emptying my lungs very thoroughly, and then charging them very fully, I brought the time up to nearly a minute and a half. In this interval I might have been urged through more than half a mile of carbonic-acid gas with no injury and with little inconvenience to myself.

Dr. Tyndall concluded, firmly, "The problem of supplying fresh air to persons surrounded by an irrespirable atmosphere has been already solved by Mr. Fleuss and others."

Then there were even more disturbing objections. Could the defenders at the English end always be relied on as absolutely loyal Englishmen? _The Field_, without naming any names, wrote of "proof that in the United Kingdom itself ... there are numbers of daring and reckless persons" who, "to gain their sinister ends ... would not hesitate to sacrifice the independence of the country." Frankly, the paper feared possible acts of treachery in the tunnel by "a handful of unprincipled desperadoes." And the _Spectator_, visualizing the thing in more detail, suggested that its readers "consider ... the danger of treachery ... the rush on the tunnel being made by Irish Republicans in league with the French, while the wires of the telegraph were cut, and all swift communications between Dover and London suddenly suspended." Taking all the risks of the tunnel into account, the _Spectator_ said it could not bring itself to believe that "even in this age, with its mania for rapid riding and comfortable locomotion, such a project will be tolerated." The _Sunday Times_, for its part, pointed out that, as things stood, "the silver streak is a greater bar to the movements of Nihilists [and] Internationalists ... than is generally believed." But, it added, "with several trains a day between Paris and London, we should have an amount of fraternising between the discontented denizens of the great cities of both countries, which would yield very unsatisfactory results on this side of the Channel."

Meetings and debates to discuss the tunnel menace were held all over England, and even at a meeting of so progressive an organization as the Balloon Society of Great Britain, which was held in the lecture room of the Royal Aquarium at Westminster, the subject was discussed with "some warmth of feeling ... on both sides." There was a wide circulation of sensational pamphlets, written in pseudohistorical style, that purported to chronicle the sudden downfall of England at the end of the nineteenth century through the existence of a Channel tunnel—Dover taken, the garrison butchered, the English end of the tunnel incessantly vomiting forth armed men, London invaded, and England enslaved—all of this in a few hours' time.