Part 6

In contrast to these manifold cries of alarm among the English, it seems never to have occurred to anybody in France at the time seriously to suggest that if a tunnel were to be constructed, a hostile English force, supported by an English navy in control of the Channel sea, might suddenly seize the French entrance by surprise and use it as a bridgehead for a general invasion of France. A few French commentators did, however, remind the anti-tunnel forces in England that while the English had set hostile foot on French soil some two or three times in as many centuries—not to mention her having kept physical control over the port of Calais for over two hundred years following the Battle of Crécy—English soil had remained untouched by France. Most of the French newspapers appeared to be unable to fathom the cause of the whole tunnel commotion, which was generally put down to English eccentricity. Several French journals, surveying all the fulminations on the other side of the Channel, even took an attitude toward the English of a certain detached sympathy. One of the more interesting French commentaries on the uproar in England appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. In this article, the author expressed some doubt that British military men who denounced the dangers of the tunnel were really convinced of the reality of those dangers. For them to do so, he suggested, one would have to presuppose, on one side of the Channel, a "France again a conqueror with, at her head, a man gifted with ... an incredible depth in crime; a secret, an almost incredible diligence in preparation as in execution," and, on the other side, "a governor of Dover who would be an idiot or a traitor, a War Minister who would not possess the brain of a bird, a Foreign Minister who would allow himself to be deceived in doltish fashion." How could the French possibly assemble perhaps a thousand railway carriages in England without arousing the suspicions of British Intelligence? How could the vanguard of the French invaders get through the tunnel with all their required ammunition, horses, and supplies, and get them all unloaded in a few minutes—would this vanguard sally forth without biscuits? The author found no solution to these particular problems. Instead, he devoted himself to the larger issue:

The day the inauguration of the Submarine Tunnel will be celebrated, England will no longer be an island, and that is a stupendous event in the history of an island people.... Islanders have always considered themselves the favorites of Providence, which has undertaken to provide for their security and independence.... They congratulate themselves on their separation from the rest of the world by natural frontiers over which nobody can squabble. They feel that they hold their destiny in their own hands, and that the effect of the follies and crimes of others could not reach them.... Their character is affected by this. Like Great Britain, every Englishman is an island where it is not easy to land.

And the article asked, wonderingly, "What would an England that was not an island be?"

The deliberations of the scientific investigating committee appointed by the War Office and presided over by Sir Archibald Alison lasted from the latter part of February until the middle of May. In the committee's report of its findings to the War Office, the complexity and solemn nature of the questions laid before it were indicated by their mere classification and subclassification. Thus, the contingencies for rendering a Channel tunnel absolutely useless to an enemy were considered under the headings of:

I. Surprise from Within II. Attack from Without

And the committee reported that it had considered measures to secure the tunnel against (I) under such subcategories as:

1. Fortifications 2. Closure or temporary obstructions 3. Explosion by mines or charges 4. Flooding a. Temporary b. Permanent

After reviewing the situation in great detail, and from every aspect, the committee suggested a long list of precautionary measures that, it said, it would be necessary to use, singly or in combination, to protect and seal off the tunnel against any enemy attempts to invade England directly through the tunnel or by seizing the English end from the outside and using it as a bridgehead for invasion. The list included these recommendations:

The mouth of the tunnel should be protected by "a portcullis or other defensible barrier."

A trap bridge should be set in connection with this portcullis.

Means should be provided for closing off the ventilation, and for "discharging irrespirable gases or vapors into the tunnel."

Arrangements should be made for rapidly discharging loads of shingle into the land portion of the tunnel, shutting it off.

The land portion of the tunnel should be thoroughly mined with explosives capable of being fired by remote control exercised not only from within the central fort at Dover but also from more distant points inland, so that even if the protective fortress fell to the enemy, the tunnel still could be permanently destroyed.

In addition, a truck loaded with explosives and equipped with a time fuse should be kept ready by the entrance, so that it could be sent coasting down into the tunnel for some distance, there to explode automatically.

Arrangements should be made for temporarily flooding the tunnel by means of culverts operated by sluice valves. ("If by chance the sluice valves should not act, Measure XVIII could be resorted to, or the tunnel could be blocked by one or more of the means ... mentioned in Measures VIII, IX, X, XI, and XII.")

The tunnel should emerge inland, out of firing range from the sea. And it was imperative that it emerge under the guns and "in the immediate vicinity of a first-class fortress, in the modern acceptation of the term, a fortress which could only be reduced after a protracted siege both by land and sea."

And so on.

Even after drawing up all these elaborate precautions for closing the tunnel from the English end, the Channel Tunnel Defense Committee was left with some nagging doubts about their adequacy. In a concluding paragraph of its report, the committee pointed out that "it must always be borne in mind that, in dealing with physical agencies, an amount of uncertainty exists," and that it was "impossible to eliminate human fallibility." As a consequence, the members stated cautiously, "it would be presumptuous to place absolute reliance upon even the most comprehensive and complete arrangements."

The committee also agreed, almost as an afterthought, that the Channel tunnel proposed by Sir Edward Watkin could not be sanctioned in the form envisaged, on the grounds that it did not meet the committee's conditions for emerging inland, out of firing range from the sea, and in the immediate vicinity of a first-class fortress. It also rejected, on the first of these grounds, a proposal by the lesser Channel Tunnel Company for a tunnel that would start from within Dover and for the sake of easy destructibility run right under a nearby corner of Dover Castle—and on the grounds that this entrance would be _too_ much in the vicinity of a fortress. And the committee objected that since the proposed entrance would emerge "in the heart of the main defences and in the midst of the town" any fire from these defenses "would inflict great injury on the town and its inhabitants, and the general defence would be much embarrassed."

At the War Office, the report of the Alison committee was supplemented by another long memorandum on the tunnel question by Sir Garnet Wolseley. In this document of some twenty thousand words, which was conveniently furnished with numerous marginal headings like "Why tunnels through the Alps afford no argument in favor of the Channel Tunnel," "The Tunnel an acknowledged danger," "What national advantage then justifies its construction," "Many tunnels will be constructed," "What we owe to the Channel," and "Danger of surprise of our fortifications without warning! Fatal result!!," Sir Garnet recapitulated and elaborated at great length upon his previous arguments against the tunnel and added several new ones. Sir Garnet went into fine detail concerning the possibility of a sudden seizure of the English end of the tunnel and, simultaneously, Dover, by the French. For example, to his previous description of how hostile French forces might come by train through the tunnel dressed in ordinary clothes he added the detail that they might also travel in the carriages "at express speed, with the blinds down, in their uniforms and fully armed"—their co-conspirators at the other end meanwhile having rendered it "not likely that ticket-takers or telegraph operators on the French side would be allowed any channel of communicating with us until the operation had been effected." Sir Garnet was equally explicit about the situation at Dover. Warning that "the civilian may start in horror at the statement that Dover could also be taken by surprise," General Wolseley declared that, as things stood, anybody at all, any night, was free to walk up to any of the forts at Dover, and, "if he would announce himself to be an officer returning home to barracks, the wicket would be opened to him, and if he entered he would see but two men, one the sentry, the other the noncommissioned officer who had been roused up from sleep by the sentry to unlock the gate." General Wolseley demonstrated how such a caller might well be "a dashing partisan leader" of a French raiding party that had landed in Dover in the dead of night, in calm or foggy weather, from steamers, and had already quietly knocked down and silenced any watchman or other witnesses in the dark area. He showed how such a _soi-disant_ English officer and his accomplices "might thus easily obtain an entrance into every fort in Dover; the sentry and the sleepy sergeant might be easily disposed of. The rifles of our sentries at home are not loaded, and the few men on guard [could be] made prisoners whilst asleep on their guard bed." Thus, General Wolseley said, the intruders could quickly effect the seizure of all the forts in Dover—"In an hour's time from the moment when our end of the tunnel was taken possession of by the enemy, large reinforcements could reach Dover through the tunnel, and ... before morning dawned, Dover might easily be in possession of 20,000 of the enemy, and every succeeding hour would add to that number." With Dover done in, London would be next, and the future commander-in-chief of the British Army went on to show how the enemy force, now swelled to 150,000 men, once it reached London and occupied the Thames from there to the arsenal at Woolwich, could dictate its own terms of peace, which he estimated at a rough guess as the payment of six hundred million pounds and the surrender of the British Fleet, with the English end of the tunnel remaining permanently in the hands of the French, so that "the perpetual yoke of servitude would be ours for ever."

Concerning all the various measures proposed to protect the tunnel, Sir Garnet had no confidence in them at all. He stressed once more the unreliability of anything mechanical or electrical, and he added the new argument that whatever secret devices, such as mines, were installed in the tunnel for its protection were bound to come to the knowledge of the enemy sooner or later. Any military secret, General Wolseley said, was a purchasable secret; he illustrated his argument with an observation concerning a meeting between Napoleon I and Alexander I of Russia:

No two men were more loyally followed or had more absolute authority than Napoleon and Alexander. No two men had a stronger wish or stronger motive for keeping secret the words which passed between them personally in a most private conference in a raft in the middle of a river. Yet, by paying a large sum our Ministry obtained the exact terms of the secret agreement the two had there arrived at. Moreover, our Ministry obtained that information so immediately that they were able to act in anticipation of the designs formed by the two Emperors.

Finally, having discussed, in the most elaborate fashion, all the measures that his previous opposition to the scheme had caused to be proposed for the defense of the tunnel, Sir Garnet condemned them on the ground of their very elaborateness. "If in any one of these respects our security fails, it fails in all," he wrote of the multiple precautions recommended by Sir Archibald Alison's scientific committee. Thus, in General Wolseley's eyes, the defense of the tunnel was foredoomed as a self-defeating process, and was therefore a practical impossibility.

The question of the multiplicity of the proposed defenses was handled in different fashion in a further War Office memorandum on the tunnel, issued by the Duke of Cambridge, the Army Commander-in-Chief and a cousin of Queen Victoria. "Nothing has impressed me more with the magnitude of the danger which the construction of this proposed tunnel would bring with it," the Duke of Cambridge wrote, "than the amount of precautions and their elaborateness [proposed by] this Scientific Committee.... If this danger was small, as some would have the country believe, why should all these complicated precautions be necessary?" The Duke of Cambridge fully endorsed the position taken by Sir Garnet Wolseley. He protested "most emphatically" against the construction of a Channel tunnel and "would most earnestly beg Her Majesty's Government" to consider with the utmost gravity the perils of surprise attack upon the country arising out of even a modified scheme that would take into account the recommendations of the Alison committee.

To his memorandum His Royal Highness appended a copy of a report that he had had his intelligence service put together specially in connection with the tunnel question—a long account purporting to show some hundred and seven instances occurring in the history of the previous two hundred years where hostilities between states had been started without any prior declaration of war, or even any decent notification.

If anything seemed likely to have been successfully blocked up and finished off under all this bombardment, it was Sir Edward Watkin's Channel-tunnel scheme. Curiously enough, the Board of Trade, which had ordered the tunnel workings stopped back in April and had no intention of issuing a working permit for them now, was not altogether convinced of this. In fact, since April the Board had been developing the suspicion that something peculiar might be going on down under the sea at Shakespeare Cliff. Back in the early part of April, the Board of Trade's order to the Submarine Continental Railway Company to stop its tunneling activities was received, as one might expect, with some anguish. The first formal reaction was a letter from the permanent secretary of the company to T. H. Farrer, the secretary of the Board of Trade, saying that the company would of course acquiesce in the orders of the board, but begging, at the same time, to be allowed to continue the present gallery extending from the main, or Number Two, shaft at Shakespeare Cliff a short distance further, so as to be able to complete the first stage of the works—the junction of the main gallery with the new gallery extending from the ventilating, or Number Three, shaft. This letter was followed on April 9 by another from Sir Edward Watkin addressed to Joseph Chamberlain, the president of the Board of Trade, urgently repeating the request, this time on the ground of safety. Sir Edward wrote Mr. Chamberlain:

The moment the Board of the Tunnel Company decided to obey you, I peremptorily ordered the works to be stopped. The [boring] machine has been silent since Thursday evening. But the Engineer sends me a very startling report and warning.

He fears _defective ventilation_ [owing to stoppage of the air-driven boring machine] and danger to life—quite apart from depriving a fine body of skilled workmen of their bread, and general loss and damage in money. I can only reply to him that I am acting under your order. Still ... this is the first time the ventilation of a mine has been so interfered with. Should the engineer's alarm be well founded, and should men faint from bad air at the end of the gallery, there would be no means of getting them out alive.

Sir Edward added, without changing his tone of humane agitation, that only the day before he had received a request from the Duke of Edinburgh to be allowed to see the tunnel workings, along with the Duchess, ten days hence, and that the Speaker of the House of Commons had already arranged to visit the tunnel "on Saturday, the 22nd, leaving Charing Cross at eleven." "What must be done?" he asked. Mr. Chamberlain replied promptly by telegraph that if the stopping of the machinery in the tunnel was constituting a danger to life, he authorized Sir Edward, pending further investigation of the situation by the Board of Trade, temporarily to keep the machinery going to the extent of preventing this danger. However, he followed up this telegram with a letter to Sir Edward in which he expressed himself as being "not able to understand the exact nature of the physical danger anticipated" by Sir Edward in the tunnel if the workings were stopped. "I do not see the necessity for workmen remaining in the tunnel where the ventilation is likely to be defective," Mr. Chamberlain observed. He added that he was making arrangements to have one of the Board of Trade inspectors visit the tunnel to investigate the situation.

On April 11, the Board of Trade duly telegraphed Sir Edward that its chief inspector of railways, Colonel Yolland, of the Royal Engineers, would be at Dover at noon the next day to investigate the ventilation problem in the tunnel. Sir Edward, however, wired back that he was unable to meet the Colonel at Dover that day and could not make an appointment with him "until after the visit to the works of the Duke of Edinburgh on Tuesday next."

To this the Board of Trade replied, on April 13, that Colonel Yolland had been instructed to visit the tunnel works "entirely out of regard to the very urgent and grave question raised in your letter ... respecting the ventilation of the boring" and that the department was finding it difficult to understand why Colonel Yolland's visit to the tunnel should be postponed. Sir Edward's answer to this was to invite Mr. Chamberlain down into the tunnel personally, so that Sir Edward could "show and explain everything," since "until you have seen, and had explained to you, on the spot as Mr. Gladstone did and had, and as we hope the Duke of Edinburgh will next Tuesday, the nature and condition of our works, it is, in my humble judgement, impossible to discuss the question with exactitude." He said nothing about the possibility of Mr. Chamberlain's or the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh's being asphyxiated in the tunnel. Mr. Chamberlain declined the invitation; he said he had ordered Colonel Yolland down to Dover immediately to report on the tunnel. But Colonel Yolland didn't get down into the tunnel to make an inspection that month. Some impediment, some unanticipated difficulty always seemed to arise when things appeared to be about to straighten themselves out. By the beginning of May, the Board of Trade, still trying, flatly informed Sir Edward that Colonel Yolland and Walter Murton, its solicitor, would inspect the tunnel workings on May 6. But on May 4 the general manager of the South-Eastern Railway replied that "Sir Edward Watkin wishes me to say that he regrets very much that it will be quite impossible to arrange for such inspection to take place on that date." He suggested that Sir Edward could arrange it for the 13th. The Board of Trade, replying immediately, insisted on its taking place "not later than Wednesday next." That letter was met with the answer that "Sir Edward Watkin is at present out of town, and is not expected to return until early next week." He must have stayed out of town quite a while, because the Board of Trade heard nothing from the company until May 18, when the directors of the company, writing jointly, told the department that while they acquiesced in the request of Colonel Yolland and Mr. Murton to visit the tunnel, unfortunately "the machinery is under repair," and as a consequence "it would not be ... safe for those gentlemen to go down the shaft." However, the directors added, hopefully, they felt sure that "by working the machinery, air compressors, and pumping engines for a few days and nights" their engineers could get everything in order for a proper tour of inspection. On May 24 Mr. Murton tried again. He wrote the tunnel proprietors, notifying them that "Colonel Yolland and myself propose to inspect the tunnel works on Saturday next the 27th instant." But the company's reply to the letter was regretful. It said that "the repairs to the winding engine cannot be completed until after Whitsuntide."

Meanwhile, Mr. Murton was having his difficulties with the solicitor of the South-Eastern over the legal question of the company's claims to ancient manorial rights to the use of the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff, as the tone of various letters he was obliged to write indicates. For example:

DEAR SIR,

May I remind you that I have not yet received the abstract of title; I beg that you will at once send it to me....

I am, & c., WALTER MURTON

Or again:

DEAR SIR,

I am without answer to my letter of the 31st ultimo. I beg you will let me know without further delay whether you do or do not propose to send me abstract of title.

I am, & c., WALTER MURTON

Or yet again:

DEAR SIR,

Will you kindly write me a reply to my letters which I can send on to the Board of Trade.

Yours, & c., WALTER MURTON

By June 9, the Board of Trade became quite out of patience over the matter of inspecting the tunnel. Introducing an ominous note, it informed Sir Edward that Mr. Chamberlain "feels that he must insist upon this visit of inspection, and if he understands that permission is refused, will be compelled to place the matter in the hands of his legal advisers, with the view of determining and enforcing the rights of the Crown." Sir Edward was indignant. In reply, he declared that he was being subjected to an "undeserved threat." Mr. Chamberlain, responding, denied that the threat was undeserved. He wrote firmly:

Hitherto, on one ground or another, this inspection has been again and again postponed.

I am bound to guard the rights of the Crown in this matter, and I desire to ascertain whether those rights have up to the present time been in any way invaded.

This is the object of the inspection, and as it will not brook delay ... I have only now to ask an immediate answer stating definitely when it can take place.

Sir Edward's answer was once more to beg Mr. Chamberlain himself to join a party of prominent visitors going down to see the tunnel; he added that "Colonel Yolland shall be at once communicated with."