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: