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Thomas Whiteside

The Tunnel Under the Channel

SIMON AND SCHUSTER ? NEW YORK ? 1962

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM COPYRIGHT 1961, 1962 BY THOMAS WHITESIDE PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC. ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK 20, N. Y.

FIRST PRINTING

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 62-9744 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY AMERICAN BOOK-STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK

The tunnel seems always to have had a capacity to arouse in its proponents a peculiarly passionate and unquenchable enthusiasm. Men have devoted their adult lives to promoting the cause of the tunnel, and such a powerful grip does the project seem to have had on the imagination of its various designers that just to look at some of their old drawings--depicting, for example, down to the finest detail of architectural ornamentation, ventilation stations for the tunnel sticking out of the surface of the Channel as ships sail gracefully about nearby--one might almost think that the tunnel was an accomplished reality, and the artist merely a conscientious reporter of an existing scene. Such is the minute detail in which the tunnel has been designed by various people that eighty-six years ago the French Assembly approved a tunnel bill that specified the price of railway tickets for the Channel-tunnel journey, and even contained a clause requiring second-class carriages to be provided with stuffed seats rather than the harder accommodations provided for third-class passengers. And an Englishman called William Collard, who died in 1943, after occupying himself for thirty years with the problem of the Channel tunnel, in 1928 wrote and published a book on the subject that went so far as to work out a time-table for Channel-tunnel trains between Paris and London, complete with train and platform numbers and arrival and departure times at intermediate stations in Kent and northern France. As for the actual engineering details, a Channel tunnel has been the subject of studies that have ranged from collections of mere rough guesses to the most elaborate engineering, geological, and hydrographic surveys carried out by highly competent civil-engineering companies. Interestingly enough, ever since the days, a century or so ago, when practical Victorian engineers began taking up the problem, the technical feasibility of constructing a tunnel under the Channel has never really been seriously questioned. Yet, despite effort piled on effort and campaign mounted on campaign, over all the years, by engineers, politicians, and promoters, nobody has quite been able to push the project through. Up to now, every time the proponents of a tunnel have tried to advance the scheme, they have encountered a difficulty harder to understand, harder to identify, and, indeed, harder to break through than any rock stratum.

If the proponents and promoters of the tunnel have never quite succeeded in putting their project across in all the years, they have never quite given up trying, either; and now, in a new strategic era of nuclear rockets, a new era of transport in which air ferries to the Continent carry cars as well as passengers, and a new era of trade, marked by the emergence and successful growth of the European Economic Community, or Common Market, the pro-tunnel forces have been at it again, in what one of the leading pro-tunnelers has called "a last glorious effort to get this thing through." This time they have encountered what they consider to be the most encouraging kind of progress in the entire history of the scheme. In April, 1960, an organization called the Channel Tunnel Study Group announced, in London, a new series of proposals for a Channel tunnel, based on a number of recent elaborate studies on the subject. The proposals called for twin parallel all-electric railway tunnels, either bored or immersed, with trains that would carry passengers and transport, in piggyback fashion, cars, buses, and trucks. The double tunnel, if of the immersed kind, would be 26 miles long between portals. A bored tunnel, as planned, would be 32 miles long and would be by far the longest traffic tunnel of either the underwater or under-mountain variety in the world. The longest continuous subaqueous traffic tunnel in existence is the rail tunnel under the Mersey, connecting Liverpool and Birkenhead, a distance of 2.2 miles; the longest rail tunnel through a mountain is the Simplon Tunnel, 12.3 miles in length. The Channel tunnel would run between the areas of Sangatte and Calais on the French side, and between Ashford and Folkestone on the English side. Trains would travel through it at an average speed of 65 miles an hour, reaching 87 miles an hour in some places, and at rush hours they would be capable of running 4,200 passengers and 1,800 vehicles on flatcars every hour in each direction. While a true vehicular tunnel could also be constructed, the obviously tremendous problems of keeping it safely ventilated at present make this particular project, according to the engineers, prohibitively expensive to build and maintain. The train journey from London to Paris via the proposed tunnel would take four hours and twenty minutes; the passenger trains would pass through the tunnel in about thirty minutes. Passengers would pay 32 shillings, or .48-.92 cheaper than the cost of a first-class passenger ticket on the Dover-Calais sea-ferry--to ride through the tunnel; the cost of accompanied small cars would be .48, a claimed 30 per cent less than a comparable sea-ferry charge. The tunnel would take four to five years to build, and the Study Group estimated that, including the rail terminals at both ends, it would cost approximately 4,000,000.

All that the Study Group, which represents British, French and American commercial interests, needs to go ahead with the project and turn it into a reality is--besides money, and the Study Group seems to be confident that it can attract that--the approval of the British and French Governments of the scheme. For all practical purposes, the French Government never has had any objection to a fixed installation linking both sides of the Channel, and as far as the official British attitude is concerned, when the British Government announced, in July, 1961, that it would seek full membership in the European Common Market, most of the tunnel people felt sure that the forces of British insularity which had hindered the development of a tunnel for nearly a century at last had been dealt a blow to make them reel. But what raised the pro-tunnelers' excitement to the greatest pitch of all was the decision of the French and British Governments, last October, to hold discussions on the problem of building either a bridge or a tunnel. When these discussions got under way last November, the main question before the negotiators was the economic practicality of such a huge undertaking.

THE FIRST SCHEME for the construction of a tunnel beneath the English Channel was put forward in France, in 1802, by a mining engineer named Albert Mathieu, who that year displayed plans for such a work in Paris, at the Palais du Luxembourg and the ?cole Nationale Sup?rieure des Mines. Mathieu's tunnel, divided into two lengths totaling about eighteen and a half miles, was to be illuminated by oil lamps and ventilated at intervals by chimneys projecting above the sea into the open air, and its base was to be a paved way over which relays of horses would gallop, pulling coachloads of passengers and mail between France and England in a couple of hours or so of actual traveling time, with changes of horses being provided at an artificial island to be constructed in mid-Channel. Mathieu managed to have his project brought to the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul, who was sufficiently impressed with it to bring it to the attention of Charles James Fox during a personal meeting of the two men during the Peace of Amiens. Fox described it as "one of the great enterprises we can now undertake together." But the project got no further than this talking stage. In 1803, a Frenchman named de Mottray came up with another proposal for creating a passage underneath the Channel. It consisted of laying down sections of a long, submerged tube on top of the sea bed between England and France, the sections being linked together in such a way as to form a watertight tunnel. However, Mottray's project petered out quickly, too, and the subject of an undersea connection between the two countries lay dormant until 1833, when it attracted the attention of a man named Aim? Thom? de Gamond, a twenty-six-year-old French civil engineer and hydrographer of visionary inclinations.

Such exasperating objections to joining England and France above water sent Thom? de Gamond back to the idea of doing the job under the sea, and between 1842 and 1855 he made various energetic explorations of the Channel area in an attempt to determine the feasibility of driving a tunnel through the rock formations under the Strait. Geological conditions existing in the middle of the Strait were, up to that time, almost entirely a matter of surmise, based on observations made on the British and French sides of the Channel, and in the process of finding out more about them, Thom? de Gamond decided to descend in person to the bottom of the Channel to collect geological specimens. In 1855, at the age of forty-eight, he had the hardihood to make a number of such descents, unencumbered by diving equipment, in the middle of the Strait. Naked except for wrappings that he wound about his head to keep in place pads of buttered lint he had plastered over his ears, to protect them from high water pressure, he would plunge to the bottom of the Channel, weighted down by bags of flints and trailing a long safety line attached to his body, and a red distress line attached to his left arm, from a rowboat occupied also by a Channel pilot, a young assistant, and his own daughter, who went along to keep watch over him. On the deepest of these descents, at a point off Folkestone, Thom? de Gamond, having put a spoonful of olive oil into his mouth as a lubricant that would allow him to expel air from his lungs without permitting water at high pressure to force its way in, dived down weighted by four bags of flints weighing a total of 180 pounds. About his waist he wore a belt of ten inflated pig's bladders, which were to pull him rapidly to the surface after he had scooped up his geological specimen from the Channel bed and released his ballast, and, using this system, he actually touched bottom at a depth of between 99 and 108 feet. His ascent from this particular dive was not unremarkable, either; in an account of it, he wrote that just after he had left the bottom of the Channel with a sample of clay

... I was attacked by voracious fish, which seized me by the legs and arms. One of them bit me on the chin, and would at the same time have attacked my throat if it had not been preserved by a thick handkerchief.... I was fortunate enough not to open my mouth, and I reappeared on top of the water after being immersed fifty-two seconds. My men saw one of the monsters which had assailed me, and which did not leave me until I had reached the surface. They were conger eels.

Imagine a train full of travelers, after having run for fifteen minutes in the bowels of the earth through a splendidly lighted tunnel, halting suddenly under the sky, and then ascending to the quays of this island. The island, rising in mid-sea, is furnished with solid constructions, spacious quays garnished with the ships of all nations; some bound for the Baltic or the Mediterranean, others arriving from America or India. In the distance to the North, her silver cliffs extending to the North, reflected in the sun, is white Albion, once separated from all the world, now become the British Peninsula. To the South ... is the land of France.... Those white sails spread in the midst of the Straits are the fishing vessels of the two nations.... Those rapid trains which whistle at the bottom of the subterranean station are from London or Paris in three or four hours.

... would still preserve for this country for the future that maritime isolation which formed its strength throughout the past; for the situation of the tunnel beneath the bed of the sea would enable the government on either coast, in case of war, as a means of defense, to inundate it immediately.... According to the calculations of the engineer, the tunnel might be completely filled with water in the course of an hour, and afterwards three days would be required, with the mutual consent of the two Governments, to draw off the water, and reestablish the traffic.

Thom? de Gamond's visit to England was climaxed by a couple of interviews on the subject of the Channel tunnel that he obtained with Prince Albert, who supported the idea with considerable enthusiasm and even took up the matter in private with Queen Victoria. The Queen, who was known to suffer dreadfully from seasickness, told Albert, who relayed the message to Thom? de Gamond, "You may tell the French engineer that if he can accomplish it, I will give him my blessing in my own name and in the name of all the ladies of England." However, in a discussion Thom? de Gamond had earlier had with Her Majesty's Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who was present at one of the engineer's interviews with Albert, the idea of the tunnel was not so well received. The engineer found Palmerston "rather close" on the subject. "What! You pretend to ask us to contribute to a work the object of which is to shorten a distance which we find already too short!" Thom? de Gamond quoted him as exclaiming when the tunnel project was mentioned. And, according to an account by the engineer, when Albert, in the presence of both men, spoke favorably of the benefits to England of a passage under the Channel, Lord Palmerston "without losing that perfectly courteous tone which was habitual with him" remarked to the Prince Consort, "You would think quite differently if you had been born on this island."

While Thom? de Gamond was occupied with his submarine-crossing projects, other people were producing their own particular tunnel schemes. Most of them seem to have been for submerged tubes, either laid down directly on the sea bed or raised above its irregularities by vertical columns to form a sort of underwater elevated railway. Perhaps the most ornamental of these various plans was drawn up by a Frenchman named Hector Horeau, in 1851. It called for a prefabricated iron tube containing a railway to be laid across the Channel bed along such judiciously inclined planes as to allow his carriages passage through them without their having to be drawn by smoke-bellowing locomotives--a suffocatingly real problem that most early Channel-tunnel designers, including, apparently, Thom? de Gamond, pretty well ignored. The slope given to Horeau's underground railway was to enable the carriages to glide down under the Channel from one shoreline with such wonderful momentum as to bring them to a point not far from the other, the carriages being towed the rest of the way up by cables attached to steam winches operated from outside the tunnel exit. The tunnel itself would be lighted by gas flames and, in daytime, by thick glass skylights that would admit natural light filtering down through the sea. The line of the tube was to be marked, across the surface of the Channel, by great floating conical structures resembling pennanted pavilions in some medieval tapestry. The pavilions were to be held in place by strong cables anchored to the Channel bottom; they were also to contain marine warning beacons. This project never got under the ground.

Although Thom? de Gamond's revised plan of 1867 came to nothing in itself, it did cause renewed talk about a Channel tunnel. The new spirit of free trade was favorable to it among Europeans, and everybody was being greatly impressed with reports of the striking progress on various great European engineering projects of the time that promised closer communication between nations--the successful cutting of the Isthmus of Suez, the near completion of the 8.1-mile-long Mount Cenis rail tunnel, and the opening, only a few years previously, of the 9.3-mile-long St. Gotthard Tunnel, for example. Hardly any great natural physical barriers between neighboring nations seemed beyond the ability of the great nineteenth-century engineers to bridge or breach, and to many people it appeared logical enough that the barrier of the Dover Strait should have its place on the engineers' list of conquests. In this generally propitious atmosphere, an Englishman named William Low took up where Thom? de Gamond left off. Shortly after the Universal Exhibition, Low came up with a Channel tunnel scheme based principally upon his own considerable experience as an engineer in charge of coal mines in Wales. Low proposed the creation of a pair of twin tunnels, each containing a single railway track, and interconnected at intervals by short cross-passages. The idea was a technically striking one, for it aimed at making the tunnels, in effect, self-ventilating by making use of the action of a train entering a tunnel to push air in front of it and draw fresh air in behind itself. According to Low's scheme, this sort of piston action, repeated on a big scale by the constant passage of trains bound in opposite directions in the two tunnels, was supposed to keep air moving along each of the tunnels and between them through the cross-passages in such a way as to allow for its steady replenishment through the length of the tunnels. With modifications, Low's concept of a double self-ventilating tunnel forms the basis for the plan most seriously advanced by the Channel Tunnel Study Group in 1960.

Encroaching seas made a channel through the isthmus and cut the Bronze Age descendants of this breed of men off from the Continent about six thousand years ago. Then fierce tidal currents coursing between the North Sea and the Atlantic widened the breach still further until, as recently as four thousand years ago , the sea wore away the rock of the isthmus to approximately the present width of the Strait, leaving exposed high at each side the eroded rock walls, formerly the whitish mudbank of Cretaceous times--now the white chalk cliffs of the Dover and Calais areas. Providentially for the later purposes of Channel tunnelers, however, the seas that divided England from the Continent also left behind them a thin remnant of the old land connection in the form of certain chalk layers that still stretched in gentle folds across the bottom of the Strait, and it was through this area of remaining chalk that the Victorian engineers planned to drive their tunnel headings. Even more providentially, they had the opportunity of extending their headings under the Channel through a substratum of chalk almost ideal for tunneling purposes, known as the Lower Chalk. Unlike the two layers of cretaceous rock that lie above it--the white Upper Chalk and the whitish Middle Chalk, both of which are flint-laden, heavily fissured, and water-bearing, and consequently almost impossible to tunnel in for any distance--the Lower Chalk is virtually flint-free and nearly impermeable to water, especially in the lower parts of the stratum, where it is mixed with clay; at the same time it is stable, generally free of fissures, and easy to work. From the coastline between Folkestone and South Foreland, north-east of Dover, where its upper level is visible in the cliffs, the Lower Chalk dips gently down into the Strait in a north-easterly direction and disappears under an outcropping Middle Chalk, and emerges again on the French side between Calais and Cap Blanc-Nez. Given this knowledge and their knowledge of the state of Lower Chalk beds on land areas, the Victorian engineers were confident that the ribbon of Lower Chalk extending under the Strait would turn out to be a continuous one. To put this view to a further test, the French Channel Tunnel Company, in 1875, commissioned a team of eminent geologists and hydrographers to make a more detailed survey of the area than had yet been attempted. In 1875 and 1876 the surveyors made 7,700 soundings and took 3,267 geological samples from the bed of the Strait and concluded from their studies that, except for a couple of localities near each shoreline, which a tunnel could avoid, the Lower Chalk indeed showed every sign of stretching without interruption or fault from shore to shore. However, when these studies were completed, Lord Grosvenor's Channel Tunnel Company did not find itself in a position to do much about them. The company was having trouble raising money, and its temporary power to acquire land at St. Margaret's Bay for experimental workings had lapsed without the promoters ever having used it. William Low, who had left the company in 1873 after disagreements with Hawkshaw on technical matters--Low had come to believe, for one thing, that the terrain around St. Margaret's Bay was unsuitable as a starting place for a channel tunnel--had become the chief engineering consultant of a rival Channel-tunnel outfit that called itself the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company. But the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company wasn't getting anywhere, either. It remained for a third English company, headed by a railway magnate named Sir Edward Watkin, to push the Channel-tunnel scheme into its next phase, which turned out to be the most tumultuous one in all its history.

SIR EDWARD WATKIN was a vociferously successful promoter from the Midlands. The son of a Manchester cotton merchant, Watkin had passed up a chance at the family business in favor of railways in the early days of the age of steam, and it is a measure of his generally acknowledged shrewdness at railway promotion that in his mid-twenties, having become secretary of the Trent Valley Railway, he negotiated its sale to the London North Western Railway at a profit of ?438,000. Now in his early sixties, Watkin was chairman of three British railway companies, the Manchester, Sheffield Lincolnshire Railway, the Metropolitan Railway, and the South-Eastern Railway--the last-named being a company whose line ran from London to Dover via Folkestone--and one of his big current schemes was the formation of a through route under a single management--his own, naturally--from Manchester and the north to Dover. It was while he was busily promoting this scheme that Watkin caught the Channel-tunnel fever. He realized that part of the land the South-Eastern Railway owned along its line between Folkestone and Dover lay happily accessible to the ribbon of Lower Chalk that dipped into the sea in the direction of Dover and stretched under the bed of the Strait, and it wasn't long before he was conjuring up visions of a great system in which his projected Manchester-Dover line, instead of stopping at the Channel shoreline, would carry on under the Strait to the Continent.

Then Sir Edward's engineers sank a second shaft, farther to the east but in alignment with the first heading, 160 feet below a level stretch of ground by the South-Eastern Railway line at Shakespeare Cliff, just west of Dover, 120 feet below high water, and began boring a new seven-foot pilot tunnel that dipped down with the Lower Chalk bed leading into the Channel. This second boring, like the first, was carried out with the use of a tunneling machine especially designed for the purpose by Colonel Frederick Beaumont, an engineer who had had a hand in the construction of the Dover fortifications. The Beaumont tunneling machine, a prototype of some of the most powerful tunneling machines in use nowadays, was run by compressed air piped in from the outside, and the discharge of this air from the machine as it worked also served as a way of keeping the gallery ventilated. The cutting of the rock was done by a total of fourteen steel planetary cutters set in two revolving arms at the head of the machine; with each turn of the borer a thin paring of chalk 5/16 of an inch thick was shorn away from the working face, the spoil being passed by conveyor belt to the back of the machine and dumped into carts or skips that were pushed by hand along the length of the gallery on narrow-gauge rails. The machine made one and a half to two revolutions a minute, and Sir Edward estimated for his stockholders that with simultaneous tunneling with the use of similar equipment from the French shore--the French Tunnel Company had already sunk a 280-foot shaft of its own at Sangatte and was preparing to drive a gallery toward England--the Channel bottom would be pierced from shore to shore by a continuous single pilot tunnel, twenty-two miles long, in three and a half years. Once this was done, according to Sir Edward's plans, the seven-foot gallery was to be enlarged by special cutting machinery to a fourteen-foot diameter, and a double tunnel, thickly lined with concrete and connected by cross-passages, constructed. The completed tunnel was to be lighted throughout by electric light--a novelty already being tried out in the pilot tunnel by the well-known electrical engineer C. W. Siemens--and the trains that ran through it between France and Britain were to be hauled by locomotives designed by Colonel Beaumont. Instead of being run by smoke-producing coal, the locomotives were to be propelled by compressed air carried behind the engine in tanks, and, like the Beaumont tunneling machine, the engine was supposed to keep the tunnel ventilated by giving out fresh air as it went along.

Trains coming through the tunnel from France were to emerge into the daylight and the ordinary open air of England either from a four-mile-long access tunnel connected to the South-Eastern's railway line at Abbots Cliff or--this was a favored alternative plan of Sir Edward's--at Shakespeare Cliff via a station to be constructed in a great square excavated a hundred and sixty feet deep in the ground, which would be covered over with glass, lighted by electric light, and equipped "with large waiting rooms and refreshment rooms." From the abyss of this submerged station, trains arriving from the Continent were to be raised, an entire train at a time, to the level of the existing South-Eastern line by a giant hydraulic lift.

As the experimental work progressed, Sir Edward Watkin saw to it that all the splendid details about the Channel-tunnel scheme were constantly brought to the attention of the South-Eastern's shareholders, the press, and the public. Sir Edward, besides being a nineteenth-century railway king, was also something of a twentieth-century public-relations operator. He was a firm believer in the beneficial effects of giving big dinners, a pioneer in the art of organizing big junkets, and an adept at getting plenty of newspaper space. An energetic lobbyist in Parliament for all sorts of causes, not excluding his own commercial projects, he was known as a habitual conferrer of friendly little gestures upon important people in and out of government, and his kindness is said to have gone so far at one time that he provided Mr. Gladstone with the convenience of a private railway branch line that went right to the statesman's country home.

The visitors were lowered six at a time in an iron "skip" down the shaft into the tunnel. At the bottom of this shaft, 163 feet below the surface of the ground, the mouth of the tunnel was reached, and the visitors took their seats on small tramcars which were drawn by workmen. So evenly has the boring machine done its work that one seemed to be looking along a great tube with a slightly downward set, and as the glowing electric lamps, placed alternately on either side of the way, showed fainter and fainter in the far distance, the tunnel, for anything one could tell from appearances, might have had its outlet in France.

He thought the visit might be regarded as a remarkable one. Their colleague, Dr. Siemens, lighted up the tunnel with the Swan light, and it was certainly a beautiful sight to see a cavern, as it were, under the bottom of the sea made in places as brilliant as daylight.

Sometimes these lunches were held down in the tunnel itself, and general conditions down there were such that even ladies attended them, on special occasions, as a contemporary magazine account of a visit paid to the gallery by a number of engineers with their families makes clear.

The visitors were conducted twenty at a time to the end on a sort of trolley or benches on wheels drawn by a couple of men. In the centre of the tunnel a kind of saloon, decorated with flowers and evergreens, was arranged, and, on a large table, glasses and biscuits, etc., were spread for the inevitable luncheon. There was no infiltration of water in any part. In the places where several small fissures and slight oozings had appeared during the boring operations, a shield in sheet iron had been applied against the wall by the engineer, following all the circumference of the gallery and making it completely watertight. There they were as in a drawing-room, and the ladies having descended in all the glories of silks and lace and feathers were astonished to find themselves as immaculate on their return as at the beginning of their trip. The atmosphere in the tunnel was not less pure, but even fresher than outside, thanks to the compressed air machine which, having acted on the excavator at the beginning of the cutting, released its cooled air in the centre of the tunnel.

Behind all the sociability and the stream of publicity engendered in the press by the visits of well-known people to the tunnel, the situation was not quite so promising. While the physical boring was going ahead smoothly enough in the Lower Chalk, the promotion of the tunnel as a full-scale project was encountering growing resistance from within the upper crust of The Establishment. The fact seems to be that the British Government had never felt altogether easy about the idea of the Channel tunnel from the start, and although it had never formally expressed any misgivings about the scheme as a whole, it had always been careful not to associate itself with the enterprise, and its attitude toward its progress generally had been one of reluctant acquiescence. Whatever disquiet people in government felt about the tunnel project appears to have been expressed in three general ways--first, in the introduction of caveats of a military nature; second, in proposals to delay the progress of the scheme on other than military grounds; and third, in a general, nameless suspicion of the whole idea. Such reservations had been evident even in 1875, when the Channel Tunnel Company applied to Parliament for powers to carry out experimental work at St. Margaret's Bay.

To exemplify the first kind of reservation put forward, the Board of Trade, the governmental department under whose surveillance such commercial schemes came, made a point of insisting that for defense purposes the Government must retain absolute power to "erect and maintain such works at the English mouth of the Tunnel as they may deem expedient," and in case of actual or threatened war to close the tunnel down. As for the tendency of governmental people to find other grounds for objection in the project, this could be exemplified by the delaying action of the Secretary to the Treasury, when in 1875 it looked as though Parliament were about to take action on the Channel-tunnel bill. In a memorandum to the Foreign Office, the Secretary sought to have the tunnel bill laid aside at the last moment of its consideration before Parliament so that the answers to all sorts of important jurisdictional questions could be sought--for example, "If a crime were committed in the Tunnel, by what authority would it be cognizable?" And as for the third, unnamed kind of objection, Queen Victoria, who, with her late husband , had once been so enthusiastic about the idea of a Channel tunnel, simply changed her mind about the entire business; in February of 1875, the Queen wrote Disraeli, without elaborating, that "she hopes that the Government will do nothing to encourage the proposed tunnel under the Channel which she thinks very objectionable."

Where the Almighty grants exceptional and peculiar bounties, He sometimes permits by way of counterpoise an insensibility to their value. Were there but a slight upward heaving of the crust of the earth between France and Great Britain, and were dry land thus to be substituted for a few leagues of sea, then indeed we should begin to know what we had lost.

These remarks of Mr. Gladstone's on the Channel appear to have made a powerful impression on opinion in upper-class England; for many years after their publication his partly Shakespearean phrase, "the streak of silver sea"--or a variation of it, "the silver streak"--remained as a standard term in the vocabulary of Victorian patriotism. Not surprisingly, considering his views in 1870, the attitude of Mr. Gladstone in 1881 and 1882, during his term as Prime Minister, toward the plan of Sir Edward Watkin to undermine those Straits the statesman had so extolled was an equivocal one.

The Bavarians have no false pruderies, no nasty little nicenesses. There is, indeed, no race in Europe more innocent, more frank, more clean-minded. Postcards of a homely and harmless vulgarity are for sale in every Munich stationer's shop, but the connoisseur looks in vain for the studied indecencies of Paris, the appalling obscenities of the Swiss towns. Munich has little to show the American Sunday school superintendent on the loose. The ideal there is not a sharp and stinging deviltry, a swift massacre of all the commandments, but a liquid and tolerant geniality, a great forgiveness. Beer does not refine, perhaps, but at any rate it mellows. No M?nchener ever threw a stone.

The L?wenbr?u first--a rococo castle sprawling over a whole city block, and with accommodations in its "halls, galleries, loges, verandas, terraces, outlying garden promenades and beer rooms" for eight thousand drinkers. A lordly and impressive establishment is this L?wenbr?u, an edifice of countless towers, buttresses, minarets and dungeons. It was designed by the learned Prof. Albert Schmidt, one of the creators of modern Munich, and when it was opened, on June 14, 1883, all the military bands in Munich played at once in the great hall, and the royal family of Bavaria turned out in state coaches, and 100,000 eager M?ncheners tried to fight their way in.

On May day all Munich goes to the Hofbr?uhaus to "prove" the new bock. I was there last May in company with a Virginian weighing 190 pounds. He wept with joy when he smelled that heavenly brew. It had the coppery glint of old Falernian, the pungent bouquet of good port, the acrid grip of English ale, and the bubble and bounce of good champagne. A beer to drink reverently and silently, as if in the presence of something transcendental, ineffable--but not too slowly, for the supply is limited! One year it ran out in thirty hours and there were riots from the Max-Joseph-Platz to the Isar. But last May day there was enough and to spare--enough, at all events, to last until the Virginian and I gave up, at high noon of May 3. The Virginian went to bed at the Bayerischer Hof at 12:30, leaving a call for 4 P.M. of May 5.

But, as I have said, the Hofbr?uhaus is no playroom for amateurs. My advice to you, if you would sip the cream of Munich and leave the hot acids and lye, is that you have yourself hauled forthwith to the Hoftheatre Caf?, and that you there tackle a modest seidel of Spatenbr?u--first one, and then another, and so on until you master the science.

And all that I ask in payment for that tip--the most valuable, perhaps, you have ever got from a book--is that you make polite inquiry of the Herr Wirt regarding Fr?ulein Sophie, and that you present to her, when she comes tripping to your table, the respects and compliments of one who forgets not her cerulean eyes, her swanlike glide, her Mona Lisa smile and her leucemic and superbly manicured hands!

BERLIN

BERLIN

Pleasure in the mass, incidentally, is perforce ever mechanical; a levee at Buckingham Palace, a f?te on the velvet terraces sloping into the Newport sea, a Coney Island gangfest, a city's electric den of gilt and tinsel.

Ah, Cairo dreaming in the Nile's moon-haze--are you to be judged thus by the narrow street that snakes into the dark of Bulak? And Budapest by the Danube--are you to be judged by the wreckage of the Stefansplatz that has drifted on your shores? And you, Vienna, and you, Paris--are you, too, to be measured thus, as measured you are, by the crimson light of your half-worlds that for some obscures your stars?

The Berlin of the Palais de Danse is the Paris of L'Abbaye; the Berlin of the Fledermaus is the New York of Jack's.

But to your eyes, Hulda, must be given no such picture. Yet such is the New York I come from; such the New York, stunning by day in its New World strength and splendour, loathsome by night in its hot, illumined bawdry. Ah, city by the Hudson, forgetting Riverside Drive twinkling amid the long tiara of trees, forgetting the still of the lake and cool of the boulders that plead in Central Park, forgetting the superb majesty of Cathedral Heights and the mighty peace of the byways--forgetting these all for a Broadway!

But the symphony of the Berlin dawn is ours now, fr?ulein, and have done with intrusive memories, corroding reflections. What are my people doing in Berlin at this hour? What are these prowling Al-Raschids about? Do they know the sorcery of the virgin morning light of Berlin as it falls upon the Siegesallee and gives life again to the marble heroes of Germany? Have they ever stood with such as you, fr?ulein, in the coral-tipped hours of the dawning day before the image of Friedrich der Grosse in that wonderful lane and felt, through this dead, cold thing, the thrill of an empire's glory? Do they know the witchery of the withering Berlin night as it plays out its wild fantasia in the leaves of the Linden trees? Have they ever been with such as you, fr?ulein, at the base of the Pillar of Triumph in K?nigsplatz or sat with such as you, fr?ulein, near the Grotto Lake in the Tiergarten, or stood with such as you, fr?ulein, on one of the bridges arching the Spree in the first trembling innuendo of morning?

Where are these, my people?

But hark, what is that?

What is that strange sound that comes to me?

A newsboy in neuralgic yowl, bawling in the street below.

Alas, it is true: after all, I am really back again in New York. My rooms are littered with battered bags and down-at-the-heel walking sticks and still-damp steamer rugs, lying where they dropped from the hands of maudlin bellboys. My trunks are creaking their way down the hall, urged on by a perspiring, muttering porter. The windows, still locked and gone blue-grey with the August heat, rattle to the echo of the rankling "L" trains. The last crack of a triphammer, peckering at a giant pile of iron down the block, dies out on the dead air. A taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street below, grunts its horn. Another "L" train and the panes rattle again. A momentary quiet ... and from somewhere in a nearby street I hear again the grind-organ.

It is playing "Alexander's Ragtime Band."

LONDON

LONDON

There are thirteen great bridges between Fulham Palace and the Isle of Dogs, and I have been at pains to try every one of them; but the best of all, for such needs as overtake a well fed and ruminative man on a summer evening, is that of Waterloo. Look westward and the towers of St. Stephen's are floating in the haze, a greenish slate colour with edges of peroxide yellow and seashell pink. Look eastward and the fine old dome of St. Paul's is slipping softly into greasy shadows. Look downward and the river throws back its innumerable hues--all the coal tar dyes plus all the duns and drabs of Thames mud. The tide is out and along the south bank a score of squat barges are high and dry upon the flats. Opposite, on the embankment, the lights are beginning to blink, and from the little hollow behind Charing Cross comes the faint, far-away braying of a brass band.

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