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TUBING THE ENGLISH
CHANNEL
By DAVID WALES
D O V E R , England, is within
gunshot of Calais, France.
The German 42-centimeters
could drop a shell across the
22 miles of water that intervene.
The floor of the Straits of Dover
is white chalk, underlaid by a stratum of
chalk and clay. Beneath, to a depth of
208 feet, lies a ledge of gray chalk, very
solid, of the same general character as
that quarried in France for use in making
cement. This substance is easy to
bore, is self-sustaining, and is practically
water-tight.
Had it not been for the groundless
fears of the suspicious British long ago,
this is the course a tube would undoubtedly
have taken to join the island to the
mainland. Many a time must the minister
of munitions, the board controlling
transport, and the generals in the field
have cursed the spirit that had given
England her "splendid isolation".
But for that spirit, a continuous stream
of trains and railway carriages, as unbroken
as the now famous stream of
motor trucks that maintained Verdun in
munitions and men, when General Petain
for so many weeks resisted the German
onslaught, would have borne its tens of
thousands of men and its hundreds of
thousands of tons of supplies to the
Western front; hundreds of vessels
would have been released for over-sea
service, and, best of all, an overwhelming
German naval victory would not have
meant starvation for England, nor quick
dissolution of the armies on the Somme
through inability to furnish further men
and supplies. England has paid high,
and may pay more dearly still for a century
of superstitious distrust.
As far back as 1802, a French engineer
of quick, practical mind and farseeing
imagination, proposed to Napoleon,
baffled in his conquest of the
world by the Straits of Dover, that his
armies enter England not as men, over
the water, but as moles, from underground.
For a few hours the great
leader toyed with the idea, then realizing
its impracticability, he dismissed the suggestion
and diverted his energies into a
great campaign against his enemy,
Austria, instead.
The years went by and then the restless
French mind in the person of Thome'de
Gamond, also an engineer, proposed in
1834, that a great tube of sheet iron be
sunk to the bottom of the sea, as a high-
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