I'll Love You Tomorrow

by Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.

  The first steam locomotives carried passengers in the 1820’s. By 1850, steam railways were running most of the way from Paris to Calais, and from London to Dover. Crossing the stormy channel in the small ferries of the day was the part of the journey that most travelers dreaded.

  By this time engineering skill had been developed for major tunneling projects. Many main line railroads had long tunnels. They had also worked Underwater-Brunel completed a footway Tunnel under the Thames in 1843-an 18 year struggle with flooding. A submarine telegraph cable was laid across the Straits of Dover in 1851. Elsewhere a five-mile tunnel through the peaks of the Alps was started in 1857, and the Suez Canal-the proudest feat of the 19thcentury engineering, started by the French and finished by the United States in 1869.

  Confident French and English engineers now approached the task of planning to construct a twenty-five-mile undersea tunnel but first they had to resolve a few issues:

  They had to check the geology, and hoped to find a suitable rock for tunneling stretched in an unbroken bed across the channel;

  They had to solve the ventilation problem to stop smoke from the steam trains from chocking the passengers in such a long tunnel.

  Both the French and the English were concerned about providing an easy access for invading armies to cross the channel.

  Frenchman Thome de Gammond worked hard to find convincing answers: In 1857 his scheme was widely accepted in England and France. After making many hazardous solo dives to check the sea-bed, he proposed a rail tunnel, bored through the chalk, which he believed ran below the sea-bed.

  His plan estimated that the ferries then carrying 350,000 passengers a year, ¾ of them English, would double. The plan proposed an international port built mid-way on an artificial island on the Varne sandbank. Steam trains would run from the Paris-Amiens-Boulogne line on a double track through a single gas-lit tunnel. Ventilation was proposed to be provided by a mid-way opening at Varne.

  The private railway companies on either side of the channel could now afford to put up the money for a serious attempt-if their governments would permit it. Railway Barons dreamed of a profitable long-distance railway not just across the Straits of Dover, but across Europe, which would generate huge volumes of new passengers and freight traffic.

  England and France became quite friendly after the Franco Prussian war 1870-71. The cocky French had been badly beaten… Paris had been besieged, and a triumphant German Kaiser was seen as a newly-powerful common enemy.

  Both countries agreed to work together on a joint tunnel scheme to bring them closer together. With government approval, tunnel companies were set up to do the first serious scientific exploration of the geology-to find out just what rocks lay under the sea-bed between Dover and Calais…The Lower Chalk bed proved the best part of the chalk for tunneling because it was both soft enough to dig through and it was waterproof.

  The first patented Boring Machines built in 1875 were utilized by both sides in 1881… to begin boring a trial tunnel at the bottom of Shakespeare cliff. But England nor France could long stand a neutral ground and in 1882, the English Tunnel Company faced political opposition from both governments who had quarreled over the Suez Canal and colonies in Africa

  But work progressed with two companies digging furiously in 1881 from the Cliffs of Dover and Folkestone, and west to Calais (Sangatte).

  Technically it was a success-driven by compressed air, the boring machines worked well, and there was so little flooding they only switched the pumps on for half a day every two weeks! Within the first year, each side had bored 2km of tunnel, and they expected to complete a 7-foot diameter pilot tunnel across the Channel within five years.

  They planned the tunnel trains would also be powered by compressed air-solving the problem of smoke and fumes and the coming invention of clean powered electric trains would further solve the problem.

  But the British military, ever conservative convinced the government that the tunnel was a military nightmare to defend and in 1883 further building of the tunnel was banned.

  The English Tunnel Company suggested that the could install an inlet to the sea half-way along the tunnel. A soldier would be permanently on guard, ready to pull the plug if the French should try a surprise invasion. They offered to build a fort guarding the tunnel entrance, and to wire it up with explosives ready to destroy the whole tunnel or flood it with seawater.

  But, to no avail…the British generals did not trust the French and the French tunnellers gave up…believing the British would always be stubborn about staying as an “island fortress.”

  By 1914, the generals now wished the tunnel had been built. During the First World War, fresh troops, munitions and supplies had to cross the Channel under constant fire from enemy ships, submarines, airships and aircraft-needing the protection of the Dover Patrol.

  It was estimated that the tunnel could have shortened the war by two years, in fact the Germans might not have invaded France if the tunnel had been built. As it was the Germans very nearly won…had it not been for the United States entering the war and saving both France and England from the control of the Germans.

  After the First World War, many politicians were in favor of going ahead with a tunnel and there were more trial borings in the 1920’s-but behind the scenes, generals and diplomats who still mistrusted the French quietly vetoed the scheme.

  In 1973, Britain finally joined France in the Common Market and both governments agreed to have another go at building the tunnel. But in 1975, construction was again abandoned because the British Prime Minister (Harold Wilson) had to look for economies in a financial crisis caused by dramatically rising world oil prices.

  Finally, in 1987, the British and French governments commissioned more studies, and decided that a traditional rail tunnel would be least risky and best value for the money-just as could have been built a century ago, for a fraction of the cost in 1987, but so what…the tunnel would be built by private money with no down sides to the government except for the loss of leadership and a quicker route for commerce and transit.

  The “Chunnel” was officially opened in 1994. There are two single track rail-tunnels and a third smaller service tunnel as an emergency exist (with frequent cross passages) these were bored through the chalk from either side, and met in the middle. They are lined with concrete panels (on the French side made with Marquise quarries).

  The tunnel copies some of the Alpine mountain tunnels in carrying cars and Lorries on drive-on/drive-off shuttle trains. Operated by Eurotunnel “Le Shuttle”, these share the tracks with high speed long distance trains run by Eurostar. All trains are electric and the twin tunnel while competing head-on with the ferries, Eurostar regards the main competition as the airlines. 80% of the traffic of the London/Paris market now takes the tunnel rail service.

  Not to be outdone, the Swiss will soon boast the world’s longest tunnel, one that will stretch 57 kilometers. In an effort to improve its rail system, the country is in the midst of a huge construction project to build two new rail tunnels through the Alps at a cost estimated at 27 billion dollars. The tunnels will cut through the mountains deeper than any other tunnel, as the country is pressured to increase its transportation system’s capacity for rail freight.

  Both base tunnels run essentially perpendicular to the main tectonic units and sit beneath 2,500meters of rock. The longer of the two tunnels, the new Gotthard tunnel, will run 57 kilometers, the other tunnel, the Lotschberg will stretch 34.6 kilometers. More than 98 million tons of freight is now being transported across the Alps by rail and truck within the arc between Mount Cenis(France) and Benner(Austria).

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  On the map the Low Countries of Europe look as though they are a single state, and once they were. They are the flatlands that surround the North Sea estuaries of three rivers, the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt. At the end of the nineteenth century Napoleonic wars, after a complex history of dynastic exchange and rivalry, they were briefl
y united as the kingdom of the Low Countries; but in the old way of Europe the comity did not last, and they are now divided once more into the kingdoms of Belgium and the Netherlands, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

  They have much in common. They are all small Countries-Luxembourg indeed, with an area less than 1000 square miles (about 2600 square kilometers), is the smallest truly independent, sovereign State in Europe. Their histories have often coincided. Their countryside’s are mostly uniformly flat. Their peoples are all Germanic in origin and long before the European Common Market came into being they had established their own customs union. Their reputations and destinies, though, have been very different.

  Pre-eminent among the three is the Netherlands, more accurately but less officially known as Holland, which has a population of less than sixteen million, but has been one of Europe’s pace-makers and power houses. Great sailors, merchants, engineers, patriots and practioners of art, the Dutch literally created their own country, for a quarter of it has been reclaimed from the sea, and it is now the most densely populated State in Europe. From this precarious seashore base, as vulnerable to the elements as it was to enemies from European interior, the Dutch sailed out to seize for themselves one of the biggest of the overseas Empires. Even now the Dutch flag flies over several islands of the Caribbean, and the language of the South African Afrikaners is a kind of Dutch. With the spoils of the east they made themselves rich, and they have remained rich by astute trading, by innovative industry, and by exploiting the geographical advantage of their positions at the mouth of the Rhine. Huge industries have grown up around the port of Rotterdam-chief outlet to the sea for Germany, and one of the world’s busiest seaports- and some of the great Dutch companies are worldwide in their presence.

  No such vivid images attach themselves to Belgium, the butt of many jokes from Europeans of more flamboyant background. Belgium is indeed and unassertive country, and well it might be, for nowhere in Europe has been more cruelly ravaged by the comings and goings of foreign armies. Waterloo is in Belgium, and so is Ypres, and here are the forests of Ardennes where Hitler’s armies made their last counterattack in the west. This is Europe’s cockpit. A nation-State since only 1831, when it was separated from the Netherlands, Belgium is inhabited by Fleming’s of Latin origin, who’s Strange a form of Dutch, and partly by Walloons of Celtic origin, who’s Strange French. Thickly populated, heavily industrialized, producing few things that most of us know about, boasting few heroes that we have heard of, Belgium came paradoxically, but justly, out of its obscurity when its capital Brussels became the administrative headquarters of the European Community and thus became synonymous with bureaucracy.

  And what of Luxemburg? Oddly enough, for many decades it was a prime symbol of Europeanism. The Grand Dutch was once very much grander, including the whole of what is now Belgium, and it has remained a formidable little State. Its steel production is said to be the highest production per capita in the world, it is an eager center of international finance, and the legal capital of the European Community. However, what made it seem long ago a supra-European State was the presence there of an international commercial broadcasting industry, transmitting in many languages. In the days when a united Europe seemed no more than a pipedream, the familiar name of Radio Luxemburg carried listeners far away a first faint inkling of community.

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  In the very heart of Europe, at the center of its preoccupation for hundreds of years, lies the German language. German, the language of Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Martin Luther, of Einstein and Benz, and of Adolph Hitler. The energies of this powerful tongue, which inspires or divides a particular loyalty among all who hear it, have frequently governed the course of history and bind these territories (Austria, Germany and Switzerland) together, not only linguistically but also in style and often in emotion.

  It is true that in one of the States in this Germanic core, Switzerland, three other national languages are officially recognized as well-French, Italian, and Romansh- but then Switzerland, which is not even a member of the United Nations, stands outside every norm, in the wealth, beauty, complacency and conservatism, as in its constitutional neutrality. Austria too issui generisas a State, being the rump of the once mighty Habsburg Empire. And Liechtenstein is only just a State: for its foreign affairs; its defense; its postal services and even its currencies; are managed by the Swiss.

  But Germany itself, the cradle of the language, exerts such powerful suggestions and has played so important and sometimes terrible a part in the history of the twentieth century (Germany responsible for starting two world wars), that its status has become a metaphor for the destruction and destiny of Europe. When in 1990 when its two halves where reunited after thirty years of Cold War alienation, perpetrated by the aggressive domination of the USSR, (Russia) and its communist intentions. The demand made by American President Ronald Reagan for Russia to “Tear down the Berlin wall,” crystallized an event more than any other and seemed to carry the promise of a Europe reconciled to the fact that the economically powerful democracy of the United Sates had clearly won the Cold War over a broken and desperate Communist ideology.

  Germany is a relative newcomer among the nation-States, as it is among the democracies. Split for centuries into fissiparous principalities, disrupted again by the sixteenth-century Reformation, which was later to divide all Europe, addled by countless wars and dynastic settlement’s, it became a modern unified State only in 1871. Even into the twentieth century Prussians, Saxons and Bavarians hardly recognized themselves as of the same nationality, for all their common heritage of language, and even now… Germany remains a federation of desperate provinces.

  Many kinds of terrain are to be found in this microcosm of the continent. There are Baltic ports and North Sea beaches; there are the Alps of Bavaria and the forest of Baden-Wurttemberg; Hamburg, in the northwest, is the famously liberal and outward-looking seaport, with old British connections; Munich, in the southeast, is a paradigm of German continentalism, close to Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. The eastern provinces, so long stifled by communism, remain drably behind the times; in the west the cult of materialism is to be seen at its glitziest and most successful.

  For the most part the Germanic people have concerned themselves with Europe, their excursions into overseas colonialism having been brief and limited. The work of their geniuses has of course become part of the whole world’s cultural inheritance, so that Mozart and Freud seem to be compatriots of us all, but their language remains almost symbolically European. And in Germany stands the city that more than any other exemplifies the mixed significance of this continent. Berlin, standing more or less at its epicenter, is because of Adolf Hitler, a place of evil memory; but reunited as it is now around the fulcrum of the Brandenburg Gate, with its equivocal emanations of tragedy, merriment, new hope and a lingering distrust, backed by the wealth and power of Germany, it is the natural capital of Europe.

  The tragedy is that the Germans still have not learned their lesson and the United States took a liberal stance at the end of the war while ceding West Berlin to the Russians. The hawks remained and are circling Germany as this book goes to print. The United States missed a golden opportunity to place a governor on the pedal of Germany in much the same way they did to Japan. We will rue the day that, while holding the cards, the United States blinked…and let Germany stay in the game…to strike again. And after several European wars and two world wars they may catch a weakened America, without resolve, and the consequence may be world domination by these aggressive hunters who know no quit.

  VIII

  Buddy Quinn and Joe Tough Escape!

  “I realize that you can fight…but it’s our wits that make us men!”

  (Malcolm Wallace, father of Sir William Wallace, Scottish military hero).

  Buddy knew from the look in Joe Tough’s eyes that he didn’t favor the plan.

  “Why you want to cause Father Hermann wor
ry, Buddy?”

  “Joe, this isn’t about Father Hermann.”

  “What is it Buddy…why you so mad…what he do to you?”

  “Joe, I’m trying to tell you that I am not mad at Father Hermann…I love Father Hermann, but Joe, I have to find out why it is that my mother has abandoned me…why is it that I haven’t seen her since the tunnel collapsed on me?”

  “Buddy, maybe your mother busy…maybe she sick…but you can’t just run away from the orphanage…why you not ask to use the phone…you call her at home or at work…come on Buddy…I not to smart but I figure this out better than you.”

  “Ok I’ll try the phone first…but if I can’t reach her or they won’t let me use the phone I’m going.”

  “Sister Mary Como let you use phone in front office but you have to tell her why you call your mother.”

  Buddy finally found Sister Mary Como alone in the office, and he developed enough nerve to go to her with his problem. After telling her that he wanted to call his mother and of his concern for her, Sister refused to let Buddy make the call.

  “Buddy, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, and I would say this to your mother if she were standing here…she isn’t responsible…you know how many times she has done this very same thing, so Buddy why cause yourself so much pain…your mother is doing ok and she will be here when she can.”

  “But suppose she is sick?”

  “What can you do about it Buddy, except to make her worry more about you.”

  Of course Sister Mary Como had all the right answers. Buddy knew that she was correct in her analysis of his mother…she had done this before. But that was before they had connected. No… staying wasn’t an option, Buddy was running and he was running tonight!