Under these circumstances of increasing controversy, the attitude of the Board of Trade toward the tunnel project became one of further reserve. In February, the Board informed the War Office that the military question of the tunnel had assumed such magnitude that a decision on it should be taken not on a departmental level but on the higher governmental policy level, and it suggested that the War Office start its own investigations on the military aspect of the matter. Commenting on the prevailing French attitude toward British fears about the tunnel project, the Paris correspondent of the London _Times_ observed mildly that "the political uneasiness which the scheme has raised on the other side does not exist here.... No Frenchman, of course, regards it as jeopardizing national security. Frenchmen see in it a greater facility for visiting the United Kingdom, and for relieving the monotony of Swiss tours by a trip to the Scotch highlands." In satirical fashion, a paragraph in _Punch_ undertook to summarize the reaction in another European country: Bogie! The Italian Government are so struck by the alarm exhibited by Sir Garnet Wolseley at the prospect of a Channel Tunnel, that they have closed the Mount Cenis and St. Gotthard Tunnels, and left travellers to the mountain diligences. Their reason for doing this is the fact that Napoleon really crossed the Alps, while he only threatened to invade England. As for reactions in Germany, the British chargé d'affaires in Dresden reported in a dispatch to the Foreign Office that he had questioned the Chief of Staff of the 12th (Saxon) Corps—"an officer of high attainments"—on his attitude toward the possible invasion of England through the Channel tunnel, or through sudden seizure of the English end from the outside. He wrote that General von Holleben, the officer in question, had observed, in connection with the practicability of landing a Continental force and taking the British end, that although such an operation was not impossible, "that [it] would succeed in the face of our military and moral resources, railways and telegraphs, he should believe when he saw it happen." General von Holleben then remarked that the idea of moving an Army-Corps 25 miles beneath the sea was one which he did not quite take in. The distance was a heavy day's march; halts must be made; and the column of troops would be from eight to ten miles long. He was unable to realize all this off hand, and he did not know but what we were talking of a chimoera. I observed that no one appeared to have asked what would happen to the air of the tunnel if bodies of 20,000 or even 10,000 men were to move through at once. The General said that this atmospheric difficulty was new to him, and it did not sound very soluble.