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