Modernist Channel crossings may sometimes become narrow straits, a sort of critical shorthand for experimental exchanges between London and Paris. And traffic may in some received opinion likewise be considered preponderantly one way, particularly in view of Paris's postwar status in 1919 as the locus for the Peace Conference, and therefore for a while capital city of the political world, as well as the capital city of the international, transnational, cultural avant-gardes. But, recalling a nauseating and hungover Channel crossing, rough in many senses (see Virginia Woolf's hilarious cross-Channel mistranslation of this word cited in our Introduction [Woolf 1975–80, vol. 4: 197]) and made while he was working on ‘a big, clean-looking freighter’ on a regular run between Rotterdam and New York (1993: 139), Langston Hughes reminds us, in an aqueous autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), that it is possible to cross through the English Channel in many other directions too, and not only to other European destinations besides France and Belgium, the amorphous ‘Flanders’, metonym for all the Great War battlefields. For the English Channel/French ‘la Manche’ in fact mediates in the east with the North Sea (also the site of huge naval conflict), which incidentally was known until the Great War as the German Ocean on British and German maps alike (see Scully 2009), and hence east to Scandinavia and Russia, and in the west with the Celtic and Irish seas and the Atlantic Ocean.