"It gave me an idea," he continued, "an idea, I confess, strengthened at Essen. Why not bottle the noxious gases set free in the furnaces, and let them loose on the enemy?"
"What, kill them wholesale?" cried Rathenau, moving uneasily in his chair. Philanthropy is one of his hobbies, and underhanded methods go against his grain. The War Lord knows this, and clapped the silencer on his savage bluntness.
"Kill them? No. Wholesale? No, too. There is to be no gale of these gases—just a breeze to knock out, or knock over, offensive or defensive. I figure this way: Maybe the enemy, entrenched, has to be dislodged at any price to gain some given point. We can't get at them with the ordinary style of weapon; they won't come out even to be hand-grenaded. In such cases, I hold it good strategy to smoke them out."
"Asphyxiating gas," mumbled Rathenau half to himself.
"A good name—something suspending animation—suspending it while we take the coveted place. We won't lose a man, and the enemy is mulcted out of prisoners only, for all placed hors de combat by our chemicals will be cared for by the Red Cross."
"Majesty does not intend to have the gases absolutely poisonous?" inquired Rathenau.
"Now, would I have asked you, whose humanity all Berlin admires, if I did?" cried the War Lord; "if I was signing death warrants, I would not have applied to you, but to Krupp. He is a natural born butcher, I tell you. Krupp devises means to destroy life with the gusto of an American barkeeper mixing cocktails. They blamed Nero for saying he wished the Roman people had but one head that he might knock it off. You should see Krupp gloat over my new howitzers."
"And those noxious gases, the workings of which Your Majesty observed at Essen, do not inflict permanent injury?"
"In the majority of cases black coffee suffices to make the men fit for work again; in a minor number of cases mild palliatives are required. I advised free distribution of milk for those suffering from a weak stomach. Hypodermic injections are resorted to once or twice a week. So you see our 'gassing' will be quite harmless."
When the President and Owner of the "A.E.G." (German for General Electric Company) still refused to wax enthusiastic, the War Lord tried a new tag. "It's the charitableness—I almost said the Christianity—of the thing that mainly attracts me," he lied. "You remember Valentina's husband in The Huguenots. He was murdered during St. Bartholomew's night, at the side of my ancestor, Admiral Coligny. The Comte de Nevars had been asked a little while before to join in the massacre of the Protestants, but refused, pleading that his family contained a long list of warriors, but not a single assassin. So am I trying to curtail killing by the proposed new method of attack. Prisoners, yes; the more the merrier; but deaths and wounds as few as possible."