And so there is scarcely light enough to see through that misty vapour which rises from water boiling in pans. Every minute nurses fetch huge black balloons, and the patients nearest to suffocation stretch out their poor hands for them; they contain oxygen, which eases the lungs and alleviates the suffering. Many of them have these black balloons resting on chests panting for breath, and in their mouths they are holding eagerly the tube through which the life-saving gas escapes. They are like big children with feeding bottles; it adds a kind of grisly burlesque to these scenes of horror. Asphyxia has different effects upon different constitutions, and calls for variety in treatment. Some of the sufferers, lying almost naked on their beds, are covered with cupping-glasses, or painted all over with tincture of iodine. Others even--these alas! are very seriously affected indeed--others are all swollen, chest, arms, and face, and resemble toy figures of blown-up gold-beater's skin. Toy figures of gold-beater's skin, children with feeding bottles--although these comparisons alone are true, yet indeed it seems almost sacrilege to make use of them when the heart is wrung with anguish and you are ready to weep tears of pity and of wrath. But may these comparisons, brutal as they are, engrave themselves all the more deeply upon the minds of men by reason of their very unseemliness, to foster there for a still longer time indignant hatred and a thirst for holy reprisals. For there is one man who spent a long time preparing all this for us, and this man still goes on living; he lives, and since remorse is doubtless foreign to his vulturine soul, he does not even suffer, unless it be rage at having missed his mark, at least for the present. Before thus unloosing death upon the world he had coldly combined all his plans, had foreseen everything. "But nevertheless supposing," he said to himself, "my great rhinoceros-like onrushes and my vast apparatus of carnage were by some impossible chance to hurl itself in vain against a resistance too magnificent? In that case I should dare perhaps, calculating on the weakness of neutral nations, I should dare perhaps to defy all the laws of civilisation, and to use other means. At all hazards let us be prepared."