began a most violent and abusive campaign against him.
The _Duesseldorfer General-Anzeiger_ published a venomous article, in
which he was represented as personally responsible for "the plot of the
Allies against Germany and for the crimes of the franc-tireurs." He was
stigmatised as "the slave of England," and it was asserted that "If he
did not grasp the hand stretched out to him by the Kaiser on August 2nd
and the 9th it is only because he did not dare to do so" (October 10th,
1914). He was said to have "betrayed his army at Antwerp. Had he not
sworn not to leave the town alive?" And _Le Reveil_, another paper
circulated in Belgium by German propagandists, announced solemnly that,
once on the Yser, the King wanted to sign a separate peace with Germany,
but England had forbidden him to do so. The _Hamburger Nachrichten_, the
_Vossische Zeitung_ and the _Frankfurter Zeitung_ repeated without
scruple this tissue of gross calumnies. The _Deutsche Soldatenpost_,
edited specially for the German soldiers in Belgium, went even a step
further and violently reproached the Queen of the Belgians for not
having protested against the cruelties inflicted on German civilians in
Brussels and Antwerp, at the outbreak of the hostilities!

[Footnote 3: _Suddeutsche Monatshefte_, April 1915.]

* * * * *

Not being able to stir the people against the Allies or against their
own Government, the German Press Bureau attempted to revive the language
quarrel and to provoke internal dissensions. It is interesting to notice
that the new campaign, whose crowning episode was the opening of the
German University at Ghent, in October last, began two months after the
surrender of Brussels and did not develop until the spring of 1915, when
an important minority of Germans began to realise that it would be
impossible to retain Belgium, and when a greater number still only hoped
to keep Antwerp and Flanders, thanks to the "social and linguistic
affinities of Flemings and Germans."

That is how Germany, who had never troubled much before about the
Flemish movement and Flemish literature, suddenly discovered a great
affection for her Flemish brothers who had so long been exposed to "the
insults of the Walloons"; how she suddenly espoused their grievances and
put into effect, in spite of their strong protests, some reforms
inscribed on the programme; how she tried by every means at her disposal
to conciliate Flemish sympat