The campaign against the Allies, though still carried on whenever the opportunity arises, was specially violent at the beginning, when the Germans had not yet given up all hope of detaching King Albert from the Alliance (August-September, 1914). It was perhaps the most dangerous line of attack because it did not imply any breach of patriotism. On the contrary it suggested that Belgium had been duped by the Allies, and especially by England, who had never meant to come to her help and who had used her as a catspaw, leaving her to bear all the brunt of the German assault in an unequal and heroic struggle. It was accompanied by a constant flow of war news exaggerating the German successes and suggesting that, even if they ever had the intention of delivering Belgium, the Allies would no longer be in a position to do so. According to the first war-news poster issued in Brussels, a few days after the enemy had entered the town, the French official papers had declared that "The French armies, being thrown on the defensive, would not be able to help Belgium in an offensive movement." I need not recall how, his name having been used at Liège to bolster up this false report, M. Max, the burgomaster of Brussels, found an opportunity of contradicting it publicly and, at the same time, of discrediting all censored news. The effect was amazing. Henceforth the official posters were not only regularly regarded as a tissue of lies, but definitely ridiculed. The people either ignored them or paid them an exaggerated attention. In some popular quarters, urchins climbed on ladders to read them aloud to a jeering crowd. The influence of M. Max's attitude was such that, eighteen months later, several people coming from the capital declared that, as far as war news was concerned, Brussels was far more optimistic than London or Paris, every check received by the Allied armies being systematically ignored and every success exaggerated. When one reads through the series of German "_Communications_" pasted on the walls of the capital during the first year of the occupation, one wonders how they did not succeed in discouraging the population. For, in spite of some extraordinary blunders--such as the announcement that a German squadron had captured fifteen English fishing boats (September 8th, 1914), that the Serbs had taken Semlin because they had nothing more to eat in Serbia (September 13th, 1914), or that the British army was so badly equipped that the soldiers lacked boot-laces and writing paper (October 6th, 1914)--the author of these proclamations succeeded so skilfully in mixing truth and untruth and in drawing the attention of the public away from any reverse suffered by the Central Empires, that the effect of the campaign might have been most demoralizing.