The whole world has noted this. People who have no sympathy to spare for the Allies' cause have been obliged to bow before this young hero, more noble in his defeat than all the conquerors of Europe in their victory. But the Germans have not felt it. Not only did they try to ridicule King Albert in their comic papers. Even the son of Governor von Bissing did not hesitate to fling in his face the generous epithet, "Lackland." [3] As soon as the last attempt to conciliate the King had failed the German press in Belgium began a most violent and abusive campaign against him. The _Düsseldorfer 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 Réveil_, 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."