But the large towns of Belgium could not be left without a Press.  Public Opinion must be guided, and might very well be guided in a direction favourable to German policy.  The German Government had already introduced the German hour into Belgian time, the German coinage, the German police system, and German music; but it had no intention, seemingly, of forcing the German speech on the old dominions of the House of Burgundy.  On the contrary, in their tenure of Belgium or of North-east France, the Germans seemed desirous of showing how well they wrote the French language, how ready they were under a German regime to give it a new literature.  Whether or not they enlisted a few recreants, or made use of Alsatians or Lorrainers to help them, it is never-the-less remarkable how free as a rule their written and printed French was from mistakes or German idioms; though their spoken French always remained Alsatian.  It suffered from that extraordinary misplacement and exchange in the upper and lower consonants which has distinguished the German people—­that nation of great philologists—­since the death of the Roman Empire.  German officers still said “Barton, die fous brie,” instead of “Pardon, je vous prie” (if they were polite), but they were quite able to contribute articles de fond to a pretended national Belgian press.  Besides there was a sufficiency of Belgian “Sans-Patries” ready to come to their assistance:  Belgian nationals of German-Jewish or Dutch-Jewish descent, who in the present generation had become Catholic Christians as it ranged them with the best people.  They were worthy and wealthy Belgian citizens, but presumably would not have deeply regretted a change in the political destinies of Belgium, provided international finance was not adversely affected.  There were also a few Belgian Socialists—­a few, but enough—­who took posts under the German provisional government, on the plea that until you could be purely socialistic it did not matter under what flag you drew your salary.

Von Giesselin was most benevolently intentioned, in reality a kind-hearted man, a sentimentalist.  Not quite prepared to go to the stake himself in place of any other victim of Prussian cruelty, but ready to make some effort to soften hardships and reduce sentences.  (There were others like him—­Saxon, Thuringian, Hanoverian, Wuerttembergisch—­or the German occupation of Belgium might have ended in a vast Sicilian Vespers, a boiling-over of a maddened people reckless at last of whether they died or not, so long as they slew their oppressors.) He hoped through the pieces played at the theatres and through his censored, subsidized press to bring the Belgians round to a reasonable frame of mind, to a toleration of existence under the German Empire.  But his efforts brought down on him the unsparing ridicule of the Parisian-minded Bruxellois.  They were prompt to detect his attempts to modify the text of French operettas so that these, while delighting the lovers of light music, need not at the same time excite a military spirit or convey the least allusion of an impertinent or contemptuous kind towards the Central Powers.  Thus the couplets