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.

After this first reverse, the Germans only attacked the Allies in order
to throw on their shoulders the responsibility for the woes which they
themselves were inflicting on their victims. When some English
aeroplanes visited Brussels, on September 26th, 1915, a few people were
killed and many more wounded. The German press declared immediately that
this was due to the want of skill of the airmen, who dropped the bombs
indiscriminately over the town. We possess now material proof that the
people were killed, not by bombs dropped from the air, but by fragments
of shells fired from guns. This can only be explained in one way. The