a personal favour to her; and
the very petitioners went away, with the ingratitude common in such
cases, and spread the news of Vivie's privileged position at the
Hotel Imperial. It was not surprising therefore that in the small
circles of influential British or American people in Brussels she
was viewed with suspicion or contempt. She supported this odious
position at the Hotel Imperial as long as possible, in the hope that
Colonel von Giesselin when he had realized the impossibility of
using herself or her mother in any kind of intrigue against the
British Government would do what the American Consul General
professed himself unable or unwilling to do: obtain for them
passports to proceed to Holland.

Von Giesselin, from December, 1914, took up among other duties that
of Press Censor and officer in charge of Publicity. After the
occupation of Brussels and the fall of Antwerp, the "patriotic"
Belgian Press had withdrawn itself to France and England or had
stopped publication. Its newspapers had been invited to continue
their functions as organs of news-distribution and public opinion,
but of course under the German Censorate and martial law. As one
editor said to a polite German official: "If I were to continue the
publication of my paper under such conditions, my staff and I would
all be shot in a week."

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.