Within a very short time after the invasion the Germans showed that they intended to take advantage of the difference between Flemings and Walloons, a difference which, as we have seen, was purely domestic, and concerned with no really vital political issue. Among the offices of his hated administration, Governor-General von Bissing established a bureau for dealing with "the Flemish question," a bureau consisting of German specialists in philology and discord. For about seven months, this commission, which was working in secret, attracted hardly any attention. Then it began to operate visibly. In the summer of 1915, I was stationed, as delegate of the Hoover commission, in Ghent, the capital of East Flanders, and witnessed the beginning of German coquetry. As may be imagined, it was very clumsy and ineffectual. One day an attempt would be made to flatter the local pride of the peasants by printing official notices and war bulletins in Flemish and German only, instead of Flemish, German, and French, as had previously been the practice; the next day they would be informed, in these same posters, that they must surrender their hay-crop to the German military authorities. The Germans appeared to be as much detested in Flanders as anywhere else in Belgium. I saw the wife of a distinguished citizen of Ghent burst into tears of vexation and anxiety because a German officer of high rank spoke to her in a restaurant. She said she feared she would be distrusted for the rest of her life by her fellow-citizens for having listened to a German officer. Yet he was evidently a gentleman, behaved with propriety, and had the excuse for addressing her that he was quartered in her house. I have known persons in Ghent to go willingly to prison rather than comply with German rules or pay fines into the German treasury. "Do you see that man?" said to me an acquaintance in Ghent one day, pointing to a German in uniform who was speaking Flemish to some peasants. "He lived here before the war; he will not be able to live here after the war; his life will not be safe."
Before the war there were four universities in Belgium: the Catholic university of Louvain, the liberal or non-sectarian university of Brussels, and the two state universities of Liége and Ghent. The instruction was given entirely in French, except that there were certain courses at Louvain and Ghent which were paralleled, rather expensively, one would think, by courses in Flemish. In 1911 a bill was introduced in the Belgian Parliament looking to the gradual transformation of the University of Ghent into an institution completely Flemish. In 1912 this proposal was again discussed, and was reported favorably in the Chamber of Representatives. The war of course put an end to the project.