From ‘The New “Day” and Merchant Shipping’, The Spectator, 13 February 1915:
THE Germans have such a mania for fixing a day for achieving some important purpose that we should feel guilty of a certain want of responsiveness if we grudged them anything of the pleasure they are deriving from contemplating the mystical date of February 18th. This is the new “day” on which the terrific process of starving Britain out by means of a few submarines is formally to begin. So be it it! The greatest day of all—Der Tag—was a kind of idealistic conception projected upon the screen of the future, like Messianic prophetic poetry. Naturally no actual day—a Monday, a Tuesday, or a Wednesday—could be fixed for Germany to overcome England and impose her will upon the world. But the “days” of another type have been most precisely fixed.
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