From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 6 January 1915:
THE mountain has produced a curious little naval mouse. The meeting of the German Council of War, together with the Emperor’s State visit to the fleet at Wilhelmshaven, seemed to show that some great naval development was about to take place—either the coming out of the German Grand Fleet in an attempt at invasion, or else some new scheme in which air and water should combine to serve the apostles of hate. And then we get the announcement that Germany will sink our transports if she can—a thing which she has been trying hard to do ever since the war began, and a thing to which, of course, we can take no possible exception. Hard on the heels of this sapient decree comes another, issued on Thursday, in which the Chief of the Marine Staff announces that the waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, are “herewith proclaimed a war region.”
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