"Decimate": has it been used in the "classic" sense in modern writing?

In this question, I learned that "to decimate" meant to reduce by 10% (hope I got that right).

And it is lamented that no-one uses it in this sense anymore.

Now, given that I never until today knew that it once had this meaning: was it ever even used this way in modern times? When was it last used in a mainstream publication in this sense?

Actually, the "reduce by 10%" meaning is not the classical sense, and is in fact a modern invention! So if at all decimate has been used in this sense, it's only in the modern period, not in any classical period. As the Merriam-Webster's dictionary of English Usage explains, decimate has had three main uses in English:

1. A specific Roman military practice of punishment (an army punishing its own soldiers), and only in this specific context (not a general-purpose "reduce by 10%"). The practice was that if a unit had exhibited cowardice or insubordination, one-tenth of the unit would be chosen at random, and clubbed to death by the other nine-tenths. You can read a five-page description of decimation in this book. Anyway, this sense carries over from Latin, and is attested in English since at least 1600.

2. A ten percent tax (esp. the one levied by Cromwell on the Royalists). This short-lived usage, attested since 1659, seems to have gone out of use (though the word tithe has taken some of its function).

3. The "modern" sense: emphatically destroy, devastate, severely reduce (not by just 10%) the numbers of, etc. This is in fact attested since 1663.

Now, it seems that Sir James Murray, primary editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, inserted a definition of decimate as "to kill, destroy, or remove one in every ten of" (the "reduce by 10%" meaning) between sense 1 and sense 3, to have a "semantic bridge" between them. This definition was given without citations (unusual for the OED) — perhaps decimate had never been used in this sense in English till then.

And it hasn't been much used in that sense since, either.

[The only exception is in engineering, where "decimation" means reducing the number of samples (resulting in a lower 'resolution'), with no implication about the extent of the reduction: so you see phrases like "decimate by a factor of 4". In such a context, "decimate by a factor of 10/9" would effectively mean "reduce by 10%".]

I couldn't find the comic I was looking for, but I did come across these:

Found here

Found here

The moment I became a Doctor Who fan for life was when, in Series 3 Episode 12 "The Sound of Drums", we had this dialogue:

The Master: Shall we decimate them? That sounds good, nice word, decimate.
The Master [to the Toclafane]: Remove one tenth of the population!

(Assuming/hoping here that there is no difficulty with considering "screenwriting" to be a subset of "writing".)

Most references in google books are either from dictionaries, or from bitter pedants who bewail its shift in meaning. Though I did find this one fiction book, where it's used without overtly drawing attention to itself.