The news of Freddy's death reached Margaret only a fortnight later; it
came to her from the War Office in the ordinary official way. He had
not died, as he would have wished to have died, in action, in a great
offensive against the enemy; he had been sniped, shot through the head
when he raised its brightness for half a minute above the parapet of
his trench. His courage and ability had never been put to the test; he
had fallen like a first year's bird hit by a deadly shot.
His youth and brains and beauty were the offerings which he had laid on
the altar of Liberty. Fame had been denied him.
As England's blackest days passed, and Margaret read in the papers the
horrible accounts of the poisonous gas which was blinding and
suffocating our men at the front, and when hospital nurses told her of
the pitiful "gas" cases which they had seen, Freddy's painless death
became almost a thing to be thankful for.
Pessimism was running its course. Germany's triumphs were magnified,
the Allies' work belittled. She had come to think that it could only
have been a case of time before he would either have been permanently
injured or killed; the death-rate of officers was terrible. Freddy had
died as he had lived, an almost perfect example of England's manhood--a
striking proof that her decadence was an ugly scandal, whose birthplace
was Berlin. It was one of Germany's many clever forms of propaganda,
intended to undermine England's prestige in the eyes of neutrals when
the "great day" came.