The Once and Future King

Chapter IV

The hay was safe and the corn would be ripe in a week. They sat in the shade at the edge of a cornfield, watching the dark brown people with their white teeth who were aimlessly busy in the sunlight, firehanging their scythes, sharpening their sickles and generally getting ready for the end of the farm year. It was peaceful in the fields which were close to the castle, and no arrows needed to be apprehended. While they watched the harvesters, they stripped the half-ripe heads of corn with their fingers and bit the grain daintily, tasting the furry milkiness of the wheat, and the husky, less generous flesh of the oats. The pearly taste of barley would have been strange to them, for it had not yet come to Gramarye.

Merlyn was still explaining.

‘When I was a young man,’ he said, ‘there was a general idea that it was wrong to fight in wars of any sort. Quite a lot of people in those days declared that they would never fight for anything whatever.’

‘Perhaps they were right,’ said the King.

‘No. There is one fairly good reason for fighting – and that is, if the other man starts it. You see, wars are a wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop him.’

‘But both sides always say that the other side started them.’

‘Of course they do, and it is a good thing that it should be so. At least, it shows that both sides are conscious, inside themselves, that the wicked thing about a war is its beginning.’

‘But the reasons,’ protested Arthur. ‘If one side was starving the other by some means or other – some peaceful, economic means which were not actually warlike – then the starving side might have to fight its way out – if you see what I mean?’

‘I see what you think you mean,’ said the magician, ‘but you are wrong. There is no excuse for war, none whatever, and whatever the wrong which your nation might be doing to mine – short of war – my nation would be in the wrong if it started a war so as to redress it. A murderer, for instance, is not allowed to plead that his victim was rich and oppressing him – so why should a nation be allowed to? Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not by force.’

Kay said: ‘Suppose King Lot of Orkney was to draw up his army all along the northern border, what could our King here do except send his own army to stand on the same line? Then supposing all Lot’s men drew their swords, what could we do except draw ours? The situation could be more complicated than that. It seems to me that aggression is a difficult thing to be sure about.’

Merlyn was annoyed.

‘Only because you want it to seem so,’ he said. ‘Obviously Lot would be the aggressor, for making the threat of force. You can always spot the villain, if you keep a fair mind. In the last resort, it is ultimately the man who strikes the first blow.’

Kay persisted with his argument.

‘Let it be two men,’ he said, ‘instead of two armies. They stand opposite each other – they draw their swords, pretending it is for some reason – they move about, so as to get to the weak side of one another – they even make feints with their swords, pretending to strike, but not doing so. Do you mean to tell me that the aggressor is the one who actually hits first?’

‘Yes, if there is nothing else to decide by. But in your case it is obviously the man who first took his army to the frontier.’

‘This first blow business brings it down to a matter of nothing. Suppose they both struck at once, or suppose you could not see which one gave the first blow, because there were so many facing each other?’

‘But there nearly always is something else to decide by,’ exclaimed the old man. ‘Use your common sense. Look at this Gaelic revolt, for example. What reason has the King here for being an aggressor? He is their feudal overlord already. It isn’t sensible to pretend that he is making the attack. People don’t attack their own possessions.’

‘I certainly don’t feel,’ said Arthur, ‘as if I had started it. Indeed, I didn’t know it was going to start, until it had. I suppose that was due to my having been brought up in the country.’

‘Any reasoning man,’ continued his tutor, ignoring the interruption, ‘who keeps a steady mind, can tell which side is the aggressor in ninety wars out of a hundred. He can see which side is likely to benefit by going to war in the first place, and that is a strong reason for suspicion. He can see which side began to make the threat of force or was the first to arm itself. And finally he can often put his finger on the one who struck the first blow.’

‘But supposing,’ said Kay, ‘that one side was the one to make the threat, while the other side was the one to strike the first blow?’

‘Oh, go and put your head in a bucket. I’m not suggesting that all of them can be decided. I was saying, from the start of the argument, that there are many wars in which the aggression is as plain as a pike-staff, and in those wars at any rate it might be the duty of decent men to fight the criminal. If you aren’t sure that he is the criminal – and you must sum it up for yourself with every ounce of fairness you can muster – then go and be a pacifist by all means. I recollect that I was a fervent pacifist myself once, in the Boer War, when my country was the aggressor, and a young woman blew a squeaker at me on Mafeking Night.’

‘Tell us about Mafeking Night,’ said Kay. ‘One gets sick of these discussions about right and wrong.’

‘Mafeking Night …’ began the magician, who was prepared to tell anybody about anything. But the King prevented him.

‘Tell us about Lot,’ he said. ‘I want to know about him, if I have to fight him. Personally I am beginning to be interested in right and wrong.’

‘King Lot …’ began Merlyn in the same tone of voice, only to be interrupted by Kay.

‘No,’ said Kay. ‘Talk about the Queen. She sounds more interesting.’

‘Queen Morgause …’

Arthur assumed the right of veto for the first time in his life. Merlyn, catching the lifted eyebrow, reverted to the King of Orkney with unexpected humility.

‘King Lot,’ said he, ‘is simply a member of your peerage and landed royalty. He’s a cipher. You don’t have to think about him at all.’

‘Why not?’

‘In the first place, he is what we used to call in my young days a Gentleman of the Ascendancy. His subjects are Gaels and so is his wife, but he himself is an import from Norway. He is a Gall like yourself, a member of the ruling class who conquered the Islands long ago. This means that his attitude to the war is the same as your father’s would have been. He doesn’t care a fig about Gaels or Galls, but he goes in for wars in the same way as my Victorian friends used to go in for foxhunting or else for profit in ransoms. Besides, his wife makes him.’

‘Sometimes,’ said the King. ‘I wish you had been born forwards like other people. What with Victorians and Mafeking Night …’

Merlyn was indignant.

‘The link between Norman warfare and Victorian foxhunting is perfect. Leave your father and King Lot outside the question for the moment, and look at literature. Look at the Norman myths about legendary figures like the Angevin kings. From William the Conqueror to Henry the Third, they indulged in warfare seasonally. The season came round, and off they went to the meet in splendid armour which reduced the risk of injury to a foxhunter’s minimum. Look at the decisive battle of Brenneville in which a field of nine hundred knights took part, and only three were killed. Look at Henry the Second borrowing money from Stephen, to pay his own troops in fighting Stephen. Look at the sporting etiquette, according to which Henry had to withdraw from a siege as soon as his enemy Louis joined the defenders inside the town, because Louis was his feudal overlord. Look at the siege of Mont St Michel, at which it was considered unsporting to win through the defenders’ lack of water. Look at the battle of Malmesbury, which was given up on account of bad weather. That is the inheritance to which you have succeeded, Arthur. You have become the king of a domain in which the popular agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that gets hurt. Unless you can make the world wag better than it does at present, King, your reign will be an endless series of petty battles, in which the aggressions will either be from spiteful reasons or from sporting ones, and in which the poor man will be the only one who dies. That is why I have been asking you to think. That is why …’

‘I think,’ said Kay, ‘that Dinadan is waving to us, to say that dinner is ready.’