Arthur's revolutionary theory of entering and then winning a "war to end all wars" does not occur to him instantly, early in his reign. When the novel begins, Arthur is still very much like the Wart he was in The Sword in the Stone. White introduces him with the description, "He had fair hair and a stupid face, or at any rate there was a lack of cunning in it." Even Merlyn has become restless and impatient with his pupil: When Arthur asks Merlyn if he has "been doing something wrong," the wizard replies, "It is not so much what you are doing . . . It is how you are thinking. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's stupidity." The "stupidity" that so infuriates Merlyn is not of an academic strain; rather, he detests Arthur's ideas about war and violence, which are revealed to him when the King describes his battle with Lot of Orkney as "splendid." After his boyhood lessons, Arthur should know better than to use such a word to describe a thing so terrible; however, Arthur is still like a schoolboy in many ways, including his conception of war. Merlyn must again become his tutor so that the King can think for himself after the wizard is locked "in a hole" (as he will be by Nimue) later in life.
To make his student rethink his ideas about the "splendid" nature of war, Merlyn offers Arthur a brief history lesson in which he outlines the last three thousand years of military conflict.When Arthur calls Sir Bruce Sans Pitie a "swine" and a "marauder," he fails to realize that a man like Sir Bruce is simply "an example of the general situation." A long time ago, the Gaels who fought with copper hatchets were defeated by another clan of Gaels with bronze swords, who were then driven West by Teutons with iron weapons, who were themselves attacked by the Romans and, eventually, the Saxons. The Saxons, however, were then conquered by the Normans, leaving the present situation in which the Gaels resent the Gauls (their Norman oppressors) and see Arthur's coronation as a "chance to pay off racial scores, and to have some blood-letting as sport, and to make a bit of money in ransoms." The universal thinking that "Might is Right" disgusts the wizard, who contends that wars are "the greatest wickedness of a wicked species." "There is no excuse for war," he explains, "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." Merlyn's words here recall those of Lyo-lyok, the wild goose, who tells Arthur in The Sword in the Stone that he is a "baby" because he finds war a "knightly" pursuit.
