White's description of the battle of Bedegraine stresses the ways in which Arthur's new concept of war is put into practice. According to the nobles' custom, a "good war had to be full of 'arms shoulders and heads flying about the field and blows ringing by the water and the wood.' But the arms, shoulders, and heads would be those of villeins, and the blows which rang, without removing many limbs, would be exchanged by the iron nobility." Such is the idea of warfare held by Arthur's opponents, the Eleven Kings. He orders that there will be no ransoms and that his knights will only fight other knights, observing no "ballet-dancer's rules." They are to "press the war home to its real lords — until they themselves" are "ready to refrain from warfare, being confronted with its reality." Arthur is waging war on an idea as much as on another army. White's tone in describing the battle suggests his endorsement of Arthur's thinking. He frequently becomes sarcastic (Arthur begins with an "atrocity" by "not waiting for the fashionable hour") and adopts the point-of-view of Arthur's enemies to display their foolishness in still thinking of war like a foxhunt. When Arthur chases his enemies' nobles without their own footmen, "They were indignantly surprised by what they considered an unchivalrous personal outrage — outrageous to be attacked with positive manslaughter, as if a baron could be killed like a Saxon kern." White even states that Arthur's "second atrocity was that he neglected the kerns themselves," instead "concentrating his indignation upon the leaders who had seduced their addled pates." King Lot realizes too late that he is being faced with "a new kind of warfare" which holds that "the death of gentlemen" is an acceptable part of battle. Because he ignores the traditional ways of thinking about war, Arthur gains an easy victory over the Eleven Kings. To recall the issue raised in the epigraph, the future of warfare (embodied by Arthur) defeats the past (embodied by the Eleven Kings), creating a peaceful present in which nobles who begin wars are taken to task for risking the lives of their own subjects. The foxhunt is over, at least for the moment.
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