But the present still plagues Arthur, who, in the novel's last scene, sits in his tent and ruminates over his life and achievements. These thoughts serve as both an effective summary of the volumes of The Once and Future King as well as White's last lecture to the reader on the terrors of a world governed only by Force Majeure — a world he had just witnessed during World War II. Although Arthur is described as a man whose idea was "doomed to failure," this description is a half-truth. True, the Law will not stop Mordred, who will slay his father after the novel ends. But as Arthur's thoughts continue, the reader detects White's linking these supposedly "medieval" ideas about war and law to the twentieth century, which is one of the overall aims of all myth and White's retelling of the Arthurian one. Arthur considers: "Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe . . . Perhaps there were no virtues . . . Perhaps Might was a law of Nature, needed to keep the survivors fit. Perhaps he himself . . . But he could challenge it no further."
A reader cannot but help detecting the voice of Darwin speaking through the king — a voice so disturbing to him that he does not even complete his last question, which is, that perhaps he himself was only a creation of Nature, designed to keep the survivors in order. Arthur's thinking, like the England of White's imagination, grows more modern as the novels progress. Mordred is a blueprint for Hitler (with his hatred of Gaels and Jews, swastika-like badges, and stormtrooper "Thrashers") who brings Camelot into the twentieth century with his guns — the times of knights dueling like nobles and not striking each other when they fall are no more. Force Majeure has returned and will obliterate Camelot and its leader. When Guenever figuratively remarks earlier in the novel, "Civilization seems to have become insane," she speaks as a prophet, foretelling the fall of the Round Table, but not the ideals that kept it intact.
