Camden Military Academy - Excalibur Yearbook (Camden, SC)

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Beraltbur The romantic tales about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are among the best-known legends in the Western world. For most of us they were introduction to the world of chivalry of knights in shining armor seeking honor and glory in combat, of beautiful women watching their lovers engage in brilliant tournament competition. That world seems far removed from our own technologically advanced but uncertain times. The Camden Military Academy connection, however; between this publication, Excalibur, and the legendary Sword Excalibur of King Arthur, is immediate. Our link with the hero Arthur, moreover, is not to a myth but to an actual historical figure who lived in Britain fourteen hundred years ago in times that were, like our own, full of threats. Daily, contemporary society confronts economic turmoil on an international scale, crime that reaches our very neighborhoods, prospects of nuclear destruction that threatens our very existence. No magical sword scabbard, such as that of Arthur's Excalibur, protects us. But we cope much as Arthur's followers did, staging tournaments on football, baseball, and soccer fields of battle, living by a modern code of honor as knights lived by their chivalric ideals, preparing to transfer lessons learned here to the arena of life, seeking to achieve future goals and to realize present aspirations. Dedication and pride in every turn, each salute harkens to knightly custom, its origin the mutual lifting of hel- met visors to reveal identities. In bonds of honor we salute the legendary, the fabled past and the real present, of which modern myths are made. The swor

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T H. White brought the Arthurian legend into the twentieth century with his The Once and Future King on which the Broadway musical Camelot and its film adapta- tion were based. White mixes history with boyhood - happy hawking, jousting, humor, and magic. He introduces Sir Thomas Mallory, author of the medieval Morte d'Arthur, as a youthful page. The character Arthur, soon to die, admonishes the boy not to fight in a final battle with Mordred but to ride to Warwickshire where he should think of himself as a messenger of the Round Table and spread its message down through the years to people like you and me. Put it like this (Arthur says to him). There was a king once, called King Arthur. That is me. When he came to the throne of England, he found that all the kings and barons were fighting against each other like madmen ... They did a lot of bad things, because they lived by force. Now this king had an idea, and the idea was that force ought to be used, if it were used at all, on behalf of justice, not on its own account. Follow this, young boy. He thought that if he could get his barons fighting for truth, and to help weak people, and to redress wrongs, then their fighting might not be such a bad thing as once it used to be. So he gathered together all the true and kindly people that he knew, and he dressed them in armour, and he made them knights, and taught them his idea, and set them down, at a Round Table. And King Arthur loved his Table with all his heart. He was prouder of it than he was of his own dear wife, and for many years his new knights went about killing ogres, and rescuing damsels and saving poor prisoners, and trying to set the world to rights. That was the King's idea.