"If Daemon had ridden over Gwayne Corbray... if Fireball had not been slain on the eve of battle... if Hightower and Tarbeck and Oakheart and Butterwell had lent us their full strength instead of trying to keep one foot in each camp... if Manfred Lothson had proved true instead of treacherous... if storms had not delayed Lord Bracken's sailing with the Myrish crossbowmen... if Quickfinger had not been caught with the stolen dragon's eggs... so many ifs, ser, had any one come out differently it could all have turned t'other way. Then we would be called the loyalists, and the red dragons would be remembered as men who fought to keep the usurper Daeron the Falseborn upon his stolen throne, and failed.
Ser Eustace laments that history could have turned out very differently had number of minuscule events happened in their favor; if these things had happened favorably then perhaps they would be known as "heroes" instead of being branded as "traitors."
A great battle is a terrible thing but in the midst of blood and carnage, there is sometimes also beauty, beauty that could break your heart. I will never forget the way the sun looked when it set upon the Redgrass Field...ten thousand men had died, and the air was thick with moans and lamentations, but above us the sky turned gold and red and orange, so beautiful it made me weep to know that my sons would never see it.
Ser Eustace makes this utterance in his glorification of war. Unlike most men who stay away and do everything to prevent all out hostilities from erupting Ser Eustace sees war as a necessary--even beautiful--component of society-building.
"The hedge knight is the truest kind of knight. Other knights serve the lords who keep them, or from whom they hold their lands, but we serve where we will, for men whose causes we believe in. Every knight swears to protect the weak and innocent, but we keep the vow best, I think."
Ser Arlan discusses his particular bent on the chivalric code of the knight seeing the life of the hedge knight as the best means to uphold and live up to the code as not being tied down to any single feudal lord means that the possibility of conflicting oaths
“Why?” he asked Pate. “What am I to them?” “A knight who remembered his vows,” the smith said.
Steely Pate makes this utterance as encouragement to Dunk and as approval of his actions, despite the obvious trouble it has caused him and those knights that have thrown their lot in with him.
