ARMS AND THE MAN by George Bernard Shaw

 Arms and the Man – George Bernard Shaw

Introduction

Set during the four-month-long Serbo-Bulgarian War that occurred between November 1885 and March 1886, this play is a satire on the foolishness of glorifying something so terrible as war, as well as a satire on the foolishness of basing your affections on idealistic notions of love. There is also another theme concerning social classes. These themes brought reality and a timeless lesson to the comic stage. Consequently, Arms and the Man has become one of Shaw’s most popular plays and has remained a classic ever since.

Plot summary

The play takes place during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War. Its heroine, Raina (rah-EE-na) Petkoff, is a young Bulgarian woman engaged to Sergius Saranoff, one of the heroes of that war, whom she idolizes. One night, a Swiss mercenary soldier in the Serbian army, Captain Bluntschli, bursts through her bedroom window and firstly threatens Raina, then begs her to hide him, so that he is not killed. Raina complies, though she thinks the man a coward, especially when he tells her that he does not carry pistol cartridges, but chocolates. When the battle dies down, Raina and her mother sneak Bluntschli out of the house, disguised in an old housecoat.

The war ends and Sergius returns to Raina, but also flirts with her insolent servant girl, Louka, whom they think is engaged to the loyal house servant Nicola. Raina begins to find Sergius both foolhardy and tiresome, but she hides it. She eventually begins to understand that her betrothed does not fit into the same heroic image she has always had and instead begins to fall in love with the Swiss soldier. Bluntschli unexpectedly returns so that he can give back the old housecoat, but also so that he can see her. Raina and her mother are shocked, especially when her father and Sergius reveal that they have met Bluntschli before, and invite him to stay for lunch and to help them with troop movements.

Afterwards, left alone with Bluntschli, Raina realizes that he sees through her romantic posturing, but that he respects her as a woman, as Sergius does not. She tells him that she had left a portrait of herself in the pocket of the coat, with the inscription "To my chocolate-cream soldier", but Bluntschli says that he didn't find it and that it must still be in the coat pocket. Bluntschli gets a note informing him of his father's death and revealing to him his now enormous wealth. Louka then boldly tells Sergius that Bluntschli is the man whom Raina protected, and that Raina is really in love with him. So Sergius challenges him to a duel, but the men avoid fighting and Sergius and Raina break off their engagement (with some relief on both sides). Raina's father discovers the portrait in the pocket of his housecoat, but Raina and Bluntschli trick him by taking out the portrait before he finds it again, only tell him that his mind is playing tricks on him. After Bluntschli reveals the whole story to Major Petkoff, Sergius proposes marriage to Louka. Mrs. Petkoff's as expected, expresses horror at the proposal. Nicola quietly and gallantly lets Sergius have her, and Bluntschli, recognising Nicola's dedication and ability, determines to offer him a job as a hotel manager.

Raina, having realized the worthlessness of her romantic ideals and her fiancé's values, protests that she would prefer her poor "chocolate-cream soldier" to this wealthy businessman. Bluntschli says that he is still the same person, and the play ends with Raina proclaiming her love for him and Bluntschli, with Swiss precision, both clearing up the major's troop movement problems and informing everyone that he will return to be married to Raina exactly two weeks from Tuesday.

CHARACTERS

1.     Captain Bluntschli

Bluntschli is a realist who believes in adapting to a situation in order to survive. As a professional soldier, he knows that he is only a tool as a soldier and he has no illusions about war. He knows the practical actions one must take to win battles and stay alive. His most famous feature is that he keeps chocolates in his cartridge belt rather than bullets. His common sense appeals to Sergius, who is impressed by Bluntschli's ability to figure out troop movements. This influence helps Sergius make the decision to be honest about Louka and to change his life.

When Bluntschli takes refuge in Raina's bedroom, he starts a chain of events that changes his life and the lives of all those associated with the Petkoff family. Despite his pragmatism, Bluntschli has a romantic side. This romantic side is seen in his actions like: one, he ran off to be a soldier rather than go into his father's business; two, he climbs a balcony to escape rather than drop into a cellar; and three, he himself returns the borrowed coat rather than shipping it, because he wants to see Raina. He has always known that to believe in being totally practical can be as unrealistic as believing in total idealism and he has tried to maintain a balance. However, over the course of the play, this balance becomes difficult to maintain as he changes from a soldier who looks suspiciously at love, to a man who is leaving the army to get married and to take care of his father's business. Thus, the man who changed Raina's and Sergius's lives has also had his own life transformed.

2.     Louka

An ambitious and sometimes spiteful maid who is desperate to rise above her station, Louka is attracted to Major Sergius Saranoff, and he to her. However, Sergius is engaged to Raina, and he is a gentleman while Louka is just a servant. Louka shames Sergius about the hypocrisy of his behaviour. She tries to break up his relationship with Raina when Captain Bluntschli returns, knowing that Bluntschli is the enemy soldier who hid in Raina's bedroom. Louka is herself supposedly engaged to another servant, Nicola. Louka is resentful of a society that tries to restrict her to a certain "place." One can tell that she is better suited to being a mistress than a maid. Nicola tries to convince her that a rigid structure of classes is part of the natural order of things, and that people are happier when they accept their place and stop torturing themselves with useless aspirations. Louka replies scornfully that Nicola has "the soul of a servant." Nicola advises her to accept her place in life, but she rejects his discouraging philosophy and eventually wins her man and a new life.

3.     Nicola

Nicola is a wily servant. He covers up for Raina and Catherine in their deceptions. He believes that class division is a system that should not be questioned, and he advises Louka to accept her place. He found Louka, taught her how to be a proper servant, and plans to marry her, but he realizes how Louka's marriage to Sergius would create an advantage for both Louka and for himself. Therefore, he changes his story and denies his engagement to Louka. This helps Louka to achieve her ambitions. This impresses Bluntschli who offers him job at the end of the story. Ultimately, Nicola wants to run his own business, so he will do whatever it takes to stay in favour with the Petkoffs and Major Sergius who were potential patrons, while taking advantage of opportunities to earn extra capital for special services.

4.     Catherine Petkoff

She is Raina's mother and the wife of Major Paul Petkoff. Catherine is a nouveau-riche social climber. Crudely ignorant and snobbish, Catherine is Shaw's example of people who express typically romanticize love and war. Catherine is disappointed when the war ends in a peace treaty, because she wanted a glorious victory over a soundly defeated enemy. Although she allows Bluntschli to hide in her home and she helps to keep him secret, she thinks Sergius Saranoff is the ideal handsome hero her daughter must marry for an appropriate match. She declares Bluntschli unsuitable until she finds out how rich he is, and then she quickly changes her mind. This proves that she believes that possessions and class should be the greatest considerations in marriage instead of love.

5.     Major Paul Petkoff

Major Petkoff is Raina's father and Catherine's husband. He is an amiable, unrefined buffoon who craves rank and who has somehow stumbled into wealth. His rank was given to him for being the richest Bulgarian, but he has no military skills. He has little knowledge of the world outside his household. This is seen in the way he relies on Bluntschli to make arrangements for his regiments and on how he relies on Catherine to give the order. His purpose in the play is almost that of a prop. It is his old coat that is lent to Bluntschli and which then gives Bluntschli the excuse to come back to see Raina. It is Petkoff who discovers the incriminating photo in his coat pocket that leads to the revelation of the truth and to the resolution of the story.

6.     Raina Petkoff

She is the central character in the play. Raina learns to abandon her foolish ideals about love in exchange for real love. Raina is central to the play because Catherine and Paul Petkoff are her parents, Sergius is her fiancé, Louka and Nicola are her family's servants, and Bluntschli is her dream soldier. The play starts in her bedroom, where we learn what a dreamy romantic she is about love and war, before Bluntschli, the enemy soldier comes through her window and begins to destroy her unrealistic dreams with his realism.

Raina is a youthful, lively, willful, and an articulate female character who shows a childish approach to life. When Raina informs Bluntschli that he is in the house of Petkoff, "the richest and best known [family] in our country," she expects him to be impressed. She brags that her father holds the highest command of any Bulgarian in the Russian army, but it is only the rank of major, which should actually be a shame to the Bulgarians. Raina also brags that their house is the only private house in Bulgaria that has two rows of windows and a flight of stairs by which you can go up and down. She sometimes acts like a spoiled child to get her way. Catherine points out that Raina always times her entrances to get the most attention.

Nonetheless, Raina is intelligent. She probably wouldn't have fallen for Bluntschli if she had not been open to his arguments and if she were not smart enough to see the differences in qualities between Bluntschli and Saranoff. She is also honest enough with herself to realize that she is not truly in love with Saranoff, but that she was just playing a role to meet social expectations. Raina has enough bravery and compassion to help Bluntschli, an enemy soldier in need, and she is courageous and adventurous enough to take a risk with Bluntschli and to start a new life with him.

7.     Major Sergius Saranoff

Major Saranoff is Raina's fiancé, and he is a shining example of Raina and her mother's romanticized image of a hero. He is almost unrealistic in his attempt to live up to this image of a hero, especially in battle. This is because it is hopeless to try to become what you do not have what it takes to become. Thus, Shaw uses this character to show that these romanticized ideals were probably nonsense all along. Sergius has fundamental hopelessness about life. He clings to his idealized image of himself because he is afraid to find out who he really is. He knows that he is a different person with Raina than he is with Louka, and Louka has pointed out his hypocritical behaviours to him. Sergius realizes that he must be more than the idealized soldier that the young ladies worship. But of the other selves that he has observed in himself he says: "One of them is a hero, another a buffoon, another a humbug, another perhaps a bit of a blackguard." He is disturbed by the feeling that "everything I think is mocked by everything I do." In losing Raina and declaring his love for Louka, Sergius is finally freed to be himself and to discover his own values.

THEMES

1.     Romanticism of War

In line after line, Shaw satirizes the romantic notions about war that glorify a horrible business. Except for the comic dialogue, the audience is presented with a soldier who has escaped from a horrible battle after three days of being under fire. He is exhausted, starving, and being pursued. Such is the experience of a real soldier. Later on in the play, Shaw throws in a shocking report on the death of the man who told Bluntschli's secret about staying in Raina's bedroom; there is nothing comic or heroic about being shot in the hip and then burned to death. When Raina expresses horror at such a death, Sergius replies, "And how ridiculous! Oh, war! War! The dream of patriots and heroes! A fraud, Bluntschli, a hollow sham." That a soldier would prefer food to cartridges in his belt was considered ridiculous by critics.

It is also noteworthy that Catherine is not satisfied with a peace treaty because, in her unrealistic vision of glorious war, there is supposed to be a devastating defeat of the enemy followed by celebrations of a heroic victory. Shaw's message here is that there can be peaceful alternatives to unending fighting. Shaw was dedicated throughout his life to reduction of violence; especially that of wars, and Arms and the Man was one of the vehicles he used to appeal for reduction of violence.

2.     Romanticism of Love

Romance also plays a big role in Arms and the Man, but, again, Shaw turns the tables by having the heroine and her fiancé abandon their idealized relationship for a more realistic and truer love. Shaw was a master flirt but he recognized that playing a game differed from serious love, and he tried to convey this in Arms and the Man, which is subtitled "An Anti-Romantic Comedy." In the play, Raina and Sergius have paired themselves for all the wrong reasons: because their social status requires a mate from the same social level; and because Sergius plays the role of the type of hero that Raina has been taught to admire, and Raina plays the role that Sergius expects from a woman of her station. The problem is that neither is portraying his/her real self, so their love is based on outward appearances, not on the true person inside. They are both acting out a romance according to their idealized standards for courtship rather than according to their innermost feelings. Raina has just fallen for her brave army officer who looks handsome in his uniform. When Bluntschli and Louka force Raina and Sergius to examine their true feelings, Raina and Sergius discover that they have the courage and desire to follow their hearts instead of seeking to meet social expectations.

3.     Class Discrimination

As a socialist, Shaw believed in the equality of all people and he hated discrimination based on gender or social class. These beliefs are evident in the relationships portrayed in Arms and the Man. Shaw allows a maid to succeed in her ambitions to make her life better by marrying Sergius, an officer and a gentleman. This match also means that Sergius has developed the courage to free himself from the expectations of his class and instead marry the woman he loves. The silliness of Catherine's character is used to show the illogical nature of class snobbery, as she clearly makes divisions between her family and the servants, even though, or perhaps because, the Petkoffs themselves have only recently climbed the social ladder. The play also attacks divisions of rank, as Captain Bluntschli has leadership abilities that the superior-ranking officers, Majors Petkoff and Saranoff, do not have, illustrating the fact that ability has little to do with rank. Ability also has little to do with class, as exemplified by the character of Nicola, who is declared the ablest, and certainly the wiliest, character in the play.

4.     Idealism versus Realism

Arms and the Man illustrates the conflict between idealism and realism. The romantic ideal of war as a glorious opportunity for a man to display courage and honour is dismissed when Sergius admits that his heroic cavalry charge that won the battle was the wrong thing to do. His notable action does not get him his promotion and Sergius learns that "Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward's art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm's way when you are weak."

Sergius and Raina must face the fact that their ideals about love are false. Fortunately, in the end, both of them are actually released by this knowledge to pursue their true loves. But first, Sergius goes through a period of misery in which he questions whether life is meaningless if his standards of conduct disappoint him when he faces reality. This question is an underlying current throughout the play. Shaw gives a happy resolution, but it is a serious question that most people must face in life.

In the play, we learn a lot about Bluntschli's realism—i.e., keeping chocolates instead of ammunition in his cartridge belt, showing contempt for sentimentality, and reacting in a practical manner to his father's death. However, Nicola is the complete realist in the play. Nicola's message is: adapt, exploit and survive. Bluntschli proves to have a romantic side, after all, and he is therefore the most balanced character in the play since he seems to know when to mix his romanticism with realism and when to stick to his ideals.

Arms and the Man as a Comedy

One standard trait of comedic plays—often used by Shakespeare and also used by Shaw in Arms and the Man—is the use of an ending in which all the confusions of the play are resolved, and every romantic figure winds up with his or her ideal partner. The incidents in Arms and the Man of the lost coat and the incriminating inscription on the hidden photograph are also ploys that are typical of comedy. In Shaw's hands comedy is serious business disguised by farce. Shaw further shows the crudeness of the Petkoffs when Raina explains that "Bulgarians of really good standing—people in OUR position—wash their hands nearly every day." Raina thinks that simply washing hands is a sign of a gentleman, not knowing that her primitive lifestyle is a sign of her low standards. In Act 2, Major Petkoff blames his wife's chronic sore throat on washing her neck every day. Major Petkoff’s lecture on the foolishness of frequent bathing is another sign from Shaw that we are dealing with people who have only recently barely risen above the great unwashed masses. Throwing in the comments about washing being the fault of the English whose climate makes them so dirty is an attempt at making fun of Shaw himself.

The repeated reference to their library once again shows that the Petkoffs think that all they need to be gentry is to have a room called the library. Putting a bell in it just makes their attitude to get worse. When Petkoff asks why they cannot just shout for their servants, Catherine replies that she has learned that civilized people never shout for their servants. He counters that he has learned that civilized people do not hang their laundry out to dry where other people can see it. Catherine finds that concept absurd and declares that really refined people do not notice such things, as if she knew. Obviously, neither of them have any idea what refinement is, especially if they have only recently begun learning proper habits.