Arms and the Man
Summary
The play begins in the
bedroom of Raina Petkoff in a Bulgarian town in 1885, during the
Serbo-Bulgarian War. As the play opens, Catherine Petkoff and her daughter,
Raina, have just heard that the Bulgarians have scored a tremendous victory in
a cavalry charge led by Raina's fiancé, Major Sergius Saranoff, who is in the
same regiment as Raina's father, Major Paul Petkoff. Raina is so impressed with
the noble deeds of her fiancé that she fears that she might never be able to
live up to his nobility. At this very moment, the maid, Louka, rushes in with
the news that the Serbs are being chased through the streets and that it is
necessary to lock up the house and all of the windows. Raina promises to do so
later, and Louka leaves. But as Raina is reading in bed, shots are heard, there
is a noise at the balcony window, and a bedraggled enemy soldier with a gun
appears and threatens to kill her if she makes a sound. After the soldier and
Raina exchange some words, Louka calls from outside the door; she says that
several soldiers want to search the house and investigate a report that an
enemy Serbian soldier was seen climbing her balcony. When Raina hears the news,
she turns to the soldier. He says that he is prepared to die, but he certainly
plans to kill a few Bulgarian soldiers in her bedroom before he dies. Thus,
Raina impetuously decides to hide him. The soldiers investigate, find no one,
and leave. Raina then calls the man out from hiding; she nervously and
absentmindedly sits on his gun, but she learns that it is not loaded; the
soldier carries no cartridges. He explains that instead of carrying bullets, he
always carries chocolates into battle. Furthermore, he is not an enemy; he is a
Swiss, a professional soldier hired by Serbia. Raina gives him the last
of her chocolate creams, which he devours, maintaining that she has indeed
saved his life. Now that the Bulgarian soldiers are gone, Raina wants the
"chocolate cream soldier" (as she calls him) to climb back down the
drainpipe, but he refuses to; whereas he could climb up, he hasn't the strength
to climb down. When Raina goes after her mother to help, the "chocolate
cream soldier" crawls into Raina's bed and falls instantly asleep. In
fact, when they re-enter, he is sleeping so soundly that they cannot awaken
him.
Act II begins four months
later in the garden of Major Petkoff's house. The middle-aged
servant Nicola is lecturing Louka on the importance of having proper respect for
the upper class, but Louka has too independent a soul to ever be a
"proper" servant. She has higher plans for herself than to marry
someone like Nicola, who, she insists, has the "soul of a servant."
Major Petkoff arrives home from the war, and his wife Catherine greets him with
two bits of information: she suggests that Bulgaria should have annexed Serbia, and she tells him that she
has had an electric bell installed in the library. Major Sergius Saranoff,
Raina's fiancé and leader of the successful cavalry charge, arrives, and in the
course of discussing the end of the war, he and Major Petkoff recount the
now-famous story of how a Swiss soldier escaped by climbing up a balcony and
into the bedroom of a noble Bulgarian woman. The women are shocked that such a
crude story would be told in front of them. When the Petkoffs go into the
house, Raina and Sergius discuss their love for one another, and Raina
romantically declares that the two of them have found a "higher
love."
When Raina goes to get her
hat so that they can go for a walk, Louka comes in, and Sergius asks if she
knows how tiring it is to be involved with a "higher love." Then he
immediately tries to embrace the attractive maid. Since he is being so
blatantly familiar, Louka declares that Miss Raina is no better than she;
Raina, she says, has been having an affair while Sergius was away, but she
refuses to tell Sergius who Raina's lover is, even though Sergius accidently
bruises Louka's arm while trying to wrest a confession from her. When he apologizes,
Louka insists that he kiss her arm, but Sergius refuses and, at that moment,
Raina re-enters. Sergius is then called away, and Catherine enters. The two
ladies discuss how incensed they both are that Sergius related the tale about
the escaping soldier. Raina, however, doesn't care if Sergius hears about it;
she is tired of his stiff propriety. At that moment, Louka announces the
presence of a Swiss officer with a carpetbag, calling for the lady of the
house. His name is Captain Bluntschli. Instantly, they both know he is the
"chocolate cream soldier" who is returning the Major's old coat that
they disguised him in. As they make rapid, desperate plans to send him away,
Major Petkoff hails Bluntschli and greets him warmly as the person who aided
them in the final negotiations of the war; the old Major insists that
Bluntschli must their houseguest until he has to return to Switzerland.
Act III begins shortly after
lunch and takes place in the library. Captain Bluntschli is attending to a
large amount of confusing paperwork in a very efficient manner, while Sergius
and Major Petkoff merely observe. Major Petkoff complains about a favorite old
coat being lost, but at that moment Catherine rings the new library bell, sends
Nicola after the coat, and astounds the Major by thus retrieving his lost coat.
When Raina and Bluntschli are left alone, she compliments him on his looking so
handsome now that he is washed and brushed. Then she assumes a high and noble
tone and chides him concerning certain stories which he has told and the fact
that she has had to lie for him. Bluntschli laughs at her "noble
attitude" and says that he is pleased with her demeanor. Raina is amused;
she says that Bluntschli is the first person to ever see through her
pretensions, but she is perplexed that he didn't feel into the pockets of the
old coat which she lent him; she had placed a photo of herself there with the
inscription "To my Chocolate Cream Soldier." At this moment, a
telegram is brought to Bluntschli relating the death of his father and the
necessity of his coming home immediately to make arrangements for the six
hotels that he has inherited. As Raina and Bluntschli leave the room, Louka
comes in wearing her sleeve in a ridiculous fashion so that her bruise will be
obvious. Sergius enters and asks if he can cure it now with a kiss. Louka
questions his true bravery; she wonders if he has the courage to marry a woman
who is socially beneath him, even if he loved the woman. Sergius asserts that
he would, but he is now engaged to a girl so noble that all such talk is
absurd. Louka then lets him know that Bluntschli is his rival and that Raina
will marry the Swiss soldier. Sergius is incensed. He sees Bluntschli and
immediately challenges him to a duel; then he retracts when Raina comes in and
accuses him of making love to Louka merely to spy on her and Bluntschli. As
they are arguing, Bluntschli asks for Louka, who has been eavesdropping at the
door. She is brought in, Sergius apologizes to her, kisses her hand, and thus
they become engaged. Bluntschli asks permission to become a suitor for Raina's
hand, and when he lists all of the possessions which he has (200 horses, 9600
pairs of sheets, ten thousand knives and forks, etc.), permission for the
marriage is granted, and Bluntschli says that he will return in two weeks to
marry Raina. Succumbing with pleasure, Raina gives a loving smile to her
"chocolate cream soldier."
CRITICAL COMMENTARY
One of Shaw's aims in this
play is to debunk the romantic heroics of war; he wanted to present a realistic
account of war and to remove all pretensions of nobility from war. It is not,
however, an anti-war play; instead, it is a satire on those attitudes which
would glorify war. To create this satire, Shaw chose as his title the opening
lines of Virgil's Aeneid, the Roman epic which glorifies war and the
heroic feats of man in war, and which begins, "Of arms and the man I sing.
. . ."
When the play opens, we hear
about the glorious exploits which were performed by Major Sergius Saranoff
during his daring and magnificent cavalry raid, an event that turned the war
against the Serbs toward victory for the Bulgarians. He thus becomes Raina
Petkoff's ideal hero; yet the more that we learn about this raid, the more we
realize that it was a futile, ridiculous gesture, one that bordered on an utter
suicidal escapade.
In contrast, Captain
Bluntschli's actions in Raina's bedroom strike us, at first, as being the
actions of a coward. (Bluntschli is a Swiss, a professional soldier fighting
for the Serbs.) He climbs up a water pipe and onto a balcony to escape capture,
he threatens a defenseless woman with his gun, he allows her to hide him behind
the curtains, and then he reveals that he carries chocolates rather than
cartridges in his cartridge box because chocolates are more practical on the
battlefield. Yet, as the play progresses, Bluntschli's unheroic actions become
reasonable when we see that he survives, whereas had the war continued,
Sergius' absurd heroic exploits would soon have left him dead.
Throughout the play, Shaw
arranged his material so as to satirize the glories associated with war and to
ultimately suggest that aristocratic pretensions have no place in today's wars,
which are won by using business-like efficiency, such as the practical matters
of which Bluntschli is a master. For example, Bluntschli is able to deal with
the business of dispensing an army to another town with ease, while this was a
feat that left the aristocrats (Majors Petkoff and Saranoff) completely
baffled. This early play by Shaw, therefore, cuts through the noble ideals of
war and the "higher love" that Raina and Sergius claim to share; Arms
and the Man presents a world where the practical man who lives with no
illusions and no poetic views about either love or war is shown to be the
superior creature.
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