Through the character of Buntschli in Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw wanted to invert ideals such as heroism, romance and war at a time when society attached too much importance to the aforementioned.
Shaw, a very humorous man in real life, wrote the play in the 1890s in a jovial and crisp manner, leaving his audience, and later his readers unsuspecting the seriousness of the matter in hand as he reduced the glorification of war and heroism to, literally, a joke.
Thirty-four-year-old Captain Buntschli, fighting for the losing Serbs, ‘unheroically’ chooses to climb up to the window of a lady in the enemy country to take refuge rather than getting caught and facing inevitable death in the hands of the victors’ army. The lady in question is Raina Petkoff, the daughter of Major Petkoff, a respected major on the victor’s side, and is engaged to marry Sergius Saranoff, the ‘hero’ responsible for leading the charge to defeat the Serbian army.
Buntschli is a man of modest stature, ordinary looking who has decided to run away than face death. Clearly, this leads to questions about his ‘heroism’ but Buntschli makes no bones about his stand on war as he tells Raina that he found nothing heroic about war or the ‘foolish’ charge that her fiance led. Interested in this foreign concept, Raina saves this intruder from soldiers on her side of the country when they come looking for him to her house. Unwittingly, she falls for this “chocolate-cream soldier” who prefers to keep chocolates to keep him from starving than ammunition that would help him kill others as he tells Raina, “What use are cartridges in battle? I always carry chocolate instead; and I finished the last cake of that hours ago.”
However, Buntschli turns out to be every bit the hero as he turns up the next day in the pretext of returning the coat that Raina had smuggled him out in. Apart from officially meeting Major Petkoff and Sergius, he also helps officialise a truce that was in talks so that further warfare was stopped. In the course of the play we also learn that Shaw’s version of the hero also respects Raina for the woman she is, unlike Sergius, the ‘hero’ for society.
Interestingly, Buntschli is more a man than Sergius could ever hope to be as he wins Raina using his head. A true romantic, he reveals his true identity of being a well-off Swiss to Raina and then promptly realises the standing of men in front of a lady he admires as he calls himself: “a fugitive, a beggar and a starving man”. He makes Raina realise the folly of her ideals imposed by society and then reveals what he truly his, thus making Shaw’s audience contemplate on the futility of war, the lofty ideas of heroism and the frivolities of romance, albeit with a smirk here and a chuckle there.
(The writer is a freelance journalist who spends her time eating, reading and sleeping, when not tackling deadlines)