Arms and the Man is a comedy by George Bernard Shaw. The play was first produced on 21 April 1894 at the Avenue Theatre and published in 1898 as part of Shaw's Plays Pleasant volume, which also included Candida, You Never Can Tell, and The Man of Destiny. Arms and the Man was one of Shaw's first commercial successes. The title of the play Arms and the Man is taken from Dryden's translation of the opening lines of Virgil's Aeneid:

"Arms and the Man I sing, who forced by fate,

And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate."

Aeneid by Virgil is a war and adventure epic. It tells the story of Greek hero Aeneas' valiant achievements. Aeneas participated in the Trojan War. After Troy was burnt, he left the city with his old father, wife and children He eventually reached Italy and overcame it after encountering several challenges and threats. As a result, Virgil sings in his epic on the splendour of battle and bravery. In Aeneid man is portrayed as a superhero, and war is celebrated. Aenaes is hailed as a great hero who wields his weapons with heroic bravery and, in the end, triumphs over both his adversaries and his allies. With each subsequent act of bravery the hero commits, his stature rises, creating a spiraling upward movement. Thus in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ man, as well as the arms, are highly extolled.

In Arms and the Man Bernard Shaw gives an ironic twist to Virgil's lines. Shaw glorifies neither war nor the life of the soldier. His view in the play is that it is meaningless for men to fight wars to gain glory and honour. In this play, Shaw bitterly attacks the romantic attitude of war. He does not glorify the profession of the soldiers rather says it as the ‘coward’s art’. The play though opens with a note of valour and romanticism the heroic cavalry charge of Sergius, the affectionate love of Raina for Sergius, the dramatist highlights those only for the sake of ironical treatment. 

Shaw makes it obvious that most soldiers use battle and their weapons not as means of obtaining glory but as a means of subsistence through the character Bluntschli. Bluntschli is a professional soldier who will engage in combat anywhere for money. He would rather take a defensive stance on the battlefield than engage in combat and risk losing his life. In the battlefield, chocolates he says, are more important than cartridges, since they provide quick nourishment. Bluntschli exposes that ‘nine soldiers out of ten are born fools,’ and in course of the drama, Sergius appears like an idiot, a fool and ‘only an amateur’.

Bluntschli’s professional military background and experience makes him question the unprofessional way in which the Bulgarians led by Sergius attacked the Serbs. He says that only an amateur would lead a cavalry charge against a battery of machine guns, without calculating the danger of the situation. If the Serbs had the proper ammunition, and the guns had gone off, Sergius and his regiment would have been completely wiped out. The action of the drama involves men with arms, but as it progresses, the hollowness and sham of battle is revealed, and the romantic idealisation of combat suffers a devastating blow. Thus we get a realistic perspective of war that does not glorify it or see it as the opportunity to gain honour and fame. A soldier, in Shaw’s view, should ideally try to save his life, rather than die a glorious death on the battlefield.

In Arms and the Man Shaw shows that the glory of war and the heroism of soldiers are nothing but an illusion. The worst situation in which warriors are doomed is war. War is a ridiculous, horrible affair in which people are mercilessly burnt alive. Sergius, instead of emerging as a heroic figure at the end, is exposed, ridiculed and is revealed to be a fool, a man of clay, and the victim of a maid's trap.

Orwell says that Arms and the Man “war is not a wonderful, romantic adventure” still needs to be told. As discussed above, the plot revolves around war, and it deals with men and their arms, though in a sense different from that of Virgil’s lines. It expresses the dramatist’s satiric intention of exposing the hollowness of war and the heroism of soldiers. Shaw has shown the falsity of such romantic ideas. He has emphasized that man is a creature of instincts and impulses which are supreme of greater importance than arms.