approach to warfare.

Sergius pretends to be in love with Raina, the woman from his own class he is expected to love and marry. However, his true interest is in her maid, with whom he carries on a clandestine romance when Raina is not around. Sergius is also considered a military hero after winning a battle, but as Bluntschi points out, Sergius only won the battle because the other side was even more grossly incompetent than he was.

Bluntschi, in contrast to Sergius, doesn't pretend to be what he is not, and doesn't feel he has to play a cardboard heroic or romantic role. He deserts the battleground to save himself, which Shaw presents as a reasonable and positive response to his situation. He openly prefers chocolate to bullets. There is no false posturing in him. When he falls in love with Raina, it is based on genuine affection for her.

Shaw's play illustrates that is better to act in response to what our own hearts and minds tell us than to try to enact a false script of how life should be.

I tend to think that Shaw's treatment of war and love is to remove the romanticism that is so strongly attached to both concept.  Shaw was realistic enough to understand that society held cliched standards that sought to define both experiences to such a point that individuals had to second guess their own emotive narratives in both to ensure they were conforming to an external standard rooted in phony romanticism.  The romantic view of war made it out to be an experience of unquestioned glory and valor.  The fact that Bluntschii carries chocolates with him instead of bullets is an honest symbol of the fear intrinsic to war.  There is little Romanticism in a war, which is exposed as a "sham" in the work.  In much the same way, I think that Shaw treats love as an entity in which there is much romanticism and a concern about what love should be as opposed to what it is.  The hollowness between Raina and Sergius is representative of this.  Their union is one in which both are constantly plagued with expressing what should be said by lovers separated by war, even though it is evident that there is a hollowness to their words that both truly "get."  In this, there is a strong statement about what has happened to love and war in terms of social expectations controlling individual experience and feeling.  It is this treatment that Shaw seeks to address in the drama.

First, Arms and the Man does not romanticize war. Rather, it is intended to show, through satire, that war is futile, tragic, and ultimately absurd. There are some characters in the play who do romanticize war, but this is only because they have not participated in it. When the play begins, Raina and her mother Catherine each have romanticized notions of war, as when Catherine describes a battle between the Bulgarians and the Serbs in which Sergius had supposedly acted very gallantly:

You can’t guess how splendid it is. A cavalry charge—think of that! He defied our Russian commanders—acted without orders—led a charge on his own responsibility—headed it himself—was the first man to sweep through their guns. Can’t you see it, Raina; our gallant splendid Bulgarians with their swords and eyes flashing, thundering down like an avalanche and scattering the wretched Servian dandies like chaff.

Raina is spellbound by this account, and very relieved that Sergius, who has courted her for some time, has emerged as a great military leader. To her, the battle proved that Sergius was "just as noble as he looks." The Serbian soldier, later revealed to be Bluntschli, seeks shelter in her room following the battle. He reveals to her that the exploits of Sergius were actually foolish, and only succeeded because of the ineptitude of the Serbian army. They had been sent the "wrong cartridges" by the army. Sergius was "charging windmills," thinking that he had "done the greatest thing," but in reality he had just been lucky. He was spared death by an absurd incident that encapsulates the futility of war. The soldier himself has no heart to kill anybody, and in fact carries chocolates in his cartridge box.

Later, it emerges that Sergius's exploits have not advanced him in the ranks of the army. Though his cavalry charge was successful during the battle, it was not in line with conventional military tactics. Other officers, who had behaved "by the book," have been promoted. This happened even though they, unlike Sergius, failed in battle:

I [Sergius] won the battle the wrong way when our worthy Russian generals were losing it the right way. That upset their plans, and wounded their self-esteem. Two of their colonels got their regiments driven back on the correct principles of scientific warfare. Two major-generals got killed strictly according to military etiquette.

Shaw uses this entire incident to satirize both war and the tendency to lionize heroes of war. He portrays war itself as a tragic farce. Its heroes in Arms and the Man are fools. Not only does he not romanticize war, but he mocks those who insist on doing so. In other words, he deliberately satirizes the romanticization of war.

Shaw does not romanticize war in Arms and the Man. The play only appears appears to do so in order to satirize (poke fun at) the concept of war as romantic and heroic.

In the play, the Serbian Bluntschli is a pragmatic mercenary who tells it like it is. He is pitted as a love rival for Raina against the romantic Bulgarian war hero Sergius. Raina, full of romantic notions about war and heroism, is at first appalled when Bluntschli appears in her bedroom. He has deserted from the Serbian army and needs a place to hide. He tells her he carries chocolate bullets so as not to have to kill and challenges her idea that war is glorious.

Sergius proves to be a hypocrite. He might pose as the dashing war leader but as Bluntschli points out, his side only wins the battle because it is slightly less grossly incompetent than the other side. Sergius pretends to be in love with Raina, but, in fact, is using her as a cover to have an affair with her servant, Louka, the woman he truly loves. Finally, though he is not in love with Raina, Sergius feels compelled to try to live up to cardboard notions of heroism by challenging Bluntschli to a duel when Sergius realizes he is a romanic rival.

Shaw uses light-hearted comedy to point out the absurdity of war and the foolishness of romanticizing violence.

The main aim of George Bernard Shaw in his play Arms and the Man is to debunk the romantic image of war; as a playwright, Shaw deromanticizes war by mocking or undermining characters who have the unrealistic view that war is glamorous.

While Shaw himself does not consider war romantic, several of the characters in the play do start out with that position, although the events of the play and Captain Bluntschli's arguments eventually move both the characters and the audience to a more realistic view. 

Raina originally has a glamorous ideal of war based on a combination of epic and romantic poetry. She projects this ideal onto Sergius, who himself is caught up in the problem of trying to live up to the mythos of the war hero. 

The difference between the practical approach to war of mercenaries and the romanticism of amateurs is seen in Bluntschli's description of Sergius' charge:

He did it like an operatic tenor—a regular handsome fellow, with flashing eyes and lovely moustache, shouting a war-cry and charging like Don Quixote at the windmills. We nearly burst with laughter at him; ...

Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw is set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885. In the opening scene, we discover Raina, the female romantic lead of the play, discussing her fiancé, Sergius, who is a soldier fighting in the war. Her views of both Sergius and the war are, as she admits, based on opera, Byron, and Pushkin, works of art rather than the actual reality of fighting. Even before the entrance of Captain Bluntschli, she displays a degree of doubt about whether her ideals are really just products of her own imagination.

The satiric element is mainly provided by situational irony and the comments of Captain Bluntschli, the pragmatic Swiss mercenary who shows that, indeed, the romantic imagery of epic tales, when applied to the actual conduct of a real war, is just silly. While Raina finds the idea of a cavalry charge thrilling, the professional soldier sees riding horses into a machine gun nest as simply absurd and debunks the idea of the man leading a cavalry charge as brave by suggesting that he is in the front because his horse is running away with him, making him an incompetent rider.

The contrast between the reality of war and the romantic image of it is paralleled by a similar duality in the portrait of love, where Raina's infatuation with Sergius is shown to be as little grounded in reality as her image of him as a warrior. It is this dual incongruity, highlighted by the blunt speaking of Captain Bluntschli, that is the basis of the satire.

In Act 1 of Arms and the Man, the subject of war is mainly portrayed through the perspectives of Raina and Captain Bluntschli.

While Raina is enthralled with the idealized notion of the war hero, Captain Bluntschli is more honest about the realities of war. At the beginning of Act 1, Raina is ecstatic with the news that her fiance, Sergius Saranoff, has distinguished himself as the hero of the hour. He has supposedly defied the Russian commanders and led an independent Bulgarian charge against their collective Serbian enemies. Sergius is everything Raina worships in a war hero: he is good-looking, wealthy, well-pedigreed, chivalrous, and fashionably brave. Although she initially doubts his warrior ethos, lamenting that she reads too much Pushkin and Byron, this fantastic news of her fiancé's courage bolsters her spirits.

On the other hand, Captain Bluntschli is disturbingly honest. He starts to divest Raina of her preconceived notions about soldiers almost immediately, telling her that "nine soldiers out of ten are born fools." The captain is a cynic; he is a professional Swedish soldier-for-hire who only joins the Serbian side because it is nearer to his homeland. He eats the sweets Raina offers him with an almost child-like glee and grateful appreciation. Spontaneously, he admits to Raina that he has been under fire for three days and that he is as nervous as a mouse. Ever the realist, he then proceeds to divest Raina of her perceptions regarding her fiancé's war bravery.

It turns out that Sergius Saranoff had actually led a cavalry charge against an enemy arrayed with an impressive battery of machine guns. If it hadn't been for the fact that Captain Bluntschli's side had blundered by equipping the Serbians with the wrong cartridges, Sergius might not have lived to boast about his comically ill-conceived charge. Captain Bluntschli is extremely amused when he discovers that Sergius is Raina's fiancé; with the air of an experienced soldier, he reminds Raina that the older soldiers often carry food, while the younger soldiers (their heads filled with idealistic notions of the glories of battle) often pack just ammunition and cartridges.

Captain Bluntschli also betrays his humanity when, at the end of Act 1, he sinks onto Raina's bed into an exhausted sleep. War is hard, exhausting work, its reality far from the romantic portrayals of battlefield glory and valor.

Arms and the Man is subtitled an "Anti-Romantic Comedy" for a reason. Shaw is out to debunk romantic notions about warfare and love: hence, "arms" in the title is an allusion to The Aeneid anda pun on "arms" as both weapons of warfare and "weapons" of love.

Sergius and Raina have a false, romantic idea of love. They do not really love each other, but they do love the idea of being in love with each other. They are from the same social class and each is playing out a role about love that society has taught them is appropriate. Though Raina has doubts about her romantic ideals at the beginning of the play, idly wondering if they come from Byron and Pushkin rather than real life, she enters into the fairytale fantasy of being in love with her prince in shining armor. She wants to cast Sergius as a hero who will protect her. Sergius also wants to be the strong protector of Raina, but, in reality, he is attracted to her maid, Loucka. 

Bluntschli debunks Raina's romantic ideas about war and love. She has to get over these false beliefs in order to realize that it is the hardheaded and, as his name implies, blunt Bluntschli that she really loves. When she does, the play can have the happy ending that defines it as a comedy. 

I think that one way in which Shaw's work can be linked to the concept of love and war is in the way in which Shaw suggests that there is an excessive Romanticism intrinsic to each.  Shaw writes his work with the idea that social convention and norms dictate an automatic Romanticizing of love and war, without a real questioning as to why these are the way they are.  The love that Raina and Sergius share is one that appears to be true on the surface.  To all who look, it is a love that is sincere.  Yet, there is an emptiness there, something that reflects an expectation of Romanticism.  This same type of love that only exists at a surface level and is not substantive can be seen in the love of war.  The symbolic action that Bluntschii does not carry bullets, but chocolate is reflective of the hollow reverence that war commands. Shaw criticizes the social expectation of war that sees it as glorious and honorable, something that is filled with valor, as opposed to examining it for the act of savage brutality.  It is here where I think that Shaw is able to use his work to thematically develop the Romanticism intrinsic to love and war.  This social condition is one in which Shaw is calling out for change.