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.
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. (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. In contrast, Captain Bluntschli's actions in Raina's bedroom strike us, at first, as being the actions of a coward. 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. 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. 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." It is not, however, an anti-war play instead, it is a satire on those attitudes which would glorify war. 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.
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