Arms and the Man: Title

As Bernard Shaw himself tells us, the title of the play, “Arms and the Man”, has been taken from Dryden’s translation of the opening lines of the Roman poet; Virgil’s Aeneid. The opening lines of Dryden’s translation run as follows:

Arms and the Man I sing, who forced by fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate.

and this suggested to Bernard Shaw the title of his play, and his choice has proved to be a happy one.

The phrase used by the Roman epic is Arms. Virumque, and Chesterton rightly points out that for Virgil it is a mounting and ascending phrase. But Bernard Shaw reverses the process and changes the significance of the phrase. The technical originality of the play is that it is built not on pathos, but on bathos, and this technical peculiarity is indicated by the title itself.

Virgil’s Aeneid is an epic of war and adventure. It narrates the heroic deeds of the Greek hero, Aeneas. Aeneas took part in the war of Troy. After Troy was burnt, he left the city with his old father, wife and children. After facing numerous difficulties and dangers, he reached Italy, and conquered it. Thus Virgil in his epic sings of the glory of war and heroic valour. The phrase Arms Virumque in Virgil is a heroic expression which puts us in mind of the stir and thrill of war and heroic exploits of great warriors. War is glorified and man is shown to be a creature of heroic proportions. Aenaes is exalted as a great hero, he uses arms with heroic valour and in the end emerges triumphant, towering head and shoulders both above his enemies and his associates. There is a mounting upward movement with the hero gaining in stature with each successive deed of valour he performs. Thus men, as well as, the arms which he uses are both extolled.

In the play, Bernard Shaw has reversed the process; Virgil’s phrase receives an ironic treatment at the hands of the dramatist. He does not glorify war or the profession of a soldier; rather he strips them of their romantic glamour. No doubt the play opens with a tale of heroism and military alarms. Catherine tells Raina of the heroic cavalry charge of the, betrothed Sergius and the young lady is in raptures.

Of course, they just cut us to bits. And there was Con Quixote flourishing like a drum major,
thinking he’d done the cleverest thing ever known, whereas he ought to be courtmartialled
for it. Of all the fools ever let loose on a field of battle, that man must be the very maddest.
He and his regiment simply committed suicide – only the pistol missed fire.

He is the hero of the hour. Then there is the fugitive from the field of war, with soldier in arms close at his heels. He too, has, his own arms, a pistol and later on he uses Raina’s cloak as a shield. There is the search in Raina’s room by the brave soldiers of the Bulgarian army. The entire atmosphere resounds with war cries and the clang of arms.

The action evolves out of the background of war and deals with men in arms. But very soon, as the action develops, the hollowness and sham of war is exposed and the romantic idealization of war is given a shattering blow. It is known that soldiering is a “coward’s art of attacking you enemy when he is at a disadvantage”.

Soldering, my dear madam, is the cowards’ art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong,
and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting.
Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

That most soldiers are born fool is convincingly proved by the fact that the Bulgarian officer, who leads the search, fails to notice the revolver which has been staring him in the face all the time.

Nine soldiers out of ten are born fools.

Thus Shaw, contrary to Virgil, shows that the glory of war and the heroism of soldier are mere illusions. 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 shown to be a mere fool, a man of clay, easily entrapped into marriage by a mere servant girl. The supremacy not of the arms or of heroic valour, but of the essential humanity of man is asserted. Man is essentially a creature of instincts and impulses, and his basic instinct is one of self-preservation. A soldier’s staple fare is not arms of heroism, but food, and his chief concern is not military glory, but away from the battlefield, and instead of cartridges he carries chocolates to the front. Man is not at all heroic, but a pathetic creature of Bluntschli and then is nervous and frightened like a mouse. It is danger alone which can rouse him to action.

Thus the title of the play Arms and the Man is a suitable one. It is indicative of the dramatist’s satiric intention of exposing the illusion regarding both the glory of war and the heroism of soldiers. He 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.