n an atmosphere of military
melodrama; the dashing officer of cavalry going off to death in an
attitude, the lovely heroine left in tearful rapture; the brass band,
the noise of guns and the red fire. Into all this enters Bluntschli, the
little sturdy crop-haired Swiss professional soldier, a man without a
country but with a trade. He tells the army-adoring heroine frankly that
she is a humbug; and she, after a moment's reflection, appears to agree
with him. The play is like nearly all Shaw's plays, the dialogue of a
conversion. By the end of it the young lady has lost all her military
illusions and admires this mercenary soldier not because he faces guns,
but because he faces facts.

This was a fitting entrance for Shaw to his didactic drama; because the
commonplace courage which he respects in Bluntschli was the one virtue
which he was destined to praise throughout. We can best see how the play
symbolises and summarises Bernard Shaw if we compare it with some other
attack by modern humanitarians upon war. Shaw has many of the actual
opinions of Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy he tells men, with coarse innocence,
that romantic war is only butchery and that romantic love is only lust.
But Tolstoy objects to these things because they are real; he really
wishes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to them in so far as they are
ideal; that is in so far as they are idealised. Shaw objects not so much
to war as to the attractiveness of war. He does not so much dislike love
as the love of love. Before the temple of Mars, Tolstoy stands and
thunders, "There shall be no wars"; Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, "Wars
if you must; but for God's sake, not war songs." Before the temple of
Venus, Tolstoy cries terribly, "Come out of it!"; Shaw is quite content
to say, "Do not be taken in by it." Tolstoy seems really to propose that
high passion and patriotic valour should be destroyed. Shaw is more
moderate; and only asks that they should be desecrated. Upon this note,
both about sex and conflict, he was destined to dwell through much of
his work with the most wonderful variations of witty adventure and
intellectual surprise. It may be doubted perhaps whether this realism in
love and war is quite so sensible as it looks. _Securus judicat orbis
terrarum_; the world is wiser than the moderns. The world has kept
sentimentalities simply because they are the most practical things in
the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a