Arms and the Man is one of Shaw's earliest plays. It was first produced in London in 1894. It was subsequently published in the volume Plays Pleasant in 1898, and is still most easily found in modern editions of that volume. It is not a difficult play to find – any used bookstore will almost invariably have a copy.

Arms and the Man is quite possibly Shaw's most popular play. In Canada, which produces Shaw more frequently than any other country in the world, it is probably the most common Shaw play to see the stage, with the possible exception of Candida, another play from the Plays Pleasant volume.

The success of Arms and the Man has been consistent right from its first production in 1894. The original staging of the play was so well received that Shaw's reputation as one of the greatest wits in the London drama scene was almost instantly established. Shaw himself, present at the opening performance, was actually disappointed in the response of the audience. It is true that Arms and the Man is a comedy, but it is also about war. The setting of the play is in war-torn Bulgaria, and focuses not only on the romance between the young people of the play, but the atrocities that go on during war times and the ability of people not so very far removed from these atrocities to ignore them completely.

Coming just a few years before the start of the Great War, Shaw's play turned out to be sadly prophetic. When war was declared, young men literally flooded the offices in order to sign up. These men carried with them the same romantic – and wholly inaccurate – ideas of the "glories" of war that Raina and her mother Catherine carry with them at the start of the play.

Over the course of the play, Raina loses this romantic ideal in favour of a far more productive and accurate version that allows her to find true love. Sergius, her betrothed at the start of the play, goes through a similar transformation, realizing that there must be more to himself than the two dimensional ideal of the soldier that young ladies seem to worship.

Unfortunately, Shaw's message was disregarded, and the Great War carried on exactly as he could have predicted. His nation suffered an immense period of disillusionment, as the true nature of war was shown to them – at their very doorstep.

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Synopsis from:  http://mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/aant.htm