# Arms and the Man — Character guide

> Key figures in Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw.

- [Raina Petkoff](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters/raina_petkoff.md): Raina lives inside her own operatic imagination, adoring Sergius's portrait like a priestess and reading herself to sleep on Byron and Pushkin. When a hunted Swiss soldier climbs through her window, she hides him and lie
- [Captain Bluntschli](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters/captain_bluntschli.md): Bluntschli enters Raina's room as a starving, mud-spattered fugitive with a revolver and no illusions about war. Practical, unromantic, and quietly amused, he punctures her heroic vocabulary while depending on her secrec
- [Sergius Saranoff](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters/sergius_saranoff.md): Sergius is betrothed to Raina and adored by the whole household as the embodiment of Byronic heroism, but he suspects his own glory is theatrical. He chafes against Bluntschli's unglamorous efficiency and drifts toward L
- [Catherine Petkoff](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters/catherine_petkoff.md): Catherine runs the Petkoff home with brisk authority, betting her husband about coats and lecturing her daughter on Bulgarian glory. She is socially ambitious and fiercely protective of appearances, yet practical enough 
- [Major Petkoff](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters/major_petkoff.md): Petkoff returns from the front with military rank he never sought and a comfortable appetite for lunch, newspapers, and his old coat. He is genial, easily managed by Catherine, and cheerfully baffled by Bluntschli's busi
- [Louka](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters/louka.md): Louka serves the Petkoffs with barely concealed insolence, contemptuous of Raina's raptures and of Nicola's contented servility. Ambitious and clear-eyed, she sees Sergius's theatricality for what it is and sets her sigh
- [Nicola](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters/nicola.md): Nicola moves through the Petkoff household as its most competent and least sentimental member, fetching the disputed coat from the blue closet and acting as valet while officers wager over his errand. His engagement to L
- [Paul](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters/paul.md): A soldier or servant briefly mentioned in the household.
- [The Serbians](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters/the_serbians.md): Offstage enemy army in the war between Bulgaria and Serbia.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/arms_and_the_man_se/characters