In the following excerpt from Act 1, Bluntschli explains how to distinguish a young soldier from an older soldier. The difference has much to do with awareness: the older soldiers are conscious of the dehumanization that situates them as mere objects to be used in the pursuit of military victory. Shaw cements this connection through metaphor:
MAN: You can tell the young ones by their wildness and their slashing. The old ones come bunched up under the number one guard: they know that they are mere projectiles, and that it’s no use trying to fight.
Through the above quotation, Shaw provides incisive commentary on the inhumanity of warfare, likening soldiers to "projectiles"—mere tools to be used in the service of their commanders and governments, rather than individuals with autonomy. The older soldiers, Bluntschli claims, are aware of the fact that they are being used. Younger soldiers are not.
These younger soldiers charge ahead with their "wildness and [...] slashing," not yet disillusioned with the "glory of war" myth fed to them as propaganda. This theme, of the exploitation of young people during wartime, would later become a prominent topic of discourse amongst WWI-era writers. Famed poet Wilfred Owen would even wrote a poem entitled "Arms and the Boy," which took inspiration both from Shaw's play title and from his satirical anti-war content. In this way, Arms and the Man thematically and structurally anticipated much of the literature that would come out of the first world war.
