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I remember back to 1991 when the United States began bombing Iraq in what was then called the Persian Gulf War. (Is it now the first Iraq War?) I could not bear to watch it on television, so I sat on my living-room floor and sobbed and sobbed. I was pregnant with my second daughter, Laura, at the time, and I knew that pregnant mothers like me were suffering in a war that neither of us had any control over. I remember the jingoism and the puffed-up patriotism that allowed people to romanticize war, even in the end of the 20th century. Not long later, hundreds of misguided young men � including NFL football player Pat Tillman � joined the military in droves in a fit of patriotic fervor only to discover that war is always a tragedy and that young men die in old men’s wars.

If that foolish romanticization could happen in the 21st century, how much more was that true in the 19th? Years before Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was sending up the war enthusiasts with this 1894 gem. Silly Raina Petkoff, daughter in the richest, best-connected family, romanticizes war and imagines that her fiancé, Captain Sergius Saranoff, will be a victorious hero, straight out of a Victorian melodrama. However, Raina hears a very different account of the nature of war from an escaping Swiss mercenary on the run from the Bulgarian-Russian forces. Shaw’s take on the real nature of courage will blow you away.