Major Sergius Saranoff is an officer in the Bulgarian army. Bulgaria at this period was on the margins of Europe, and generally considered somewhat primitive and unsophisticated by Europeans. Sergius is handsome and dashing, and appears to believe in and enact an idealized romantic vision of war and love, although, as we discover later in the play, he himself feels constricted by the role in which the Petkoffs and Bulgarian society have placed him. He belongs by birth to the Bulgarian aristocracy.
Captain Bluntschli is a Swiss mercenary from a bourgeois family rather than an aristocratic one. He is older than Sergius and has a pragmatic view of war as a profession rather than as a patriotic calling. He has no particular commitment to Serbia or Bulgaria and is involved in the war as a job, and thus more concerned with his personal survival than with anything else. He is less handsome than Sergius. He is cosmopolitan where Sergius is provincial. At heart, though, Captain Bluntschli is a romantic in matters of the heart and falls in love with Raina.
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