Mother Courage and Her Children Summary ( acknow: Gradesaver)
The play is set in Europe during the Thirty Years' War.
Mother Courage, a canteen woman, pulls her cart with her three children (
Eilif,
Kattrin, and
Swiss Cheese) in the wake of the army, trading with the soldiers and attempting to make profit from the war.
We are first introduced to a
Recruiting Officer and a
Sergeant,
who complain about the difficulty of recruiting soldiers for the war.
Mother Courage's cart is pulled on and, distracting her with the promise
of a transaction, the Recruiting Officer leads Eilif off. One of her
children is now gone.
Two years later, we find Mother Courage haggling with the General's
Cook
over a capon. On the other side of the stage, Eilif is praised by the
General for heroically slaughtering some peasants and stealing their
cattle. Eilif sings "The Song of the Girl and the Soldier," and his
mother joins in. She then berates him for risking his life so stupidly.
Three years later, Swiss Cheese has taken a job as the regiment's paymaster.
Yvette Pottier,
the camp prostitute, sings "The Song of Fraternization" to warn Kattrin
about the horrors of a relationship with a soldier. The Cook and the
Chaplain
arrive to greet Mother Courage with a message from Eilif, and there is
suddenly a Catholic attack. The Chaplain discards his robes, and Swiss
Cheese hides the regiment's paybox.
Later the same evening, Swiss
Cheese is followed when he attempts to return the paybox to his General
but is captured. Mother Courage mortgages her cart to Yvette and tries
to bargain with the soldiers using the money--but she bargains for too
long, and Swiss Cheese is shot. Mother Courage denies his body when it
is brought to her to be identified, so it is thrown into a pit.
The
next scene finds Mother Courage waiting to complain outside the
Captain's tent. She sings the "Song of the Great Capitulation" to a
young soldier who also has come to complain to the Captain. The song,
which has the moral "everyone gives in sooner or later," leads to the
soldier's storming out, and Courage herself ends up deciding that she
doesn't want to complain.
On the day of the funeral of General
Tilly, Mother Courage undertakes a stock check, and she talks at length
with the Chaplain about whether or not the war will continue. He
convinces her that it will, so she decides to invest in more stock for
her cart. The Chaplain suggests that Mother Courage could marry him, but
he is rejected. Kattrin appears and returns to her mother, severely
disfigured, having collected some merchandise. Mother Courage thus
curses the war.
In the following brief scene, Courage sings a song that praises the war as a good provider. Business is good for now.
Two
peasants wake up Mother Courage, trying to sell her some bedding,
shortly before the news breaks that peace has broken out. The Cook
returns, unpaid by the regiment, and he instigates an argument between
Mother Courage and the Chaplain. Yvette makes her second appearance, now
a rich widow, much older and fatter, and reveals that the Cook was once
her lover. Mother Courage leaves for the town, and Eilif is dragged
along by soldiers. Again he has slaughtered some peasants and stolen
their cattle, but it is now peacetime. He is executed for it, but his
mother never finds out. She returns with the news that the war is back
on again, and she now returns to business with the Cook in tow.
The
seventeenth year of the war finds the world in a bleak condition, with
nothing to trade and nothing to eat. The Cook inherits an inn in Utrecht
and invites Mother Courage to run it with him, but he refuses to take
Kattrin. Mother Courage is forced to turn him down, so the two go their
separate ways. Pulling the wagon by themselves, Mother Courage and
Kattrin hear an anonymous voice singing about the pleasure of having
plenty.
The Catholics are besieging the Protestant town of Halle,
and Mother Courage is away in the town, trading. Sleeping outside a
peasant family's house, Kattrin is woken by their search party, who take
one of the peasants with them as a guide. The peasant couple prays for
the safety of those in the town, but Kattrin, unseen, gets a drum from
the cart and climbs onto the roof. She beats the drum to try to awake
the townspeople so that the siege can be anticipated. The soldiers
return and shoot her, but before she dies, she is successful in
awakening the town.
The next morning, Mother Courage sings a
lullaby over her daughter's corpse, pays the peasants to bury her, and
harnesses herself, alone, to the cart. The cart rolls back into action,
but it is easier to pull now, since there is so little left in it to
sell.
