Journey’s End – R. C. Sherriff, 1928 ★★★★

Where Poppies Blow

War is hell. A hell of a bore, for one thing. Imagine endless days sitting in a trench somewhere while the rain and muck and rats have at you, trying to think of anything to take your mind off the prospect of sudden, violent death. Maybe even getting numb from it after awhile.

World War I had a reputation for that, on account of the long-static lines of the Western Front and the work of writers who survived, men on both sides including R. C. Sherriff, who ten years after getting wounded in combat wrote a play about both the dying and the waiting.

Journey’s End is a remarkable examination of life during wartime, where a simple lesson of war as hell merges into a powerful character study. While wedded to a particular place and time, its insights and economical stagecraft deliver a still-searing emotional journey.

In the final year of World War I, five British officers are assigned a rumbling sector of the Western Front. Company commander Dennis Stanhope is a tough veteran, but after too much combat time, also a self-hating drunk. He must prepare his company for a big German attack while also dealing with a ghost from his own past, a young officer named Raleigh who looked up to Stanhope back in school and can only wonder what became of his old hero now that he is newly under Stanhope’s command.

Raleigh reports to the company, as performed in a recent production. The entire play is set in a small dugout just beyond the front line, the sound of war distant but constant.
Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1091470.Journey_s_End

Stanhope’s romance with Raleigh’s sister before the war complicates matters, as he explains to his second-in-command:

STANHOPE: Oh, for Lord’s sake don’t be a damn fool. You know! You know he’ll write and tell her I reek of whisky all day.

OSBORNE: Why should he? He’s not a –

STANHOPE: Exactly. He’s not a damned little swine who’d deceive his sister. [Act I]

The Jazz Age play sounds familiar themes about the pain of war and the stupidity of sending young men off to die in order to satisfy their superiors’ momentary whims. These themes have been used to death in the years since. You can’t penalize Journey’s End for getting there early, though its originality doesn’t make those themes any fresher.

Journey's End became a movie in 1930, directed by director James Whale and starring Colin Clive as Stanhope (a team reunited in Frankenstein). Whale directed the play's debut on stage with a young unknown named Laurence Olivier in the role of Stanhope.
Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DceQRpKxWdw, where the entire movie can be viewed.

What makes Journey’s End work for me are the things about it that aren’t called out, like the interaction between its characters, believably real and conversational despite the playwright’s observing the classical necessities of an acted drama. The first-act humor is a surprise, and helps us identify and become more invested in the plight of the soldiers. Most notable for me was the pacing, which builds slowly and almost excruciatingly to a gut-twisting climax.

It’s masterful stagecraft: We only have one setting, an officers’ dugout, and a half-dozen or so characters, yet Sherriff spins the most from his spare set and cast. An experienced playwright, Sherriff knew both his subject and his medium, and it shows.

British theatergoers in 1928 also knew the backstory from the opening scene as “A dugout in the British trenches before St Quentin.” St. Quentin was the center of attack for the German army’s final major thrust into France, the Spring Offensive of 1918. Entire British divisions, not to mention over 177,000 soldiers, were destroyed over the course of 15 days. Think of goats tied to stakes, awaiting the lions. Doom hangs over the proceedings:

STANHOPE: Our orders are to stick here. If you’re told to stick where you are you don’t make plans to retire. [Act II, scene 2]

A map of the Western Front as the play opens in late March 1918. The company is located in St. Quentin, France, directly in the middle of Operation Michael, which became the final major German advance of the war (depicted by the shaded bulges).
Image from https://www.forces.net/news/operation-michael-how-germany-tried-win-wwi.

Stanhope’s hopeless predicament suggests the postwar nausea of the Lost Generation, however unlike those Bohemians Sherriff might have been. He flatly rejected an anti-war message to his play, saying his aim was to capture a sense of the life he knew at the front. Yet there is a note of existential despair as Stanhope ponders the freakish good luck of not having imagination, or visualizes a wall of worms behind the revetments of his dugout:

STANHOPE: D’you ever get a sudden feeling that everything’s going farther and farther away – till you’re the only thing in the world – and then the world begins going away – till you’re the only thing in – in the universe – and you struggle to get back – and can’t? [Act II, scene 1]

Balanced against Stanhope is his deputy, Osborne, known as “Uncle,” quietly loyal to Stanhope but, as revealed in the opening scene, concerned about his friend’s grip on life and the bottle.

Trotter is a bit of a glutton and a slacker, his name suggestive of a piggish attitude as we watch him whine at dinner “war’s bad enough with pepper, but war without pepper – it’s – it’s bloody awful!”

In 2017, Journey's End was remade in a film starring Sam Claflin as Stanhope, Paul Bettany as Osborne, and Stephen Graham as Trotter. It takes minor liberties with the source play, and actually manages to be grimmer in tone, yet it's a first-class film and the one to see.
 Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIn0M5iT65c

Hibbert is dodgier still, claiming he has neuralgia – a nerve disorder common among frontline troops in World War I. Stanhope suspects Hibbert is faking it to get out of combat. Like much else in the play, Sherriff is ambiguous about Hibbert’s true situation. If we accept Hibbert shouldn’t be there, what does that say about Stanhope?

Raleigh just wants to prove himself in the eyes of his hero Stanhope, “a jolly good bat,” as he remembers him. It just takes him a while to grasp the distinction between doing so on the rugby field and here:

RALEIGH: It’s – it’s not exactly what I thought. It’s just this – this quiet that seems so funny.

OSBORNE: A hundred yards from here the Germans are sitting in their dugouts, thinking how quiet it is. [Act I]

While there are suggestions of violence and much drama, the predominant emotions one gets from the play are exhaustion and ennui. Even if the soldiers are being put in harm’s way for good reason (the March Offensive would prove the Germans’ last chance for victory in the war, and the extra days bought here with Allied lives ultimately proved Germany’s undoing), you know there is a lot of cold stupidity going on among the commanders, who seem to risk their men’s lives for pointless raids.

Even Stanhope manifests this fatally stubborn mentality, having his soldiers run barbed wire along their flanks to keep them in place when the attack comes, and ruling out any talk of a strategic withdrawal. The higher the stakes become, the more he drinks and grouses at subordinates. An inspiring figure he is not.

Playwright R. C. Sherriff in his Army days. While Journey's End remains his best-known work, Sherriff carved out a successful writing career both in England and Hollywood, less on stage than around it. His writing on 1939's Goodbye Mr. Chips was nominated for an Oscar.
Image from https://fantastic-writers-and-the-great-war.com/war-experiences/r-c-sherriff/.

Confronted by Hibbert, who makes no bones about his wanting to go home, Stanhope first threatens to shoot him before having more success by admitting he often feels the same. Still, his manner of encouragement leaves something to be desired:

STANHOPE: If you went – and left Osborne and Trotter and Raleigh and all those men up there to do your work – could you ever look a man straight in the face again – in all your life! [There is silence again.] You may be wounded. Then you can go home and feel proud – and if you’re killed you – you won’t have to stand this hell any more. [Act II, scene 2]

Stanhope would like nothing more than to be wounded and go home having done his duty by the standards of his time. But Journey’s End is a signpost of a cultural turning, that Stanhope’s stoic standards were absurdly obsolete the time of this play.

Journey’s End is a bleak play but not a dire one; it moves quickly and balances its tension with a kind of reverie that keeps us caring. Rather than focusing on the war and its horrors, it reflects the deadly reality more indirectly as we listen to characters struggle to distract themselves with talk of rockeries and girls. The war it depicts may be over a century behind us, but Journey’s End remains vital.