Journey's End (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Luckily” for Sherriff he was invalided out – got a “Blighty one” – at Passchendale, his face embedded with bits of concrete from a shattered German pillbox. And yet the play differs from many post-1914 works of WWI fiction, in that it is not clearly antiwar.

Is this “well-made” three-act drama, set entirely in an officers’ dug-out in the trenches at Saint-Quentin, Aisne, over a four-day period running up to the big Boche offensive of March 21 1918, too sanitised and jingoistic to deserve its classic status? During the Second World War, productions were staged by members of the Royal Natal Carbineers at El Khatatba, Egypt (January 1944); and by British prisoners in Changi Prison, Singapore (February 1943); at Tamarkan, Thailand, a Japanese labour camp on the Burma Railway (July 1943); in Stalag 344, near Lamsdorf, Germany (July 1944); and in Campo P. When the higher commands ask Stanhope how the raid went, it’s clear that they don’t care if men died but if they captured a German who they can milk for information. The luck also rubbed off on Victor Gollancz, for whom the text was a first major publishing coup, selling 175,000 copies. Raleigh can’t believe what the last three years of military service have done to the previously kind and light-hearted Stanhope.Remarkably in the decades since the end of the conflict only one conventional play has evoked that man-made nightmare for its audience and endured: Journey’s End by RC Sherriff, an insurance clerk from Hampton Wick who enlisted in late 1915 aged 19 and lived to tell the tale. William Franklyn stars as paperback hero Sexton Blake, with David Gregory as his assistant Tinker, in the original BBC Radio dramatisations from 1967.

Sherriff, author of Journey's End, the most famous play of the Great War, saw all his frontline service with the 9th Battalion East Surrey Regiment. Because it was broadcast live, and the technology to record television programmes did not exist at the time, no visual records of the production survive other than still photographs.It is, in some respects, the World War One experience we have come to know the most, which is the Officers war. Following rejection by many theatre managements, "Journey's End" was given a single performance by the Incorporated Stage Society, in which Lawrence Olivier took the lead role.

The scene ends with the idealistic Raleigh, who is untouched by the war, stating that it is "frightfully exciting" that he has been picked for the raid. This devastating play may date back to the late twenties, but its anti-aggression sentiments and its powerful spotlight on the futility of war still resonate loudly. That meant his tragic death in the final scene was hard to handle, but I wouldn't have had it any other way.It's also interesting to see how else the characters cope with the war: Stanhope drinks, Trotter eats, Raleigh has a rose-tinted view of everything. In one fear-soaked diary entry he couldn’t even muster complete sentences: “Shell whizzes over… feel sick – breathing comes hard heart beats.

Under a new producer, Maurice Browne, the play soon transferred to the Savoy Theatre where it ran for three weeks starting on 21 January 1929.The spine is faded, and there is tanning to the untrimmed page edges but otherwise this copy is in strong readable condition.