Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as a "useful corrective to the romantic conception of war," R.C. Sheriff's Journey's End offers a stark glimpse of trench life at the end of World War I. A pen-and-paper classic focusing on British officers at the front, it opens in a dugout in the French trenches. Raleigh, a newly minted eighteen-year-old officer fresh from an English public school, joins the beleaguered company of his friend and cricket hero Stanhope, only to find himself drastically changed. Laurence Olivier played Stanhope in the first performance of Journey's End in 1928; the play was an immediate success on the stage and remains a remarkable anti-war classic.
R. C. Sherriff (1896–1975) joined the army shortly after the outbreak of the First World War and served as a captain in the East Surrey Regiment. After the war, an interest in amateur dramatics led him to write. Despite several rejections from theatre directors, Journey's End was eventually performed by the Incorporated Stage Society, starring Laurence Olivier. The play's great success enabled Sherriff to become a full-time writer, with works such as Badger's Green (1930), St. Helena (1935), and The Long Sunset (1955); he is also known as a screenwriter for films such as The Invisible Man (1933), Goodbye Mr. Chips (1933), and The Dam Busters (1955).
If you enjoyed Journey's End , you might enjoy Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That , available from Penguin Modern Classics. The text offers a relentless tension and respect for human dignity in a world of loss, as Clive Barnes noted: "The impressive tension and appreciation for human decency in a vast world of human loss still evoke emotion."