War Bunk
The novel of Journey’s End was, according to the 1930 Publisher and Bookseller, ‘easily the most popular book throughout the year.’ It was co-written by Sherriff and Vernon Bartlett.46 The novel was immediately lumped with other books that exposed the war. The so-called ‘war books’ controversy referred to an outpouring of fiction during 1928 – 1930 in which the war was massively debunked. It was a sensational period. The top books were Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon, Her Privates We by Frederic Manning and Good-bye to All That by Robert Graves.
They are none of them quite as anti-war as was made out. But they reflected a deep disenchantment (the watch word for the movement) and they all took pains to highlight the cock-ups, the pettiness, the fear. Literary experts have never really explained why 1929 was such a flowering. But it was certainly coloured by a massive disappointment with a country that, ten years after the war was broke, depressed and far from being a land fit for heroes. It was a highly readable genre. It even started to become cannibalistic. The author of the anonymous memoir War Is War, Alfred Burrage, admitted to having seen Journey’s End nine times. As with Phantom of the Opera today, a portion of Journey’s End’s profits can be ascribed to repeat business from customers who were addicted.
Sherriff was no war debunker. His play was seen as pacifist partly because it belonged to an era of peace obsession. In 1926 there was a great anti-war rally at the Royal Albert Hall. The independent Labour party issued a pamphlet How To End War and a large number of peace organisations had sprung up.
But the play really acquired its peace credentials through association with its great rival, the German novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The two works were huge cultural events – global crazes in fact – and at exactly the same time. All Quiet was about nineteen-year-old Paul Baumer and a group of five friends who go off to war on a tide of civilian fervour and patriotic duty only to experience the horrors and pointless battles of the front. The enemy turns out not to be the soldiers in the opposing trench but war itself.
The similarities between the two authors’ careers, is uncanny. Remarque, two years younger than Sherriff, was wounded by shrapnel and invalided out of the war just two days before him. London caught Journey’s End fever in January 1929. Ten days after it opened Germany greeted the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front with the same clamour. The book sold 20,000 copies a day and notched up a million sales by the end of the year. All Quiet, like Journey’s End, was translated into every European language. Remarque was asked to translate Journey’s End for the German stage. Sherriff was asked to write the English screenplay for All Quiet. Both refused for very different reasons. Remarque admired the play but couldn’t face any more war or any more controversy. Sherriff refused because he had promised his mother he’d get back home from New York to go over wallpaper choices for the new house. The two men never met, though Sherriff would eventually work on the screenplay for The Road Back, the butchered film sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front.
All Quiet’s reputation survives partly because it became a masterpiece of American cinema. Directed by Lewis Milestone with a screenplay co-written by George Abbott (later of Pajama Game fame), it won Best Picture Oscar for 1930 and made a star out of Lew Ayres as Baumer. The battle scenes have never been bettered. It was the Saving Private Ryan of its day. During a French charge the soldiers fall in breaking waves, the German trench finally being overrun where the men fight hand-to-hand with entrenching tools. It’s savage, gritty, epic, and even eighty years on, a convincing account of what it must have been like. But the real breakthrough was to depict the evil Hun as a terrified teenager.
Journey’s End’s chin was elevated slightly more nobly. It had a vein of whimsy and the language is more decorous. In that sense it is totally unrealistic despite its reputation for realism. Everyone finishes sentences, which are mostly grammatical unless a Cockney servant is talking. No one swears except for the odd ‘bloody’. Swearing was of course a huge fact of life in the trenches among all ranks. One of the best English novels of the war is Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We (its title taken from a rude pun in Hamlet) and it contains the real Anglo-Saxon of the trenches. The bad language meant that Manning’s novel was riddled with asterisks until the 1970s. It was a problem for all war writers who wanted to be true to what they heard in the field. Norman Mailer’s compromise in his war book The Naked and the Dead (1948) was to have the soldiers use an invented naughty word ‘fug’. It backfired. When the wit Dorothy Parker met him she said: ‘so you’re the guy who can’t spell “fuck.”’
Sherriff never quoted the swearing he heard in the trenches. He couldn’t have even if he had wanted to: the stage censor wouldn’t have allowed it. But what he does do so cleverly is to weave an emotional reality into the text that is so true it doesn’t matter that the language is cleaned up and the tragedy softened with pathos. It is partly the atmosphere of euphemism that gives the play its grip.
Even so, Journey’s End did cause a moral outcry. As Sherriff explained in Cambridge at a League of Nations talk in 1930, he met with an upsurge of complaint soon after the great reviews. He was getting fed up, he said, of letters complaining that an officer in his play dropped his aitches or drank too much. ‘One could hardly open The Times without reading a letter of criticism from a retired brigadier-general in Cheltenham’ he said, claiming it was always brigadier-generals who complained loudest. That was not strictly true – his highest-ranking and loudest critic was the superbly moustached Field Marshal Sir George Milne who gave an interview to the Star newspaper.47 Under the headline ‘Tommy Is Not A Beast’ the stand-first read: ‘Where Journey’s End Is Wrong.’ After grudgingly admitting it was a good play, Milne opened fire. ‘No young officer would have been treated in the way Lieutenant Hibbert was treated in that. Someone would have said to a fellow like that in the war, ‘Look here, my boy, you had better go down the line for a bit for a rest.’ No commanding officer would have kept a neurotic in the front line for the sake of his own reputation. And no soldiers would have sat down to a feast in a dugout after a raid in which their comrades have been killed. That is not English and would never have happened. That is why I dislike Journey’s End and loathe all these war books.’ Milne lambasted all those who depicted the soldiers as ‘rotters and drunken blackguards’. Who, he wanted to know, was reading all this stuff? ‘Only the young men and women who did not go to war. And all it is doing for them is to make their minds dirty – and they are already dirty enough.’
H. T. W. Bousfield suggested a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Ideals in a move against the debased values of Journey’s End – ‘the worst exhibition of bad taste this century has ever seen’.48 Mussolini was to be congratulated in banning it in Italy and for spotting that the play’s conclusion was that ‘there was no such thing as heroism.’
In a 1930 profile in Good Housekeeping, The Observer critic and playwright St. John Ervine, who lost a leg in the war fighting with the Dublin Fusiliers, recalled that he had met Sherriff on board ship while crossing the Atlantic and that he struck him as decent. ‘I instantly liked him. His unaffected boyish manner was very attractive... Mr Sherriff to me, is almost the embodied spirit of all subalterns. He is what we mean when we talk of the gallant lads who went out to the War and never came back from it. I cannot think of any person who more closely typifies the subaltern than Mr Sherriff does.’ Except that Sherriff didn’t drink much.
Most officers drank heavily. Of course they did. Ervine went on to say, in the same piece, how no one got used to the war in a paragraph that Sherriff might have written himself. ‘The longer one served on the front, the worst one felt the strain...that young officers, nerve-racked and frightened, were more terrified of showing funk before their men than they were of meeting Germans and that to pull themselves together, they took a tot, then two tots, then several tots, to keep up their courage; that in the time of intense strain, the whisky bottle gave comfort to men who had a continuous rendez-vous with death; and that in the first shock of losing comrades, men shed tears freely and easily.’
Whisky is the cause of a long discussion very early in the play. Hardy says to Osborne: ‘the last time we were resting out at Valennes he [Stanhope] came to supper with us and drank a whole bottle in one hour fourteen minutes – we timed him.’ (Act I) Stanhope is described as a ‘freak’ for his consumption. But it was not that unusual. When Stanhope says ‘If I went up those steps into the front line – without being doped with whisky – I’d go mad with fright’, he spoke for just about every officer in the frontline. When a society hostess lambasted Noël Coward about Journey’s End, saying it was a vile libel on the army and that officers didn’t drink, Coward merely turned to his friend Earl Amherst, who had been an officer in the trenches, and asked what he thought. ‘Never drew a sober breath,’ said the earl.
But despite the outbursts and the depiction of alcoholism, swearing and funk, the play was at heart deeply acceptable. Unlike All Quiet, it didn’t decry militarism. Sherriff didn’t really have a pacifist bone in his body. His story simply married up a tale of sporting hero-worship, one that had been doing the rounds in British culture for a few decades, with a realistic trench setting. It worked like a dream. It rapidly became a national possession and was deemed suitable to be seen by George V (monarch and playwright chatted at the interval), a sure sign it contained nothing to frighten the horses. Winston Churchill loved it. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he invited Sherriff to 11 Downing Street. Churchill had been an officer in the trenches and knew all about the 9/East Surrey. He watched the play very carefully and before their meeting he fired off some probing questions by letter – eg. why did Stanhope write a note and send it down the line to Battalion HQ? Did it contain Osborne’s ring and letters for safekeeping? Why did the Sergeant-Major think it odd that Mr Raleigh when wounded should be brought into the company’s dugout? Sherriff in his autobiography admits he didn’t really know the answers to the Chancellor’s questions.49
The Establishment embraced the play. It was a piece of theatre that unified the public in an agreed memory of what the war was like. Audiences went home gratefully enlightened, informed and deeply moved. It celebrated traditional values of honour and loyalty and it was consoling, which later earned it powerful enemies. St. John Ervine’s one criticism was of the play’s immaturity of thought and ‘foolish worship of the public school that has been excessively prevalent in the country for too long a time’.50 Sherriff’s play was indeed an extension of the public school life that Rebecca West complained about. Raleigh worships Stanhope, describing him as ‘skipper of rugger at Barford, and kept wicket for the Eleven. A jolly good bat, too!’ He is delighted when he discovers that Osborne once played rugby for the Harlequins and on one sacred occasion for England. Before the raid it is Raleigh who says ‘how topping if we both get MC!’ Raleigh is but a whisker away from Blackadder’s Lieutenant the Honourable George Colthurst St. Barleigh who wants to give ‘Harry Hun a darn good British style thrashing, six of the best, trousers down.’ Edward Petherbridge played Osborne in a 1988 TV version of the play shown on BBC2 (with Jeremy Northam as Stanhope) and gave a flicker of a smile at Raleigh’s gushing school banter. It’s a lovely silent comment on Raleigh’s Sherriff-like naivety.
Sherriff didn’t have a problem with depicting the war – or bits of it – as a school yarn albeit one soured by alcohol and death. But the play’s youthfulness may explain why it has fared so badly at the hands of literary historians. You hardly ever read a good word about the play in books about the literature of the period. War Poetry expert Bernard Bergonzi hated it. He wrote ‘the inert clichés of Sherriff’s final stage direction emphasize the kind of predictable experience we have just passed through: “very faintly comes the rattle of machine guns and the fevered spatter of rifle fire.”’51
Two landmark surveys of First World War literature are by American scholars, both of them decorated soldiers of World War Two. Paul Fussell wrote the classic The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Samuel Hynes A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (1990). Fussell’s book is a haunting scholastic delve into the literary riches of the war (Les Misérables lyricist Herbert Kretzmer chose it as his book on Desert Island Discs) but it utterly dismisses Journey’s End and cites its importance only in giving Joseph Heller an idea for a similar death scene in Catch-22.
Hynes is much ruder and equally brief. He thought it recycled a bunch of trench stereotypes – the coward, the officer who drinks to forget, the naïve schoolboy-officer etc. What he most disliked was the analogy between the world of the trenches and the world of the British public schools. ‘There is the same idolizing, the same adolescent emotionalism, the same team spirit and self-sacrifice, the same hovering note of homosexuality. That model of behaviour – so English, so male, and so anachronistic – was killed on the Western Front. In Sherriff’s play it was resurrected and sentimentalised.’52
He is right about the sentimentality. It is the play’s famous weakness. But the front-line dugout was a curiously sentimental place. As for the sporting gentleman, he was certainly not killed off on the Western Front. World War Two had loads of nonchalant British POWs wearing cricket sweaters who treated escape as a team sport. The spirit of heroism, pluck and understatement in the trenches lived on in films, books and in reality. It is even possible that the fighter pilots in 1940 acquired some of their fondness for understatement from Journey’s End.
Sherriff didn’t invent the schoolboy spirit he found out there in France. He simply drew on it. If you weren’t a public school boy officer you did your level best to behave like one, as Sherriff did. As for the ‘hovering note of homosexuality’, Sherriff’s was crush-prone and it shows in the play. Raleigh – with his aristocratic name and unsullied youth – is arguably one of the ‘golden lads’ that a lot of dubious trench poetry is taken with. You could also say that the drunken Stanhope, when he asks Osborne to tuck him up at night and kiss him has something further on his mind. I think to ascribe any sexuality to the play is to miss the point. Sherriff was always thinking of England.
Whatever it was that made it a hit, the 1930 film version proved a death sentence for the London run. Whale was recruited by the independent Tiffany Studios to make his directing debut on it with Gainsborough Studios. George Pearson, the famed British director of the silent era was the supervisor and he wanted Olivier to play Stanhope. But Whale, as director, insisted that Colin Clive go to California and make the picture. Browne agreed provided he took just eight weeks out of the play and not a day more. The deal was that he returned to the show by mid-January 1930. I have been unable to find out who took over his role. But whoever it was, it was a mistake. Clive had become the show’s heart-throb star, the reason for seeing the show and Sherriff knew it: ‘So far as London was concerned, Colin Clive was Journey’s End.’53 He begged Browne not to let him go. Clive went.
The film was well received. Mordaunt Hall reviewing for The New York Times wrote, ‘On the whole Mr. Clive’s performance is magnificent. Even in the close-ups his facial expressions are perfectly in keeping with the mood of the moment.’ Edward C. Stein of The Brooklyn Standard Union thought, ‘His performance of the nerve-wracked, whiskey-soaked, yet thoroughly admirable captain defies superlatives. The part is made to order for him and if you miss seeing his portrayal you are missing one of the finest performances of this or any other season.’
Speaking of the role, Clive in the July 1931 issue of Theatre World modestly said that ‘Stanhope was so beautifully written and effective it almost played itself. Any experienced actor could have walked away with it’. Looking at the film version, you get an idea of Clive’s sense of physical strain, the rasping voice and baleful good looks in his close-ups. But the film feels hammy rather than dramatic, the director Whale perhaps hampered by a loyalty to his own stage production. The movie version never really took off, though within a year Clive would achieve screen stardom in Frankenstein (1931), hysterically shouting ‘it’s ali-ii-i-vvve!’ as his monster (Boris Karloff) twitches on the bench. Osborne – that’s to say George Zucco – also went onto screen fame in a series of lurid shockers, often involving zombies.
Back in London, news of Clive’s temporary departure got around and the box office dipped. Soon the House Full boards were removed from the pavement and the audience shrank. Clive returned to the show but the spell was broken. The audiences slowly withered away and it eventually closed after a run of 593 performances – a record-breaking stint at the time for a straight play. The writer and cast toasted New Year behind the lowered curtain. The dugout must have begun to smell like the real thing.
46 Author and broadcaster, Bartlett interviewed Hitler three times. He was an MP from 1938-1950.
47 Star, 26 March 1930
48 English Review, October 1929
49 R.C.S., No Leading Lady, p.113
50 Good Housekeeping, 1930
51 Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight, p.194
52 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined, p.442
53 R.C.S., No Leading Lady, p.191