Best Defense
Tom’s World War I binge continues: A few lines from the play ‘Journey’s End’
Reading Six Weeks persuaded me to buy R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End, which I’d never read. I liked it especially because it is unique to the circumstances of its war-British class differences, trench warfare, losses by years of attrition. The entire thing takes place in an underground bunker. I doubt that it could be "updated," ...
Reading Six Weeks persuaded me to buy R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End, which I’d never read. I liked it especially because it is unique to the circumstances of its war-British class differences, trench warfare, losses by years of attrition. The entire thing takes place in an underground bunker. I doubt that it could be "updated," for example, into a drama about the Vietnam War. The concerns, the histories, the values of the soldiers involved are just too different. I suspect that when it came out it was a shocker, but now it seems like half the war movies we’ve seen since.
Lines I liked:
Osborne: "Where do the men sleep?"
Hardy: "I don’t know. The sergeant-major sees to that."
—
Osborne: "It rather reminds you of bear-baiting — or cock-fighting — to sit and watch a boy drink himself unconscious."
—
Osborne: "We are, generally, just waiting for something to happen. When anything happens, it happens quickly. Then we just start waiting again."
—
Stanhope: "There’s not a man left who was here when I came." (I suspect he kind of means himself, too — he is physically present, but spiritually with his dead comrades of the previous four years.)
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