If Journey’s End didn’t have on-screen titles setting the scene, you’d still know it was in a trench in World War I. The iconic World War I images are all there – muddy narrow pathways, the supports that keep the walls from caving in, the underground rooms, the jumbled and torn barbed wire outside the trench. The accents would tell you the soldiers are British, but you wouldn’t know much else. And that’s how it is for the soldiers. It’s an inexplicable world they’ve been dumped into.
In March 1918, this British unit is getting ready for a German offensive, rumored to be coming in a few days. So, they wait. The Germans, they all say, are just 60 yards away, but you can’t see them. Men peer over the top of the trench with periscopes and all they see is the pockmarked landscape. A couple of times, shots ring out from over there. The sound makes you jump. The film never shows who fires the shots – they come at random from a place that’s invisible.
In the story, a young Lieutenant Raleigh (Asa Butterfield) reports for duty. He’s a cliché of the fresh-faced new soldier who still thinks it’s all romance and heroism. He persuades the weary general – who’s his uncle – to send him to the unit at the front led by a captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin). The captain is considered the very best company commander, and he was an adviser at Raleigh’s boarding school. When Raleigh shows up in Stanhope’s trench, the kid – he looks like he’s 11 – finds a man who can still command but has been so damaged by war that no one from his prewar life would even recognize him.
So, Raleigh enters an absurd, demoralized world. The historian Michael Howard has described the crazy logic of World War I. He writes that to support the Austrians in a conflict with Russia over Serbia, Germany attacked France by marching through neutral Belgium. The war shown in Journey’s End doesn’t even make that much perverse sense, and the men are unmoored from history.
A hand-held camera bouncing around a set as if the filmmakers don’t know what to show, is usually an incoherent disaster. Here it’s just the ticket to describe a place where rationality is an illusion, and no one knows where to look or even what to look for. The trench is claustrophobic, and you can imagine the soldiers yearning to get out, but outside the trench is just deadly wasteland. You go out there, you die, miserably and painfully. There’s nowhere to go, no relief or escape.
Journey’s End doesn’t show how the grunts live in the trench. It centers on Raleigh and a few other officers. They have a cook, who regularly serves up tea and foods he has trouble describing. The cutlet, he says, may be liver, but another officer notices that it’s not shiny like liver, so they settle on just calling it a cutlet – of unknown origin and species.
Orders come for Raleigh to lead a daytime surprise raid over to the German trench to kidnap the first German soldier they see and bring him back for interrogation. It’s an idiotic idea, issued by officers no one ever sees. The men will be hidden by smoke bombs, so the Germans can’t see them. But everyone with a lick of sense knows that the Germans will simply shoot into the pod of smoke out there in the wasteland, and that will be that.
Journey’s End is part of a long tradition of films about the stupidity of World War I, organized by military minds divorced from actuality or reason, and it’s got a particularly affecting view of the plight of the soldier/victims. And, by the way, the Germans did grab those 60 yards of territory, only to lose them back to the Western allies a bit later. In the so-called “spring offensive,” 700, 000 soldiers were killed.
