AHEAD BY A CENTURY
A candlelit look back at heroism and the hell of war
A century ago, in the spring of 1918, the German army com-menced Operation Michael in Northern France with a barrage on the Allied trenches. Journey's End begins three days before that. The source material is a 1928 play by R.C. Sherriff, who fought in the First World War. It was first filmed in 1930, with a couple of TV movie versions in the 1980s. Director Saul Dibb (The Duch-ess, Suite Francaise), provides a perfectly pitched retelling, cap-turing the look and feel of trench warfare and doing most of his filming by candlelight. Our way into the story is Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), a recruit so green he probably bleeds sap. Newly enlisted, he asks to be posted to the battal-ion of Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin), whom he knew at school and who is now dating his older sister. Stanhope is just a few years older than Raleigh, but time at the front has turned him into a middle-aged alcoholic, barely holding himself together. His second in command, Osborne (Paul Bettany), insists on being called Uncle and functions as the moral centre of the unit. "You'll find him changed I expect," lie says mildly of Stanhope, who then stares at Raleigh as though both of them are ghosts. They may soon be. Fine British actors fill out the cast. Tobey Jones is Mason the cook, carefully referring to the soup as "yellow" and the pro-tein as "meat," or when pressed, "cutlets." The pineapples lie planned for dessert turn out to be apricots. Stephen Graham is Trotter and Tom Sturridge is Hibbert, whose barely concealed terror mirrors what we would no doubt feel if thrown into the hell that was 1918 Amiens. "Sorry about the smell," some-one remarks to Raleigh, noting that the previous French occu-pants of the trench used bodies to shore up its walls. Journey's End is full of such casual horrors. Paradoxically, the film commu-nicates both the futility of war and the need to see it through, once in it. When a daring (read stupid) daylight raid across No Man's Land to snatch a prisoner and gather intel is ordered by the generals, Osborne talks the new recruit through the preparations as though they were going out for a stroll. "The Bosch," he notes mildly (always mildly), are only about as far away as the width of a rugby field. This is where we see the heroism, compassion and gentle humour of the ordinary soldier on brilliant display. Of course, the real tension in the film is the coming attack, which has been rumoured for weeks. From 100 years away, it's a relief to know that the war will be over soon, and a terror to think what will need to happen first.