"Journey's End came at psychologically the right moment. The war had been over for 10 years. What plays there had been about it had tended to be heroic and romanticised – the reality was too near and horrific for close contemplation. Journey's End, set in a dug-out in the front line just before a German offensive, was a simple statement of how men lived after four long years of war... They wait in their dug-out, enduring lice, the stench of earth, ordure, corpses and cordite, knowing but never admitting that their chances of survival are minimal. They talk of insensitive generals but never of the political stupidity that led them to be there. They regard the Germans in their dug-outs on the other side of the barbed wire of No-Man's-Land as being as unfortunate as themselves. They yearn for the sight of the New Forest and the Sussex Downs. To that 1929 audience they must have seemed the incarnation of the lost generation."