A look at What Price Glory? and Journey's End and the new spirit that created these dramas.
"When R.C. Sheriff, nearly ten years after the Armistice, sat down to write an easy play for the amateurs of his boat club, he seems to have had no fixed notion as to what a play ought to be. The script of Journey's End shows a complete absence of strain..."
Click here to read an additional article concerning Journeys End. The attached article is a 1926 review of Ford Madox Ford's (1873 - 1939) novel, No More Parades, his second in a series of four related novels concerning the Great War. Billed as "the most highly praised novel of the year", the reviewer lapses into superlatives and exults: "Not since Three Soldiers has a novel of the war made such an impression on reviewers as Ford Madox Ford's No More Parades... All our 'intellectuals' are reading it...our young intellectual novelists will be heavily influenced by it or will attempt to imitate a whole-cloth imitation of it."
Ford was a veteran of the war who served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers; the article is illustrated with a black and white photo of the author standing shoulder to shoulder with Ezra Pound and James Joyce.
Attached is an account by a learned traveler who journeyed to that one piece of ground on the isle of Skyros that will forever be England - the grave of the English poet Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915). The literati who wrote the attached article went to great lengths imparting the significance of Skyros throughout all antiquity and it's meaning to the world of letters - credited only as "S. Casson", he informed his readers that he arrived on the island five years after the 1915 internment in order to erect the headstone that is currently in place, describing the shepherds and other assorted rustics in some detail while alluding tirelessly to the works of Homer.
The New York Times war correspondent Arthur Ruhl (1876 - 1935) reviewed a book that would later be seen as a classic piece of World War One fiction: Company K
by William March (born William Edward Campbell 1893 – 1954). Awarded both the French Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Cross, March gained an understanding of war and the frailties of human character as a member of the Fifth Marines fighting at Belleau Wood and participating in the big push during the San-Mihiel Offensive: "The outstanding virtues of William March's work are those of complete absence of sentimentality and routine romanticism, of a dramatic gift constantly heightened and sharpened by eloquence of understatement."
This book review was published in an American magazine shortly after President Wilson and the U.S. Congress declared war on the Germany. The book in question, The battle of the Somme, was written by Philip Gibbs (1877 - 1962). Highly respected among his peers and the reading public, Gibbs was knighted for his efforts at the war's end but soon he let the world know what he really thought of the war and, in particular, his feelings concerning General Douglas Haig.
Gibbs wrote a number of books that were critical of war, click here to read a review of More That Must Be Told (1921). Robert Littell reviewed the first New York production of Journey's End by former infantry officer, R.C. Sherriff (1896 – 1975: 9th East Surrey Regiment, 1915 - 1918). We have also included a paragraph from a British critic named W.A. Darlington who had once fought in the trenches and approaches the drama from the angle of a veteran:
Click here if you would like to read another article about the WW I play Journey's End. | 
