A 1930 film version was followed by other adaptations, and the play set a high standard for other works dealing with similar themes, and influenced playwrights including Noël Coward.

He considered calling it Suspense or Waiting, but eventually found a title in the closing line of a chapter of an unidentified book, "It was late in the evening when we came at last to our journey's end.

"[1] In the British trenches facing Saint-Quentin, Captain Hardy converses with Lieutenant Osborne, an older man and public school master, who has come to relieve him.

Private Mason, a servant cook, often forgets about ingredients and key parts of the food that he prepares for the officers.

Second Lieutenant Trotter is a rotund officer commissioned from the ranks who likes his food; he cannot stand the war and counts down each hour that he serves in the front line by drawing circles onto a piece of paper and then colouring them in.

He criticises another soldier, Second Lieutenant Hibbert, whom he thinks is faking neuralgia in the eye so that he can be sent home instead of continuing fighting.

Later, it is stated that in a similar raid, after the British artillery bombardment, the Germans had tied red rag to the gaps in the barbed wire so that their soldiers knew exactly where to train their machine guns.

Osborne reads aloud to Trotter from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; another attempt to escape from the realities of the war.

Stanhope sarcastically states, "How awfully nice – if the Brigadier's pleased", when the Colonel's first concern is whether information has been gathered, not whether all the soldiers have returned safely.

Stanhope is offended by this, and Raleigh eventually admits that he feels he cannot eat while he thinks that Osborne is dead, and his body is in No Man's Land.

The German attack on the British trenches approaches, and the Sergeant Major tells Stanhope they should expect heavy losses.

A message is relayed to Stanhope telling him that Raleigh has been injured by a shell and that his spine is damaged, meaning he cannot move his legs.

[1] Under a new producer, Maurice Browne, the play soon transferred to the Savoy Theatre where it ran for three weeks starting on 21 January 1929.

[3] The play was extremely well received: in the words of Whale's biographer James Curtis, it "managed to coalesce, at the right time and in the right manner, the impressions of a whole generation of men who were in the war and who had found it impossible, through words or deeds, to adequately express to their friends and families what the trenches had been like".

A touring company took the same production to over 30 venues across Britain in 2004 and 2005 and back to London, to the New Ambassadors Theatre from September 2005 to January 2006.

Starring Hugh Dancy, Boyd Gaines, Jefferson Mays and Stark Sands, it opened in New York at the Belasco Theatre on 22 February 2007 and closed on 10 June after 125 performances.

Grindley's production was revived in 2011 for a UK tour from March to June, and transferred to the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End from July to September.

[14] On 15 April 1939, Dirk Bogarde's first starring role was as Raleigh in a production of Journey's End with Newick Amateur Dramatic Society in Sussex.

[15] In January 1944, during the Second World War, a production was staged by members of the Royal Natal Carbineers at El Khatatba, Egypt.

[18] In September 2018 a production was staged by Fintry Amateur Dramatic Society (FADS), in "The Studio", a converted barn outside Killearn, Stirling.

[19] In 1930, James Whale directed an eponymous film based on the play, starring Colin Clive, David Manners and Ian Maclaren.

The play is the basis for the film Aces High (1976), although the action was switched from the infantry to the Royal Flying Corps.

Condensed into a one-hour version by the producer George More O'Ferrall, some short sequences from the film Westfront 1918 (1930) by G. W. Pabst were used for scene-setting purposes.

Reginald Tate starred as Stanhope, with Basil Gill as Osborne, Norman Pierce as Trotter, Wallace Douglas as Raleigh, J. Neil More as the Colonel, R. Brooks Turner as the Company Sergeant-Major, Alexander Field as Mason, Reginald Smith as Hardy, and Olaf Olsen as the young German soldier.

[21] The play was adapted for television in 1988, starring Jeremy Northam as Stanhope, Edward Petherbridge as Osborne, and Timothy Spall as Trotter.

[22] It held close to the original script although there were changes, the most obvious being the depiction on camera of the raid, which happens off-stage in the theatre production.

"[24] However, he was "strongly affected by the poignancy of the play itself", and was inspired to write Post-Mortem, his own "angry little vilification of war", shortly afterwards.