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RC Sherriff himself fought in World War One, and was wounded in 1917, at the Battle of Passchendaele. This was one of the worst battles in a war that seemed to be disastrous in a way no previous war had been. Around ten million soldiers died during the war. The conditions of trench warfare, where men waited and then advanced towards machine guns, became a byword for "futility", the title of a famous poem by Wilfred Owen. In Journey's End, Stanhope describes a moment when the German soldiers let the British troops carry their wounded back behind enemy lines. Osborne, his lieutenant then points out "Next day we blew each other's trenches to blazes," causing Raleigh to reply "It all seems rather - silly, doesn't it?" War in the play is all the more horrible when it is silly. Sheriff did not intend the play to be seen as a protest against the war, but its depiction of the futilityPointlessness. of the fighting made it a hit with a nation still reeling from the slaughter ten years later.

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Unlike during modern wars, the upper class died at similar rates to the working and middle classes in World War One. But the army was divided by social class, with officers drawn mostly from the middle and upper classes, and the lower ranks coming from the working classes. Journey's End shows a space in which the different classes interact more than they would at home, but also, where class remains a key distinction. Raleigh and Stanhope went to the same public school, and it is clear that they are officers partly because of their class. The question of who is in charge is sometimes played for laughs between the officers and Mason, the cook. But it is still clear who has power when the officers send a soldier out of the dugout for pepper. The need to maintain distinctions even in the face of war and disaster creates both humour and absurdity in the play. Social class in the play becomes something that people hold on to, trying to maintain control in a situation where control is impossible. 

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Journey's End is a play about the damage war does to people. It is made clear in the play when Captain Stanhope says: "Whenever I look at anything nowadays I see right through it." Many men returning from World War One suffered from mental health problems that came to be known as "shell shock". Similar symptoms were later called post-traumatic stress syndrome. Trauma is obviously affecting all of the characters. Stanhope feels the "strain", and responds by drinking. While Hibbert has "neuralgia" - a kind of pain that the other characters think he is faking, but which might be psychological, or physical. Stanhope refuses to allow Hibbert to take sick leave, and eventually confesses to Hibbert that he feels "exactly the same". The two men are bound together by the trauma of war. 

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The courage that it took soldiers to fight in the war made them heroes, but Journey's End shows that the image of heroism is a hard one to live up to. When Raleigh joins the company, it becomes clear that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of Stanhope, who was his hero at school. Stanhope, who is in love with Raleigh's sister, hates being thought of as a hero. He thinks it's a lie to call him one, considering how dependent he has become on alcohol. Talking about his love for Raleigh's sister, he tells Osborne that he is not a real hero. "She doesn't know that if I went up those steps into the front line - without being doped with whisky - I'd go mad with fright." And when Raleigh and Osborne are sent on a suicide mission, they comfort themselves by saying "we must put on a good show". Such lines show how hard it was to live up to the idea of heroism in a war that many thought was unheroic.

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The only way to keep people fighting in a war like World War One is to remind them of their need to support their fellow soldiers. Journey's End offers a portrait of many different kinds of friendship. From the banter between Mason, the cook, and the officers, to the way Osborne tucks Stanhope in at night, we see even in war, friendship is vital to carrying on and enduring the horrors of war, even though it makes the pain of losing your fellow soldiers even harder to bear.

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