A soldier stands between two worlds: the war he has left behind and the life that no longer feels like home.

The threshold that never closes: what 1917 and Wilfred Owen’s Insensibility reveal about war that follows soldiers home

The hardest part of war, some veterans say, isn’t the war. They are no longer at war. But they have not, exactly, come home either. They sit at the dinner table, they answer when spoken to, they go through the motions of a life, and yet some part of them is still somewhere else, suspended in a place neither here nor there.

Anthropologists have a word for this state. It’s called liminality: the condition of standing on a threshold, fully inside neither the world you have left nor the world you are entering. It sounds clinical, the kind of thing you’d find in a trauma research paper. But a young British soldier named Wilfred Owen had already named it from a trench, long before the vocabulary of PTSD gave modern medicine a name for it.

Sam Mendes’s *1917* (2019), shot to feel like a single unbroken take, drops audiences into the trenches of the Western Front and refuses to let them look away. Owen’s “Insensibility” (1918), bitter and sardonic, dissects the emotional numbness that war demands of the men who survive it. One was filmed a century after the conflict it depicts, inspired by stories from Mendes’s grandfather. The other was written from the front lines weeks before Owen’s own death in the final week of the war.

Yet the conclusion they reach, separated by all those decades, is uncannily the same.

War, in both texts, isn’t a contest of victory and defeat. It’s a threshold. Both texts unsettle the familiar assumption that surviving war means returning from it. Soldiers do not simply pass through violence and re-enter ordinary life unchanged. Coming home is not restoration. It is another form of exile. Once that threshold is crossed, the door behind you doesn’t reopen.

A landscape that won’t let go

1917 follows two young lance corporals, Schofield and Blake, ordered to cross enemy territory to deliver a message that will halt a doomed attack of sixteen hundred men, among them Blake’s own brother. Their first task is simple in description and impossible in feeling: cross No Man’s Land.

What Mendes does in this sequence is brutal precisely because it isn’t dramatic. The camera, locked at eye level, denies any aerial shot that might give us relief or orientation. We’re trapped at ground level with the soldiers, picking our way through barbed wire, mud-filled craters, and decomposing bodies. At one point, Schofield’s hand plunges into a corpse. The desaturated grey-brown palette conflates earth and flesh, the ground the soldiers walk on and the men who have become part of it.

It is not a battlefield. It is something stranger and more disturbing. A place belonging to neither the living nor the dead.

Corporal Schofield at No Man’s Land, 1917. (DreamWorks Pictures / Universal Pictures, 2019)

Owen builds the same threshold in language. In the opening stanza of “Insensibility,” soldiers march:

“Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.”

The dead aren’t buried. They’ve become the road. When Owen writes that “the front line withers,” his metonymy collapses the distinction between men and landscape, as though the soldiers themselves are vegetation being consumed. They “fade, not flowers,” denied even the dignity of a natural metaphor. They simply disappear.

Both texts point at the same uncomfortable truth. In war, the physical world becomes a liminal space where grave and ground are indistinguishable. The soldiers are not crossing through the dead. They are walking on them.

The numbness that keeps you alive

If the landscapes of these texts mark war’s outer threshold, the inner threshold is more insidious. Irreversible.

Schofield does not become brave. He becomes numb as a result of Blake’s death

The fulcrum of 1917 isn’t a battle. It’s a death. When Blake is killed, stabbed by the German pilot he had just tried to save, the camera lingers on Schofield’s face as the last of his innocence drains away. A passing general offers brisk advice: “It doesn’t do to dwell on it.” From this point forward, Schofield changes. Riding in the back of a truck through burning farmland and rotting horses, his face is blank. The diegetic silence that replaces Thomas Newman’s score is the sound of emotional shutdown.

Schofield does not become brave. He becomes numb. And in that numbness, he becomes capable of completing his mission, at the cost of the sensitivity that made him human to begin with.

The film therefore pushes against the masculine ideal of the soldier as emotionally controlled, resilient and unbreakable. Schofield’s silence is not proof of strength. It is evidence of damage. Mendes invites audiences to question a culture that mistakes emotional shutdown for courage.

Owen doesn’t merely show this crossing. He anatomises it:

“And some cease feeling

Even themselves or for themselves.”

The enjambment across the line break enacts the very dissolution it describes. He writes:

“Dullness best solves

The tease and doubt of shelling,”

Not courage. Not resolve. Dullness. By the third stanza, his bitter refrain, “Happy are these who lose imagination,” turns the language of joy into accusation. Imagination, the capacity for hope, for horror, for empathy, becomes excess weight, no different from the packs and rifles already weighing the men down. To survive, you have to put it down.

It is a devastating paradox. The only way to keep your body alive is to let something inside you die first.

No way back

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about 1917 and “Insensibility” is that neither text offers anyone a way out. The threshold isn’t a passage to be crossed. It is a condition to be endured.

Schofield resting beneath a tree at the beginning and end of 1917

Mendes builds this into the architecture of his film. 1917 opens with Schofield resting beneath a tree. It closes with an almost identical image, Schofield sitting alone beneath a tree, the mission accomplished, Blake dead, the sun setting. After nearly two hours of relentless forward motion, the wide static shot is disorienting in its stillness. He has saved sixteen hundred men. And yet the framing tells us he has arrived exactly where he started.

He reaches into his pocket and removes photographs of a family, a home he earlier described as something he could not bear to think about. He is suspended between the war he cannot leave and the life he cannot return to. The tree, a symbol of growth and life, becomes a symbol of permanent solitary limbo.

Owen’s ending is, if anything, more brutal. The final stanza of “Insensibility” abandons sardonic pity and erupts into pure condemnation:

“But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns

That they should be as stones.”

The target shifts. He is no longer writing about soldiers forced into numbness, but about civilians, politicians, armchair commentators who have:

“By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever mourns in man.”

That last phrase. Whatever mourns in man. Owen doesn’t name compassion, or empathy, or grief. The thing before grief. The wound before words. Whatever it is inside a human being that is capable of mourning at all.

Here Owen’s anger turns outward, away from the men in the trenches and toward the societies that consume their suffering while protecting themselves from its consequences. The poem attacks the cultural comfort of distance, the belief that those who do not fight can still judge, celebrate or justify war without being morally implicated in it.

War destroys it in soldiers by force. Society destroys it in itself by choice. The liminal space is permanent for those who fought, and contagious for those who watched.

The threshold that never closes

What Owen identified in 1918, in soldiers who had “ceased feeling / Even themselves or for themselves,” is now understood through terms such as post-traumatic stress disorder, moral injury, and complex grief. The vocabulary has multiplied. The threshold has not closed.

You can hear it in the testimony of Australian veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, in the findings of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, and in the quiet way partners and families describe someone who came home but didn’t, quite. Across a century, through the radically different forms of an unbroken cinematic shot and a six-stanza poem, 1917 and “Insensibility” issue the same warning. War’s true cost isn’t counted in the dead. It’s counted in the suspended.

Schofield’s body survives No Man’s Land. Owen’s soldiers survive the shelling. But survival, in both texts, is purchased with the very interior life that survival was supposed to protect. The man who walks out of the trench is not the man who walked in, and the gap between them is the threshold neither can recross.

More disquieting still, both texts insist that the liminal space doesn’t stay on the battlefield. It follows soldiers home into marriages, into communities asked to absorb what cannot be absorbed. And it spreads. It spreads to societies that, like Owen’s cursed “dullards,” choose not to look, not to feel, not to mourn.

Schofield, sitting beneath his tree, has completed his mission and has nowhere to go. Owen, writing weeks before his death on the Sambre-Oise Canal, never made it home at all.

Both texts leave us on the same threshold they describe.

The door behind us has already closed.