Sebastian Faulks's First World War novel is above all else, conscious of a duty of care over its subject, as is this stage version adapted by Rachel Wagstaff and directed by Trevor Nunn.
During the interlude between the second and third acts, a roll call of names belonging to a tiny fraction of the dead is projected over the safety curtain.
By then, Faulk's gallant English hero Stephen (Ben Barnes) has arrived in the French town of Amien to lodge in the house of a factory owner who abuses his beautiful wife Isabelle (Genevieve O'Reilly) and his starving employees.
It is only when the action moves forward six years, with Stephen embroiled in the Battle of the Somme, that Birdsong delivers the kind of emotion the subject deserves. We learn that love and camaraderie between dying men is far more painful to watch than that between separated lovers.
Inevitably what moves the emotions here is not Faulks's fictional story, but the real events on which it is based. All of which leaves you affected far more by history than a play's version of it.