Hugh Laurie said that filming was sad because "even for comic effect, we were representing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people".
During the filming of the episode, which took place before a studio audience at BBC Television Centre, Rowan Atkinson described sharing his character's dread of impending death and feeling a "knot in the pit of my stomach", something that he had never experienced.
Blackadder attempts to feign madness by wearing underpants on his head and sticking two pencils up his nose. This plan was based on Rowan Atkinson's habit of sticking pencils up his nose to entertain his castmates during read-throughs and script editing sessions.
Rowan Atkinson said that the scene involving Darling's "ghastly realisation" of his commission was "very sad"; John Lloyd commented "I love the fact that Captain Darling does have some compassion; he's not just a bureaucrat". They noted that "all the comedy just goes away" upon Darling's arrival in the trench, and that "there are still funny moments, but dramatically there's no comic content, it's just leading inexorably to the end."
Ben Elton was primarily responsible for the sequence in which Blackadder explains how the First World War started.