The Endking---an explanation . . .

Thanks for that, I really was wondering because I assumed they'd been killed by the Japanese but then when he was justifying why he had to shoot them, I started to question my initial assumption

I'm still lost......WHY did he feel he had to kill Holden and the other guy?They were on his team.

The ending wasn't confusing. They blew up the damn bridge and the train went down like a lead locomotive. End of story. The guys shot each other because they disagreed on the bridge and the principle of building it.

Why is this so confusing?

If that was the purpose then the scene was horribly edited. Talking on memory here, so I could be wrong, but I´m pretty positive that after Joyce and Shears die, the camera turns back to the thai girls showing their dismay. It´s improbable that Warden, who was also following the events closely, could have missed it; and there´s no way that the girls would consider Warden to be responsible for the death of the guys.

Besides, that explanation comes from Spiegel, not from Lean, who erally had the las word in artistic matters... and who also happened to do the editing of the movie. Remember that Lean is widely considered to be one of the best editors ever, so such a blatant mistake on his side is pretty unbelievable.

Seems to me there are two questions here: i] why did Warden feel pangs of guilt, and ii] what were the girls really thinking?

That the girls are horrified, and that they blame Warden for something, comes through. But what exactly they blame him for is more ambivalent. It's a good bet that what they were really horrified about and what Warden thought they were horrified about aren't the same thing. Which were they really thinking?

option1> Why are these foreigners shooting each other and blowing things up? Can't we all just get along? Let's focus our dislike on the nearest guy wearing a uniform. i.e. Warden gets the blame not because of anything he did, but rather simply because he's the closest.

option2> Why did the guys we like have to die? There are lots of earlier scenes of fondness between the girls and individual commandos. i.e. War in some general abstract sense is okay, but when a specific individual whom I know dies, that's not okay.

option3> Most of the commandos are dead, our village elder is dead, several seemingly uninvolved Japanese are dead too, and the people inside the train are dead ...all because Warden thought it would be "neat" to blow up the bridge as the train crossed it. Blowing up the bridge earlier would have set back the Japanese war effort just as much, but without all these deaths. i.e. The general carnage of war is not okay.

option4> Although we've been intimately participating for days, we didn't realize until right now what we were really doing. We were just following the orders given by the elders, which seemed harmless enough when there was no violence or dying. But now that we fully understand what this is really all about, we regret our recent participation after all. i.e. War is more horrible than we can be involved in.

Yes...a fine picture, but the last scene of Warden should have been cut out.