Britten used the old Latin Mass but interspersed it with nine poems by Wilfred Owen. Wilfred Owen was a young man who went to fight in the First World War and was killed at the age of  twenty five, just as the war ended. He had been horrified by what he had witnessed in the war and the effects it had on people. Despite his hatred of the war, however, he was not a pacifist and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery.

He came to view the war, not as a disease to be cured by political action nor as a crusade against evil, but as a major tragedy to which the only appropriate response was compassion. In his best poems he writes not only about war but about war as a metaphor for the human condition. This is how he felt about his poetry: "I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful".

To find out more about Britten and his War Requiem and to find the complete text he used, go to: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~tan/Britten/britwar.html or to the War Requiem section of this website

You will find many other useful web sites to tell you more about the work. Here is another: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A735734

You will find more of Wilfred Owen's poems at:
http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/warpoems.htm