Benjamin Britten used Wilfred Owen’s WWI poems for his version of the requiem mass. ‘What Passing Bells’ features in the opening section. The War Requiem was commissioned for the opening of the new Coventry cathedral. The mass commemorated the dead of both world wars, but also protested that they died ‘as cattle’. Britten himself was a pacifist, and said: ‘My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.’