Any account of the evolution, chronology and documentation of Britten's pacifism will, I believe, benefit from first acquiring a familiarity with what I would describe as his creative awareness of Violent climates', when we may be a shade surprised by the persistence and sheer volume of it. This means a scrutiny, brief in some instances, more extensive in others, of those works in which that creative response shows itself.

Its manifestations were various, varying indeed according to aim, utility and genre. This in itself will entail breaking the broad generalization down into categories, to the first of which, ‘documentary’, I assign to film, the so-called ‘Peace’ film of 1936 – Peace of Britain – and the Pacifist March (a unison song) that was written in 1937 for the Peace Pledge Union. These and others like them are works or collaborative projects that, literally and liberally, document Britten's pacifist convictions and his political and social sympathies. They speak for themselves; indeed, the need for simplicity and clarity – for the clear articulation of a ‘message’ – defines the ‘documentary’ mode and its necessary limitations. These ‘documentaries’ are in fact close to propaganda; and it is worth remembering that they belong to a period when Britten was highly active in collaborating in the creation of a genre of film, with its own aesthetic, that was to become known as ‘documentary film’. It was an aesthetic, incidentally, that incorporated a very powerful element of social propaganda. These were films with a ‘message’, undisguisedly, but executed with such sophistication and so imposing an array of innovative techniques that a reference to ‘propaganda’ seems singularly inappropriate.