The Battle Cry of Peace
One of silent cinema's most aggressive calls for military preparedness survives only in incomplete form.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Officially Gone
- Peak stage
- general availability
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
A large-scale American preparedness drama produced by Vitagraph before United States entry into the First World War.
The Battle Cry of Peace was completed and distributed to ordinary audiences in 1915. Like most American silent features, it circulated on vulnerable film stock in an era before systematic preservation, and no complete publicly accessible print is now known.
Existence timeline
The Battle Cry of Peace is completed as a distributable motion picture.
The finished film reaches ordinary cinema audiences.
Known release prints and original elements fail to enter a complete accessible archive.
The Library of Congress documents the severe loss rate of American silent features and the film's survival status.
Surviving fragments preserve only part of the released work.
Why it ended
The released work disappeared as its known distribution copies and original elements failed to survive. Only fragmentary moving-image material is known, so the original full viewing experience is gone.
Last confirmed trace
Partial footage, stills, sheet music, advertisements and censorship records document the released spectacle.
What it left behind
Its remains preserve evidence of how early feature films intervened directly in national political debate.
How we classified it
The archive unit reached normal public release or operation and is no longer obtainable in its original public form.
Verified normal public availability maps to 100 under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.