Mark Twain's 'the War-Prayer'—Reflections on Vietnam and Iraq

Mark Twain Studies Vol. 2 Mark Twain’s “The War-Prayer”—Reections on Vietnam and Iraq Mong-Lan Although he penned the words a century ago, if Mark Twain had been alive in 1970, or were alive today, he could as easily, and with the same ironic illumination, have written “The War-Prayer.” Why? Because Twain would certainly have thought that the Philippines became Vietnam and have become Iraq—with regard to the role played by the United States. Twain would have wanted to convey his anti-chauvinistic, anti-war message with the same poignantly convincing force these decades later as he did in the early 20th cen- tury. As Twain’s minister uses God and religion to rally his  ock in support of war, a pale man walks up and nudges him aside. In contrast, the pale man urges the congregation to realize the horrible reality for which they are, in fact, praying. With his words, he il- lustrates the violence and death that stem from believing that righteousness and God are always the natural companions of one’s own views and actions. Through the pale man, the reader is told, “If you would beseech a blessing upon your- self, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time.” He continues: “Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!” That is sufcient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow vic- tory—must follow it, cannot help but follow it. The “unmentioned results” are destruction, blood, and death for other peoples, races, and nations. The pale man rhetorically lets the congregation know what in fact they are actually asking for when praying for victory: O Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling  elds with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of  re; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out rooess with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun-ames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit,

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