“The War Prayer” (1905)

This very short story by Mark Twain is painfully obvious, although I am sympathetic with its views and have even had my own experience that resonates with it. When I say very short I mean it—under five pages. Better to call it a parable complete with readymade moral, as it was written in response to US imperial adventuring in progress for the previous decade. A preacher on a Sunday morning is giving volunteers the patriotic sendoff. War fever is in the air. Then a strange man no one knows steps up, saying he is a messenger from God sent to finish the prayer. It’s more or less a depiction of what they’re praying for from the enemy’s viewpoint—death, dismemberment, and destruction. My experience like this happened shortly after 9/11—on the following Friday, 9/14, which President Bush Jr. had designated as a “day of remembrance.” Fair enough. It also happened to be the 20th anniversary of the death of my mother, and though I had little regard for the Bush-Cheney administration I was shaken up like most people by the array of 9/11 events. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head for weeks of those thousands of people crushed under tons of rubble. And the images of that day have been branded into many of us as well—the planes hitting, the towers collapsing, people leaping to their deaths to get away from fire. They are so traumatic, and have become so sacred, that it is still considered in poor taste to speak of them. Don’t call 9/11 iconic or the greatest anything. Anyway, feeling the need to be with others on this day of remembrance, I attended a public gathering in downtown Seattle that featured a lot of political mucky-mucks who were evidently lost about how to respond. They were uniformly uninspired and uninspiring. The moments of silence were the best part. They prayed. One talked about the guns of retribution roaring, which disappointed me. I wish the strange man in “The War Prayer” had been there to speak. He had things to say to a bunch of these people that they really needed to hear. Yes, they are painfully obvious things. But even so they don’t necessarily reach anyone. Twain never published “The War Prayer” in his lifetime. Friends and loved ones urged him not to, saying it would be taken as sacrilegious. Thus has it ever been.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.