Poem of the week: from The War Prayer by Mark Twain
from The War Prayer
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.
“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields 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 fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it –
“For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
“We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
This week brings a bit of genre-shuffling, with a short story for context, and a poem that isn’t exactly a poem. Here’s the story, genuinely short, you’ll be glad to hear, and as readable as Mark Twain’s prose always is. The extract here is one of two war prayers prayed in the story, and I’ve used the paragraphed format featured in the Blue Ridge Journal, which I think adds clarity and doesn’t detract its self-sufficiency as a kind of early prose-poem.
The scene is a Sunday-evening church service, a special occasion attended by the recruits who will be marching into battle the following morning. These are the “young patriots” in the opening of the prayer. The apostrophe “O Lord our Father” reflects the youth and vulnerability of the soldiers: they have a particular need for the father. A new apostrophe opens the next section, “O Lord our God”. It is significant in retrospect; for the first-time reader, it’s no preparation for the stunningly angry burst of oratory that follows. This section is heavy on adjectives (“bloody shreds”, “smiling fields”, etc) but it’s one of those rare occasions when the adjective is an expressive force rather than an over-elaboration. Where the repetition is most conscious and might seem overworked, the effect is undercut by the satirical reversal underlying the prayer: “… help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead … help us to wring the unoffending hearts with unavailing grief …” The anaphoric “help us” is a reminder that this speech is a prayer: it’s a prayer for the victory of “our” troops turned on its head, exposing the prayer for the enemy’s devastation.
The story is thought to have been written around 1905, its immediate occasion being the American-Philippine war. Twain (1835-1910) wasn’t a pacifist, but by this stage of his life he had become an anti-imperialist, and he revised his initial support for the American annexation of the Philippines: “We go there to conquer, not to redeem … I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” It is possible that The War Prayer is a response to a particularly bloody event known as the Moro Crater Massacre, a counterinsurgency action by the US against the Moro people’s resistance in the south-western Philippines.
The central argument of The War Prayer focuses on that paradoxical construction, at the heart of the major religions, of a God at once universally compassionate and supportive of butchery towards those of another faith and/or ethnicity. The intellectual position is hardly new, and hardly sophisticated: a five-year-old child would be capable of asking the same question as Mark Twain. And yet it’s a question the believers, whatever their faith, seem unperturbed by, a handy avoidance if you’re sharpening your sword ready to lead a Crusade. Twain, not an atheist, took the view that “Christianity was bad but a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible with its prodigious crime – the invention of hell.”
In the story, there’s a significant bit of characterisation intended to strengthen the argument: the interloper who disturbs the pious with his own counter-prayer is a messenger direct from celestial HQ, kitted out like the Ancient of Days.
Twain sent the story to Harper’s Bazaar but it was apparently rejected as “not quite suitable for a woman’s magazine”. Some commentators have said it was printed first in 1916, but there is larger agreement now that it wasn’t published until 1923, when it appeared in Europe and Elsewhere, a collection of his essays. The War Prayer is hardly an essay, barely a story. Whatever its genre, it hasn’t lost its power as a scalding satirically framed vision of war’s long cycle of devastation, as relevant to the 21st century as to the 20th. Its question is unanswered, and widely considered not worth asking. God is merciful. Blessed are they that kill and die in his name.
