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"The War Prayer" is a short story by Mark Twain intended to be a scathing indictment of war; and, particularly, of blind patriotic and religious fervor as motivations for it. Its overarching message is that any religion's preaching of love and compassion is fundamentally incompatible with the conduct of war and its atrocities; and that petitionary prayer for victory over one's enemies has profound consequences which those so praying often fail or refuse to see.

Structure, Plot and Narrative
The plot and narrative of the work is simple, but effective: An unnamed country goes to war, and patriotic citizens attend a church service for soldiers who have been called up. The people call upon their God to grant them victory and protect their troops. Suddenly, an "aged stranger" appears and announces that he is God's messenger. He explains to them that he is there to speak aloud the second part of their prayer for victory, the part for which they have implicitly wished, but have not spoken aloud: the prayer for the suffering and destruction of their enemies. What follows is a grisly depiction of hardships inflicted on war-torn nations by their conquerors. The story ends pessimistically with the man, perhaps not surprisingly, being ignored; suspected, even, of being insane.

Some consider The War Prayer to be a prose poem, and American composer David Sampson even called it "the only poem ever written by Mark Twain" in the program notes from his 1985 libretto of the same name, and based upon it. Though Twain didn't necessarily consider himself a poet, he wrote several poems in his lifetime; however, not usually listed among them is The War Prayer.

Among the biggest reasons the piece is sometimes wrongly thought of as a prose poem, despite its decidely short story form as originally written, was its publication in 1968 as an entire book of around 80 pages (many of which were blank). The publisher at the time, Harper and Row (now Harper Collins), selected well-known combat artist and illustrator John Groth to profusely illustrate the volume with vigorous, graphic and sobering depictions of war. As the story begins, each page on the left contains only 19 lines which have the appearance of a poem; and on each facing page on the right is one of Groth's vivid illustrations. As the story gets to the stranger's words, the amount of text on the left page varies from several lines to sometimes just a word or two, for impact; while the page on the right always contains one of Groth's illustrations. The overall effect is somewhat reminiscent of poetry, hence the reason why those who have only seen (or who were first introduced to) The War Pray as the 1960s Harper and Row book might think of it, albeit wrongly, as a prose poem.

Twain's Motivation
Although The War Prayer, itself, is about no war in particular, Twain was passionately motivated to write it by a particular war, indeed; which war completely and profoundly reversed some of his most deeply and longest-held beliefs.

Atrocities in the Philippines
The piece is said to have been either dictated or written by Twain in late 1904 as a response to American atrocities in the Philippine-American War, fought from 1899 to 1902 (on the heels of the four-month-long Spanish-American War, which ended in August of 1898).

While Twain famously opposed the war, itself, saying that it betrayed the ideals of American democracy by not allowing the Filipino people to choose their own destiny, he was most appalled by the American atrocities there; atrocities, which Filipino historian E. San Juan, Jr. wrote in 2005 caused the deaths of as many as 1.4 million Filipinos, only a tiny fraction of whom (as few, in fact, as 34,000, according to Manuel Arellano Remondo, in his 1908 General Geography of the Philippine Islands) were combatants, thereby constituting an act of outright genocide on the part of the United States.



On balance, it is worthy of note that the actual number of non-combatant Filipinos killed during and soon after the Philippine-American War has long been debated, in part because at least one million of those thought killed was by the simple 1908 population comparison by Manuel Arellano Remondo, expressed in his General Geography of the Philippine Islands, to wit: “The population decreased due to [both] the [Spanish-American and Philippine-American] wars, in the five-year period from 1895 to 1900, since, at the start of the first insurrection, the population was estimated at 9,000,000, and at present (1908), the inhabitants of the Archipelago do not exceed 8,000,000 in number." Others counter that perhaps only as many as 200,000 non-combatant Filipino civilians may have died directly or indirectly as a result of the Philippine-American War, most due to a major cholera epidemic that broke out near its end.

Is is not, however, dfficult to imagine Twain, were he alive, countering (and, in fact, many of his writings at the time unambiguously argued) that even the potentially smaller number of non-combatant Filipino civilians actually killed by American imperialism both during and after the Philippine-American War does not mitigate its horrors; and that he would then cite such as the U.S.'s documented attacks into the countryside which often included scorched earth campaigns in which entire villages were burned and destroyed, the use of torture (water cure, ) and the concentration of civilians into so-called "protected zones;" or that he would have quoted from the November 1901 report in the Philadelphia Ledger in which its Manila correspondent wrote:

[t]he present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog...

Twain would continue to cite the horrors, one could imagine, by quoting the words of the captain from a Kansas military regiment who wrote of Caloocan, where some 17,000 non-combatant Filipinos lived, and how "[t]he Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native;" or how overwhelmingly superior was American firepower to anything that the Filipino rebels could put together, as described in the historian Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States, to wit:

In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled-up so high that the American used their bodies for breastworks. A British witness said: 'This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery.'

No faithful reading of The War Prayer, then, may be made and fully appreciated without also fully comprehending the passionate outrage about its wanton American military atrocities which Twain was clearly both feeling and expressing at the time.

Long-held imperialist views reversed
So profoundly had the Philippine-American War atrocities affected Twain that it completely reversed postitions he had taken for years before it; and thinking and writing about it occupied much of the rest of the final decade of his life. In the late 1860s and early 1870s Twain spoke out strongly in favor of American interests in the Hawaiian Islands; and, as he explained before his death, he was, by the mid-1890s, not long before the Philippine-American War, "a red-hot imperialist," who "wanted the American eagle to go screaming over the Pacific;" and in one of his letters he wrote that the war with Spain in 1898 was "the worthiest" war ever fought. However, it was the Philippine-American war -- specifically, its American atrocities -- which turned Twain completely around; and from 1901 until his death in 1910, he was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, an organization established in 1898 to battle the American annexation of the Philippines as an insular area.

The degree to which the war's atrosities vexed Twain was painfully evident in a diary entry in which he referred to American troops in the Philippines during (and even after the "official" end of) the Philippine-American War as “our uniformed assassins;” and he described their killing of what he called “six hundred helpless and weaponless Filipino savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire The Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”

One of the many political pamphlets that Twain wrote for the American Anti-Imperialist League included the Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, which was in response to the 1906 Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were killed. The Moro Crater incident's occurrence some four years after the "official" end of the Philippine-American War (and Twain's writing about it at the time) is cited by many (including, certainly, Twain, himself) as an example of the continued American imperialist activities in the Philippines even after the war's official end, which activities continued 11 more years until the Battle of Bud Bagsak in 1913, the year which many consider marks the actual (though unofficial) end of the Philippine-American War. Despite the U.S.'s passage of the Jones Act in 1916, and the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934, relations between the Philippines and the U.S. remained cool until the U.S.'s liberation of the Philippines from Japan near the end of World War II, and the subsequent U.S. passage of the Treaty of Manila in 1946, heralding a strong Philippine cultural and political affinity with the United States which endures to this day.

Publication of The War Prayer
There are conflicting histories as to The War Prayer's actual date of first official publication, some claiming it to have been as early as 1916, and others as late as 1923. The historically narrow window of opportunity to publish it at a time when America would find it least objectionable, and during which it finally (and ironically) was first published after Twain's death, would likely have made him smile.

First unsuccessful attempt
Albert Paine's 1912 book, Mark Twain: A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens tells of how Twain submitted The War Prayer to Harper's Bazaar in early 1905, but the magazine rejected it on March 22nd of that year, its editor, Elizabeth Jordan, explaining in her rejection letter to Twain that it was "not quite suited to a woman's magazine." Pressure against its publication then mounted from Twain's own family, particularly his youngest daughter, Jean, for fear of the story being considered sacrilegious, and so Twain decided against publishing The War Prayer.

Twain: Publish it after I'm dead
There were a great many of Twain's works which he believed should only be published posthumously, including the bulk of his extended autobiography which he expressly decreed should not be published until 100 years after his death). As explained by Harriet Elinor Smith, editor of the 2010 The Uncensored Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (of 3 planned volumes), in its |promotional video trailer:

Mark Twain knew, as early as 1876, that he could not write an auto-biography if he was worried about embarrassing people, offending them, or shocking them; and he continued to keep to this idea over the next 30 years. When he died in 1910, he specifically instructed that the autobiography not be published for a hundred years after his death. Some portions, in fact, he wanted withheld for 500 years. That way, he knew that he could speak his whole, frank mind and not be concerned about the consequences.

In an exchange of letters with Daniel Beard, Twain's illustrator, Beard asked Twain if he would publish The War Prayer despite its rejection by Harper's Bazaar, and even over his family's objections. Mindful of public reaction, Twain said he considered that he had a family to support, and did not want to be seen as a lunatic or fanatic. "No, I have told the whole truth in that," Twain replied to Beard, "and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead."

Twain's concern, as expressed to Beard, about how The Wary Prayer's publication durng his lifetime could negatively impact his career was further echoed in his 1905 essay "The Privilege of the Grave" (which, itself, was not posthumously published until 103 years later when it first appeared in the 22 April 2008 issue of The New Yorker magazine), in which he wrote: "We suppress an unpopular opinion because we cannot afford the bitter cost of putting it forth.  None of us likes to be hated.  None of us likes to be shunned."

The War Prayer's unambiguous attack on religion, in general; and, by inference, Christianity, in particular, also caused Twain to think twice about its publication during his lifetime, as Harriet Elinor Smith further explains: "In June of '06, he dictated a series ... about his views of Christianity.  He felt it was bloody, merciless, money-grubbing, hypocrtical and hollow; and that was the sort of thing he didn't feel was appropriate for a contemporary audience.  In particular, I think, he felt his family would be embarrassed by that...".

So, by Twain's death in April of 1910, the The War Prayer remained unpublished, as he had wanted. However, unlike the nearly half-million words in some 250 daily dictations which, by 1909, comprised his extended autobiography, and which he was certain should not be published until from 100 years to 500 years after his death, Twain struggled -- from its authorship in c. 1904, to the end of his life in 1910 -- with not publishing The War Prayer during his lifetime. This was most cogently evidenced in his letter to confidant Joseph Twichell, in which he lamented that even though his conscience told him to publish it, he had nevertheless "suppressed" the The War Prayer "for seven years" because he was not "equal" to the task.

Precise year of authorship in question
Interestingly, what Twain wrote to Twichell may inadvertently now call into question The War Prayer's widely-believed 1904 (or some even believe 1905) year of authorship, since seven years, subtracted from the year of Twain's death in 1910, would minimally set the year to 1903. If one assumes that Twain's letter to Twichell was not written in the absolutely final year of Twain's life, then the date of authoriship could conceivably be pushed back even further, to 1902 or earlier, when the Philippine-American War ended, or even during said war. It would certainly seem more likely that Twain would have written the piece closer to the either duration or end of that war, when his passion about its atrocities was most deeply felt, and during which time most of his other writings about it are known to have been penned. Doubt surrounds the precise date of Twain's letter to Twichell because so much of Twain's history relies on Paine's 1912 biography of him, from the pre-publication draft of which all references to this particular letter to Twichell were specifically redacted by Paine, pursuant to both Paine's reputation for being a stickler for propriety (which resulted in his cutting entire sections which he worried might be offensive), and also Twain's daughter Clara's steadfast insistence on her father's posthumous image being eternally protected. It may be more accurate, then, to cite The War Prayer's date of authorship as "circa 1904" (or "c. 1904").

Finally published, and none too soon
Many books and authoritative encyclopedic articles about The War Prayer indicate that it remained unpublished for 13 years after Twain's death, finally appearing for the first time in Albert Bigelow Paine's 1923 anthology of Twain's writings entitled, Europe and Elsewhere. Paine, in fact, published a long extract of it in his 1912 Twain Biography ; however, the version which Paine ultimately published in its entirety in 1923 ended-up being inaccurate, and was not subsequently accurately published until 1972 in Frederick Anderson's A Pen Warmed-up in Hell: Mark Twain in Protest. Since 1968, The War Prayer has been an illustrated and self-contained book published in multiple editions of varying lengths from 80 to 96 pages by Harper Collins. Little known, apparently, is that none of those is actually the very first time The War Prayer was published in full.

New war, new context
The War Prayer was actually first published -- finally, in full, and probably none to soon -- some only six years after Twain's death (and six years before even Paine's extract), in the November 1916 issue of Harper's Monthly.

By that time, World War I had been raging for a little over two years, amassing unprecedented casualties on both sides. The U.S., however, remained proudly neutral, as reflected in President Woodrow Wilson's re-election campaign slogan that year: He Kept Us Out of War. However, beginning with its earlier sinking of the British RMS Lusitania in 1915, with 128 Americans on board, Germany seemed determined to turn the tide of U.S. disinterest in entering the war; and while the public outrage over the Lusitania's sinking led, at first, to Germany's accession to Wilson's demands that it stop attacks on non-military ships, the "Central Powers" member nation had again stepped-up its aggressive submarine activity by January of 1917, just two months after Twain's piece was first published.

Even before The War Prayer's publication, Germany was suspected of sabotage in the 1916 Black Tom Explosion in Jersey City, New Jersey, and the earlier 1914 Kingsland Explosion in Lyndhurst, New Jersey; then, after The War Prayer's publication, German U-boats sunk more than a half dozen U.S. merchant ships. During that period, also, the infamous Zimmermann Telegram was intercepted, decoded, translationed, and then finally leaked and published in March of 1917; in which telegram Germany pledged to help Mexico win back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona (which Mexico had lost to the U.S. some 70 years earlier in the Mexican-American War) if Mexico would join World War I as Germany's ally. Consequently, on April 6, 1917, just five months after Twain's The War Prayer was posthumously published, and with the tide of U.S. disinterest in entering the war having by then completely turned, President Wilson called for war on Germany, and Congress agreed and declared it, thereby officially entering the U.S. into World War I.

Narrow historical window of acceptability
The timing of The War Prayer's publication was none too soon, then, because though few in the then-non-interventionist United States found it unpatriotic when it was first published, many would likely have found it so if it had been published just two months later, when Germany broke its submarine attack promises; and most would likely have found it unpatriotic if it had been published just five months after it actually was, when the U.S. finally entered World War I in April of 1917. The piece's publication, then, occurred during a historically narrow window of time when America's anti-war and non-interventionist sentiment was sufficiently high that Twain's fears of it being considered sacrilegious or unpatriotic became, briefly, unwarranted.

Reception and Impact
In the editor's introduction to the 2009's New Perspectives on The War Prayer, which appeared in the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Takayuki Tatsumi wrote:

Although today The War Prayer is increasingly accessible to readers worldwide, this important piece by Mark Twain has never received the critical attention that it warrants. Neither has it occupied the place that it deserves in the Mark Twain canon, or in the American literary canon. In the years since its first publication ... it has often been reprinted. But it rarely appears in anthologies of American literature, and it is among the least well-known works by Twain as far as the general public is concerned. Indeed, educated individuals are often startled and shocked when they are introduced to this piece, dumbfounded as to why they never encountered it before. A question worth pondering: How might American history and world history in the 20th century have been different if "The War-Prayer" had been as familiar to every high school student as Tom Sawyer?

Invocation during Vietnam war
Though The War Prayer was, indeed, noticed and appreciated by Harper's Monthly's largely left-leaning readers in 1916, America's fervor to enter World War I so soon after its publication muted most discussion -- or even notice -- of the piece at the time. It did not, in fact, enjoy serious notice until almost 50 years later, during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, when the anti-war movement was at a fever pitch; and war protestors read it aloud in coffee-house protests and mailed it around to one another. It was this atmosphere, and the resurgence of the popularity of Twain's piece during it, which motivated Harper and Row to publish it as a small book in 1968.

Derivative Works
Since its publication nearly a century ago, The War Prayer has been an archetypal text for all manner of derivative works dealing with the horror of war, as well has been as a popular tool for advocates of non-violence or pacifism in the United States. Screenwriters use it as a dramatic vehicle to enrich the meaning of their screenplays and scripts, peace activists feature it at anti-war events and on the World Wide Web, and pacifist Christian sermons draw moral lessons from it. Numerous works either incorporating it, referring to it, or based upon it have been produced in various forms and media.

Motion Pictures
In April of 2007, a ten-minute, short film adaptation, entitled "The War Prayer," was released by Lyceum Films. Written by Marco Sanchez, and directed by Michael Goorjian, the adaptation was set as a modern Christian Praise music concert or revival, and starred Jeremy Sisto as "The Stranger," and Tim Sullivan as "The Preacher".

Also in 2007, journalist and Washington Monthly president Markos Kounalakis directed and produced an animated short film based on Twain's piece, also entitled "The War Prayer." Narrated by Peter Coyote, it featured Lawrence Ferlinghetti as The Minister, and Eric Bauersfeld as The Stranger.

Short plays and stage readings
The War Prayer has been adapted into several short plays or stage readings, including a one-act play by Gerald P. Murphy, and a five-minute Reader's Theater edition piece by Aaron Shepard.

Orchestral music, chorale and opera
During the Vietnam War in 1972, Midwestern University's Kelly Ward composed and instrumental-chorale set to the text of The War Prayer, and published it as an 80-page operatic oratio of the same name.

As the Vietnam war ended in 1973, and for a short time thereafter during the 1970s, American composer David S. Sampson says he first discovered Twain's The War Prayer, then conceived, and in 1985 he and Johanna Keller co-wrote and completed, a one-act operatic libretto for six soloists, SATB chorus and chamber orchestra entitled The War Prayer. After trying to get it produced for next next nearly a decade, it was finally performed for the first time at Princeton, New Jersey's Pro Musica in May of 1995.

Television
In 1979, PBS, in conjunction with The Foundation for American Letters and Media (now defunct), co-produced an hour-long teledrama entitled Mark Twain: Beneath the Laughter, directed by Larry Yust; and starring Dan O'Herlihy as Mark Twain, and Kay Howell as Twain's youngest daughter Jean. As the program begins, Twain is reading The War Prayer to young Jean, whose facial expressions convey shock as the scene fades to a 19th century Protestant church, where The War Prayer is acted-out, with Richard Moll, as The Stranger; and in which considerable license was obviously taken because one of the characters is Twain's Huckleberry Finn, whose character never appears in The War Prayer, as originally written.

The War Prayer was dramatized near the end of the 1981 television program The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, based on a short sketch of the same name, written by Mark Twain in 1885. Directed by Peter H. Hunt, and with screenplay by Philip H. Reisman Jr., it starred Edward Herrmann as "The Stranger." Set in the Civil War period, this eighty-nine-minute action/adventure movie focuses on a group of scared teenage soldiers, who go to the battle? eld without proper training, without understanding the reality of war, and without understanding the reason for war. The ? lm ends with the arrival of the ghost of Edward Herrmann at a church, who delivers Twain’s “The War-Prayer” as an anti-war epilogue. Like the white-robed “lunatic” in Twain’s story, Herrmann exposes the dreadful implications of a sermon delivered by a jingoistic, triumphalist preacher.

"The War Prayer" is the title of the seventh episode, of the first season, of the science fiction television series Babylon 5. Directed by Richard Compton, and written by D. C. Fontana, the episode's story, at first, has seemingly nothing to do with Twain's work, and seemingly only the titles are the same. According to notes about the episode on The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 web site, the The War Prayer episode's title would appear to be nothing more than "a nod to Twain's piece of the same name, which should be read by everyone," and was so titled because "[g]iven the growing problems with illiteracy," a reference "not to pop society so much, as to literature... Tennyson, Twain, even writers whose last names don't begin with T" was desired. However, the underlying theme of peace in Twain's work, and the zeal of those who launch wars against others in the belief, to their very cores, that they are right and their enemies are wrong, is palpable in the episode's {Plot (narrative)|storyline]]. Babylon 5 is a heavy five-mile-long outer-space way station created to prevent another war, where humans and aliens can work out their differences peacefully. It is a home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Visited by various species, the station imposes one absolute rule for those who are onboard: no racism is allowed. In the The War Prayer episode, the clandestine Home Guard, a militant pro-Earth organization popular on the planet Earth, launches a series of attacks on prominent aliens on the station, thereby threatening to dash humanity’s last hope for peace. In the Home Guard's violent racism, there is an unmistakable parallel between it and the Ku Klux Klan.

Commemorations
On Sunday, September 11, 2005, the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, The Peace Economy Project (PEG), a St. Louis-based nonprofit organization researching and publicizing the costs of a wartime economy and an unrestrained military-industrial complex, rented the Becky Thatcher riverboat for an afternoon of conversation, speeches, and a performance of Twain’s The War-Prayer along the Mississippi as part of the 9/11 Riverboat Cruise for Peace. Among the notable participants were Byron Clemens, one of Twain’s distant cousins; Christian Woehr, assistant principal violinist with the St. Louis Symphony who specially composed a musical score for The War-Prayer, and performed it with his student quartet; and Robert Henke, an associate professor of drama at Washington University in St. Louis, who powerfully recited Twain’s text. Brown offered his reflection on the event as follows: “Twain’s words reverberated in my head as I sat aboard deck of the boat named after one of his characters. Patriotic zeal, religious hypocrisy, precious life laid asunder in the name of fluid concepts like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’ Thus was the world in Twain’s lifetime, thus is the world in mine.”

Suggested Reading

 * Boyd, Gregory A., The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church, 2007, Zondervon Books, ISBN: 9780310267317