War Prayer by Mark Twain

War Prayer by Mark Twain is a short story that uses irony and hyperbole to critique the zealous militarism gripping the hearts and minds of a community about to go to war. The first paragraph is a kind of stereotypical portrait of a nation preparing for conflict, during which war is viewed with "great and exalting excitement." The atmosphere before soldiers have died is more like a parade than preparation for death: "the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering." Twain opens the story with cascading, long sentences that release a flood of imagery and impressions of the coming of war as a joyous event: "on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by." For readers who are familiar with Twain's well-known novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the undifferentiated nature of these masses of people is surprising. These people might be 'anybody,' which is Twain's point in The War Prayer. Every community, he suggests, prepares for war in a similar fashion.

Also in contrast to some of his previous works, Twain does not satirize authority as much as ordinary people's attitudes. The people listen to "patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts" and pastors who invoked the "God of Battles" but the focus is upon the people, rather than upon negative images of authority. The fact that people are thinking in cliches is shown through the deliberate use of hackneyed, repetitious phrases like 'deepest deeps.' It is also the ordinary people sending their sons and daughters off to war who stifle dissent: "the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way." Twain suggests that war is a time when people forget their values and common sense, and become part of a mob, rather than critical thinkers and individuals with wills of their own. Without a will of ones own, one is not an effective participant in a democracy.

The final 'punch line' of the story is when an "aged stranger" appears in a church, and witnesses the preacher praying for victory and the deliverance of the young soldiers going off to battle: "With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, 'Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!' " The old man, with equally inflated, although wiser rhetoric states: "I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The old man points out that both the opposite side as well as the congregants has made the same prayer. How can God satisfy both participants in the conflict?

Twain's moral is that the religious rhetoric used to justify war and the merging of patriotism and faith is always suspect. Each side believes that his or her cause and nation is just. During wartime, prayers 'cancel one another out' and show the hypocrisy of the inflated, one-sided view of warfare expressed in propaganda. It is easy to see Twain's message reflected in real life, particularly in the cases of ethnic conflicts where participants are pitted in age-old hatreds and use religion as a justification for their crimes. Such was the case of the Bosnians vs. The Serbs and the Protestants vs. The Catholics of Northern Ireland. To pray for victory in war, points out Twain's old man, is to pray for the death of other people: "If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it." America, of course, has been the victim of such a mentality, one that uses God as a rationale for violence, in the case of the attacks of September 11th. However, America has also been guilty of using the invocation of the Almighty as a justification for victory, and a way of inflaming the spirits of troops: hence, the phrase 'God bless America' in the patriotic anthem, the words 'one nation under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, and the claim that America was fighting 'Godless communism' during the Vietnam War.