SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 71 (of 78)
Too Hot to Handle (1905)
Chapter 71
Too Hot to Handle (1905)
Near the end of 1905, I reached the Scriptural statute of limitations. Seventy years of age; three score and ten. I was a time-expired man, to use Kipling’s phrase.
I felt free, at this advanced age, to write what I wanted to, without worrying about what people thought about what I had written, or about me. I also felt the need to do it while I could—that is, while time remained to me. So I wrote, among other things, “The War Prayer” that year; I do not think it will ever be published—at least, not in my lifetime. It is too shocking, too blatant a broadside against accepted dogma. Actually, I did submit it to Harper’s Bazaar, but they did not have the courage to print it. I do not blame them, as they have families to feed, and thus readers to please.
I take full blame for “The War Prayer,” but truth be told, the thoughts it conveys were sown in my brain during a speech given in Keokuk, Iowa, in 1861 by that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean.
The older I get, the more I agree with Dean’s radical premise: praying for the success of one side in carnal conflict is tantamount to praying for the maiming and killing of the combatants on the other side, and for the lifelong heartache of their loved ones left behind.
When it is death that results to the combatants, it is not they who bear the bulk of the suffering. Rather, when warriors die, they are liberated from the pain and strife of this life. The supreme sufferers are rather those who “survive”; but can the existence that thereafter falls to the share of the bereaved really be called by such a strong term as “survival,” or is it something else and less altogether?
Calm and sedate reflection lead to the conclusion that statesmanship differs from assmanship only on account of the spelling. Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys following this process of grotesque self-deception.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Twain’s official biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, first printed an extract from “The War Prayer” in his biography of Twain, which was published in 1912, two years after Twain’s death; Paine did not publish it in its entirety until 1923, five years after World War 1 (then called “The Great War”) had ended.
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“The War Prayer” was not the only occasion on which Twain took up the cudgels against warfare. He also wrote:
Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one who gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out . . . and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. . . . He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people’s countries, and them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man” – with his mouth.
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It is unknown whether Twain was familiar with Stephen Crane’s 1896 poem War Is Kind. That effort by the author of Red Badge of Courage made the same point that Twain did here—that those who suffered the most from war’s ravages were those at home who contributed sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, and close friends to the relentlessly grinding apparatus of warfare.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.