"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;

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"Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;

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"Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;

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"Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;

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"Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;

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"Help us to turn them out roofless with 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 –

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"For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord,

Blast their hopes,

Blight their lives,

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"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."

 

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(After a pause.)

 

"Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, Speak!

The messenger of the Most High waits!"

 

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic,

because there was no sense in what he said.  

Mark Twain

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___________________________________________

 

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Outraged by United States military invasion of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote "The War Prayer" in 1905 and submitted it to Harper's Bazaar.  

 

Harper's Bazaar rejected "The War Prayer" as being "too radical," as did other publishers, editors, and publications. 

 

Twain's stunning "The War Prayer" remained unpublished in any book until 1923, 13 years after Twain's death and five years after the end of "The War To End All Wars," which consumed the World from 1914 to 1918.

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Mark Twain on the Philippine-American War

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     "There is the case of the Philippines. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess.

 

     "Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives.

 

     "I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial.

 

     "It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas.

 

     "That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.

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     "I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation."

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Mark Twain

October 6, 1900, New York World

New York City, New York