Two Prayers
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
No soldier ever went to war absent a prayer for victory; none came home absent the burden of it.
My many times great uncle Sam wrote that when we pray for victory, two prayers are heard.
When we have prayed to God to grant our soldiers victory, he wrote, we have also prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it.
We have prayed, he wrote, that other soldiers be torn to bloody shreds; that foreign fields be covered with the pale forms of their patriot dead; that the thunder of guns be drowned with the shrieks of their wounded writhing in pain; that their homes be wasted with a hurricane of fire; that we wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; that we 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 that same God for the refuge of the grave and denied it.
For our sakes who adore God, he wrote, we ask Him to 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.
Uncle Sam, whose last name was Clemens, called it The War Prayer, the one we hear in the dark pit of our heart, when we utter the prayer for victory we hear in our ear. His publisher refused to print it, fearing it might tarnish the man many knew and loved as Mark Twain. It was made public for the first time in a collection of stories and essays called “Europe and Elsewhere,” thirteen years after Sam died.
It may have darkened the notion that there is honor and glory to win for the flag or, as he put it, fail and die the noblest of noble deaths, but I don’t think it threw any shade on Sam.
I’d rather anyway our prayers paraphrase the words of another great being, and that in Veterans Days to come we pray that every one of us — every one of us — will fight no more, forever.