Mark Twain, like many young men North and South, decided that the Civil War was not to his taste, and went West. In 1887 he addressed a reunion of Maryland Union troops and gave a short, humorous, and dark, look at his war:
“When your secretary invited me to this reunion of the Union veterans of Maryland he requested me to come prepared to clear up a matter which he said had long been a subject of dispute and bad blood in war circles in this country – to wit, the true dimensions of my military services in the Civil War, and the effect they had upon the general result. I recognise the importance of this thing to history, and I have come prepared. Here are the details.
I was in the Civil War two weeks. In that brief time I rose from private to second lieutenant. The monumental feature of my campaign was the one battle which my command fought – it was in the summer of ’61. If I do say it, it was the bloodiest battle ever fought in human history; there is nothing approaching it for destruction of human life in the field, if you take into consideration the forces engaged and the proportion of death to survival. And yet you do not even know the name of that battle. Neither do I. It had a name, but I have forgotten it. It is no use to keep private information which you can’t show off. In our battle there were just 15 men engaged on our side – all brigadier-generals but me, and I was a second-lieutenant. On the other side there was one man. He was a stranger. We killed him. It was night, and we thought it was an army of observation; he looked like an army of observation – in fact, he looked bigger than an army of observation would in the day time; and some of us believed he was trying to surround us, and some thought he was going to turn our position, and so we shot him.
Poor fellow, he probably wasn’t an army of observation after all, but that wasn’t our fault; as I say, he had all the look of it in the dim light. It was a sorrowful circumstance, but he took the chances of war, and he drew the wrong card; he over-estimated his fighting strength, and he suffered the likely result; but he fell as the brave should fall – with his face to the front and feet to the field – so we buried him with the honours of war, and took his things.
So began and ended the only battle in the history of the world where the opposing force was utterly exterminated, swept from the face of the earth – to the last man. And yet you don’t know the name of that battle; you don’t even know the name of that man.
Now, then, for the argument. Suppose I had continued in the war, and gone on as I began, and exterminated the opposing forces every time – every two weeks – where would your war have been? Why, you see yourself, the conflict would have been too one-sided. There was but one honourable course for me to pursue, and I pursued it. I withdrew to private life, and gave the Union cause a chance. There, now, you have the whole thing in a nutshell; it was not my presence in the Civil War that determined that tremendous contest – it was my retirement from it that brought the crash. It left the Confederate side too weak.”
Twain could see the good and bad in both sides, and after the War became a friend of General Grant. The older he got the more cynical he got, and his final biting verdict on the enthusiasm for war that he saw as a young man at the start of the Civil War is his 1907 War Prayer:
Twain had the good sense not to publish this during his life, and like most of what he wrote it is perhaps more glib than wise.
Good post. I think that Mark Twain’s prayer-poem of 1907 is very wise indeed. I seem to recall Hawkeye on that TV show MASH saying something like this: “War is war and hell is hell, and of the two war is worse.” I went on a nuclear submarine because I was a coward. I did not want to see men being shot at and disemboweled on the field of battle. I did not want that to happen to myself. So I figured that if I had to die, then let it be by the instantaneous implosion of the pressure hull when a Soviet torpedo strikes it (from which reference you may surmise my age).
I’m not sure I agree that his prayer was more “glib than wise.” War is very ugly, and it seems to summon the evil one–without fail, I think. His joyless delight is in the sudden, unexpected and unprovided death of war-fighters and civilians alike. For the survivors, he does his best to induce despair and sorrow (even if it’s called “PTSD” or “shell shock” or what have you). I’ve seen the worst of combat, and I have to say, I’m with Twain on this one.
Twain saw almost none of the horrors of War himself, and his bitter comment belies the fairly generous peace that followed the War. How many wars end with both armies sent home to live in peace at the end, as if a sporting contest had ended? The peace would have been even more generous if Lincoln had not been murdered.
Wow! You weren’t kidding about the first comment being dark, the prayer being cynical. As I read the first, …he seems determined to be provocative. As I read the prayer, …he seems to brand every warfighter as a bloodthirsty lunatic. In general, he seems quite contemptuous of any manner of a fight.
…I find I’m wondering: How did the veterans react? His description of a battle… seems almost a mockery. Men who had been under arms for some time might well be enraged. Some might hear “fightin’ words”, …and act accordingly.
MASH…I enjoyed watching reruns as a teen. Yet a few years later, I had to reconsider. They mostly sought to portray war in both its humor and its tragedy. Yet sometimes they forgot how much Western and Eastern values… conflict.
War IS ugly and should not be engaged lightly. Even so, …there are times when you must either fight or surrender crucial principles.
My answer to Twain would be the deaths that occurred behind the lines in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Red China, Cambodia, etc. Some monsters have to be destroyed in war because they would kill more in “peace”.