The War Prayer by Mark Twain

     O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst.

Mark Twain, "The War Prayer" in Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race, ed. Janet Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 67.

-as cited by-

Howard Zinn, Terrorism And War, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 100-101.