What 1905 anti-war story by Mark Twain was published posthumously in 1916?

Mark Twain’s 1905 anti-war story was The War Prayer. It is a short, sharply satirical work in which patriotic worshippers ask for victory, while an enigmatic stranger reveals the unspoken consequences of their prayer: the suffering and destruction inflicted on the enemy.

Twain wrote the piece during a period shaped by the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. Its attack on patriotic and religious enthusiasm was so uncompromising that Twain did not publish it during his lifetime. Family members, friends, and his publisher feared that readers would consider the work sacrilegious or fanatical.

The publication history is often simplified. The story is commonly associated with a posthumous 1916 appearance, but bibliographic discussions note that the November 1916 Harper’s item frequently cited in connection with it was actually a concluding chapter of The Mysterious Stranger. The War Prayer was clearly published after Twain’s death and appeared in the collection Europe and Elsewhere in 1923.

The Great Dark and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg are also Twain works, but neither is this specifically anti-war parable.