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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.”[40] The congregation sits speechless, startled by this sudden, unwelcome outburst, and Twain concludes: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”[41] Compact in expression, hard-hitting
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