And that seemed atrocious to him, quite reasonably, of course

How strange to think that Mark Twain fought in the Civil War, and that his ‘belligerence’ (as Leopoldo Lugones would have called it) lasted for a couple of weeks. He formed a kind of regiment with his friends. I don’t know how many there would have been of them . . . no, in fact, there wouldn’t have been enough for a regiment. They learnt to ride a horse—they hadn’t known how to until then—and they went from plantation to plantation. And they were well received—each time the enemy approached, they effected a strategic withdrawal (laughs). And then, one day, they were camping out in some place, and they saw a man on horseback, and they decided—since, after all, they were at war—that this horseman was an enemy fighter. So they opened fire on him, and then realized to their horror, when the man fell off his horse, that they had killed him. And then it turned out that he wasn’t a soldier at all, he was a regular horseman. But they all felt the horror of having killed a man, and they disbanded. And that was the ‘belligerence’ of Mark Twain. It appeared in an article years later—he felt the horror. There had been a number of them all together but he’d also opened fire on that man, and it was possible that he killed him, and that seemed atrocious to him, quite reasonably, of course. And fortunately that was the end of his involvement in the war. Then he was a miner in California, he was a pilot in the Mississippi, and he wrote his books which we all remember. And he was responsible for good works, particularly in the South. A good-natured man.

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