ALPHABET OF THE GREAT WAR

André Hellé’s Alphabet of the Great War 1914-1916 for the Children of our Soldiers is the first of three picture books that the artist created as a personal reaction to the Great War. In these books Hellé made use of the graphical and textual tropes that he had developed to write his famous children’s stories about toy soldiers and their endless conflicts. This approach let him present the war to the children of France in a form with which they were already familiar. As portrayed in the Alphabet, the war is merely one more conflict between two armies of his toy soldiers: calm, and with no explicit carnage or destruction. It was an overtly patriotic work, rationalising the horrors of war to homes that were suddenly without fathers; yet his darkly ironic faux-naïf style could still suggest the absurdities of the war to the adult eye, as if by accident, in the manner he had perfected in the literary and satirical magazines of pre-war Paris. There is a paradox inherent in translating an alphabet, but since many of the original words had ready English equivalents, the Flowerdew Press translation has largely preserved Hellé’s alphabetical narrative structure. The Alphabet starts with the entry A is for Alsace. This was logical as it marked the beginning of the Great War for France, but it was also highly symbolic: both he and his publisher were Alsatian war-exiles. By having Z is for Zouave as the last entry, he hints at the isolation of the Central Powers in the world’s first truly global conflict. However, it is also self-referential: illustrated alphabets, he says, always end with Zouave; suggesting a possible secondary, ironical, reading of the Alphabet. Hellé revisited this approach after the war in 1919, with his astonishing Book of Hours Heroic and Dolorous for the Years 1914-1915-1916-1917-1918.. This second work, directed at adults, is filled with a melancholy that reflected his own sense of loss. Later in 1919 he also wrote The Alphabet of the Great Peace, which reflected the implications of the armistice for the children of France. The Flowerdew Press edition is a mimotyped facsimile of the original, with English text in the place of the French original. An additional feature is a set mimotype of 6 WWI French patriotic school posters also by Hellé, and a French postcard that he designed featuring a young girl missing her soldier father.