THE BOOK OF HOURS

André Hellé’s Book of Hours Heroic and Dolorous for the Years 1914-1915-1916-1917-1918 is the second 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 let him present the war to the children of France in a form with which they were already familiar. As portrayed in Helle's Alphabet of the Great War 1914-1916 for the Children of our Soldiers, the war is merely one more conflict between two of his armies of toy soldiers: calm, and with no explicit carnage or destruction. It was an overtly patriotic work, rationalising the horrors of war to homes 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 writing for the literary and satirical magazines of pre-war Paris. The genius of Hellé’s 1919 Book of Hours lies in its using this same naïve tone to tell the story of the now-concluded war to adults, not children; to those very citizens who had lived through the horror of it all. It presents the failures, tragedies and victories to them as if they were unfamiliar phenomena requiring an explanation. The Flowerdew Press edition is a mimotyped facsimile of the original, with English text in the place of the French original. Each of the pochoir illustrations was accompanied by a facsimile of an official document or news report describing a significant moment in the war: while the words gave the picture a context, the picture served as an ironic commentary on both the event and its description. Taken on their own, however, the 143 captioned panels become a Candide-like graphic novel of the first ever World War.