AndrŽ HellŽÕs ÒAlphabet of the Great PeaceÓ
AndrŽ HellŽÕs Alphabet of the Great Peace is the third of three picture books that the artist created as a personal reaction to the Great War. In these books HellŽ made use of the graphical and textual tropes that he had developed to write his famous childrenÕs 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 of the Great War, 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-na•f 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.
HellŽ 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 full of a melancholy that reflected his own sense of loss.
When HellŽ came to sketch out the Alphabet of the Great Peace, he seemed to wish to imbue his young audienceÑsome of whom may have never before known peaceÑwith, if not a sanguine outlook, then one that was grateful for the opportunities brought by the Armistice, of the antebellum life continuing. The war is hinted at by reference to nights in air raid shelters, meagre harvests, and the heroicism of their parentsÕ generation. Several entries do touch on the potential of the world for violenceÑquarrels between boys, toys to be struck, a crab pinchingÑ but by and large the entries deal with the events of a peacetime rural childhood.
There are the usual abecedarian tricksÑKermesse for K, X for X, and a reprise of Y for Yacht from the Alphabet of the Great WarÑbut the entries are mostly uncontrived, and the translated alphabet has maintained the order of the original. The final entry, Z for Zenith, had an unwarranted hope for the future, as HellŽ lived to see the rise of Fascism and a war that surpassed the last one in violence and extent. Read consecutively, the three picture books can be seen as reflecting HellŽÕs emotional journey from shock and outrage, to a transcending hope that the joint sacrifice had some higher purpose to it.