André Hellé - Alphabet de la Grande Guerre 1914-1916 - 1917

André Hellé, Alphabet of the Great War, a book for children. 1917
The covers are somewhat dirty with handling marks and red ink on the back cover. The corners are worn and dulled. The interior is very clean and the colors are vivid, with no creases and the volumes are very well bound. Rare in this condition for a book of more than a century.
The Alphabet of the Great War. This military ABC had a pedagogical aim: to explain to young children the conflict they were enduring and of which they were powerless witnesses. Designed to form an essential aid to learning to read, the work rests on pairing a letter, in alphabetical order, with an aspect of the conflict summarized in a short paragraph and illustrated by an image, both chosen—arbitrarily—by the author and imbued with a spirit at least patriotic, if not vengeful toward Germany. Text and image thus complement each other to guide children in constructing their representation of the war. But the graphics of André Hellé, pared-down, colorful and naïve, offer a sanitized image of the conflict very far from the reality, that of a war with no deaths or violence where the characters resemble friendly toys more than warriors. At the same time, it testifies to the modernity of this extraordinary creator.