The Long Hours

The book is, in Colette's own register, a war album: forty-odd short pieces that record the First World War from the angles available to a woman near it rather than in the trenches. She writes from hospitals and the rear, from a visit to the Verdun sector, and from Italy, and she attends to what is in front of her — a wounded face, a stripped landscape, the endurance of ordinary people — rather than to strategy or glory.

What gives the book its authority is its refusal of bombast. Colette does not inflate the war into epic; she keeps to the exact, the seen, the small human fact, and lets those carry the weight. The result is a record of the conflict that is unusually free of cliché, and that quietly rebuts the notion that she was indifferent to the history of her time.

The Long Hours belongs with Colette's other wartime writing — Peace Among the Beasts, made in the same years, and the later chronicles of the Second World War. Together they show a writer who met each war by looking closely and reporting without heroics.

There is no plot. The book collects more than forty short pieces of wartime reporting and reflection, written during the First World War. Colette draws on hospital work, a visit to the Verdun sector, correspondence from Italy, and the daily life of a country at war, recording ruined faces and landscapes and the endurance of ordinary people.

The angle is deliberately from behind the front rather than in the trenches, and the manner is plain — attentive to the seen and the specific, with a steady refusal of heroic rhetoric. It reads as a 'war album,' a record of the long, anxious hours of the conflict as a woman near it experienced them.