Weeks ago, at the beginning of the stay at home orders meant to slow the Coronavirus, an American friend forwarded a message from a Hungarian friend who was living in Switzerland. It was a poster featuring a black and white photograph of a soldier standing in the rising mist next to a small guard house. The words, in English, read “Your grandfather was asked to go to war, you’re being asked to sit on the couch.” It also had the address of a Dutch website encouraging the Dutch people to stand together against Coronavirus.

I’ve asked several historian colleagues if they recognize the photograph or the uniform worn by the soldier, but no one does. So the facts about the provenance of this poster are sketchy, but its message remains powerful.

When I first saw the image and thought that it was Swiss, I immediately thought that the analogy failed because the Swiss did not fight in WWII. They remained neutral.

Then I started thinking about the iconic images of WWII that flash through Americans’ minds. They are almost all of groups of people experiencing an event together. There are photos of soldiers together in fox holes, or working as a team to raise the flag on a Pacific island while under fire, or a bomber crew walking to their plane, or soldiers smiling with liberated civilians. Even the famous photos from the concentration camps show people suffering together. The images from the home front, such as the Rosie the Riveters on the assembly lines, show the same community activity.

But because they remained neutral but were located in the heart of a continent-wide battlefield, the Swiss had a very different experience of the war. The Swiss guarded their borders, sometimes alone or with one other man at the post. Swiss soldiers would have experienced long, lonely months on the frontier. Unlike the soldiers of other armies who fought in units and in common, Swiss soldiers standing guard along a mountainous frontier would have had an isolating war.

That sense of isolation, which the black and white photo in the poster captures so brilliantly, does offer a good analogy for the Coronavirus lockdown in which everyone is isolated to his or her own couch. We are now all being asked to stand guard in self-isolation. It’s very different than going to war in the 1940s, unless you were guarding a lonely frontier.