A Theory of Truces

Abstract

On August 14, 1945, Edith Shain, a 27-year-old nurse at Doctors Hospital in New York, left her shift and ran into the street to celebrate the surrender of the Japanese. A few moments after she reached Times Square, a sailor embraced her. “Someone grabbed me and kissed me, and I let him because he fought for his country,” she told the Washington Post many years later.¹ A snapshot of the kiss, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt and published by Life magazine, became one of the most famous images of the last century. Ms. Shain’s explanation for its popularity: The picture “says so many things: hope, love, peace and tomorrow. The end of the war was a wonderful experience, and that photo represents all those feelings.”² This is how wars ends. Men stop killing each other and start kissing pretty nurses instead. We leave the fighting behind. Permanently. We demobilize. We go back to work. We go back to school. We start families and have babies. Violence is replaced by its opposite.