The film focuses on the circumstances of a young Lieutenant in the Red Army, Grigori Anokhin, played by Yuri Tarasov, who is stuck in a sanatorium but eager to return to the front in order "to kill the Fascists", as he says. Traumatized by witnessing the massacre of his comrades, he has taken to drink, and he is ready to exact revenge. His attempts to return to the front, however, are frustrated, when he is assigned a different mission. With a team of soldiers unfit for duty at the front, he is ordered to take a group of fifteen German prisoners and their commanding officer to the remote village of Polumgla to construct a radio tower for use as an airplane beacon. With the ability to communicate only in rudimentary phrases and left to their own devices far away from the war, the villagers, soldiers, and the German prisoners slowly begin to coexist peacefully. The film ends with a detachment of NKVD soldiers arriving and declaring that the war is over, and that the radio tower the German prisoners of war have been working on for a year is no longer of any use. All of the German prisoners of war, many of whom have become intimate with the village women, are marched off into the woods and executed.—ETO History Buff