The film takes place in the time interval from the first days of the Great Patriotic War until the middle of the winter of 1941-1942, until the beginning of the Soviet counterattack near Moscow. The correspondent of the army military newspaper Ivan Sintsov, who was on vacation, was returning to his unit as part of the Western Front when the war began. However, he failed to get to the unit. Already in the first days, under the onslaught of the Wehrmacht, Soviet troops retreated. Instead of his unit, he got to the assembly point in the city of Borisov. There he was sent to headquarters along with another officer.