An aviation colonel comes to the Western Urals, to a large village of industrial importance. He remembers running here as a barefoot boy with his friend in the early 1930s. Then there was only a small crossing and a small village. About how they lived and studied here, how they became active builders of a new life, how they dreamed of seeing different countries, how they bravely fought the Nazis far from their homeland.

During the Great Patriotic War, battalion commander Pavel Akimov fell in love with the military translator Anechka Belozerova, but the circumstances of military life separated them.

The German-Soviet war. A group of scouts discovers a four-year-old girl at a bombed-out railway station who hid during the bombing and fell behind the echelon of evacuated orphanage children, and takes her with them. Soon the scouts are ambushed by the Germans in the forest.

A poignant love story against the backdrop of the Great Patriotic War.