The book is based on the personal military diaries of soldier Vasily Churkin and messages from the Soviet Information Bureau. The reader has a rare opportunity not to listen to other people's conclusions, but to independently compare the official look at the pictures of the battles with a look at them from the trench, as they say, in real time. The summaries are correlated by date and place with the diary entries of Vasily Churkin. In this contrast, not only the "half-truthfulness" of the official version becomes obvious, but also all its silences and outright lies. And all the more valuable is this diary, an openly truthful story about the war of its simple participant.