This is a story about the war, seen through the eyes of a young physicist who went to the front. The author, while regularly fulfilling his duties as an artillery reconnaissance officer, did not forget about his former specialty. And he approached the assessment of many events from the position of a rationally thinking physicist. There is no fiction here, no embellishment. Everything is stated as it was - an unbiased eyewitness account. As befits a person who has devoted himself to the exact sciences. But with a caveat - I had to restore almost everything from memory. No personal records from that time have survived, only letters from the front remain. And memory is sometimes deceptive. And the perception of what is happening is not always clear. Even when we, former fellow soldiers - participants in the same events, meet and exchange memories, different ideas about what happened often emerge. So, inaccuracies in certain details cannot be ruled out.