The writer Vasil Bykov is a participant in the Great Patriotic War, which determined the themes, plots and choice of characters in his works. His story is, first of all, about a man tortured by the icy water of swamps, the wet clay of trenches, the emptiness of the forest in a no-man's land, the uncertainty of the outcome of the war, the temptation of powerlessness, hopelessness, apostasy, the infinity of muddy roads... In the story “Love me, soldier... "tells about the last day of the war, which found a young artillery lieutenant in a small Austrian town, where love unexpectedly came to him, tragically cut short by the bestial cruelty of man.