The duration of eight hundred eighty-four days, one hundred twenty-six weeks, twenty-eight months, four and a half semesters, and almost three years encompasses the steps of a soldier of the National Army who was caught up in the storm of the Civil War. The unknown and nameless soldier with the full name Georgios Gizis, drafted from the class of 1946, is one of the many thousands who were called to mandatory military service and found themselves fighting on the frontlines of fire. However, he is one of the very few conscripts in the National Army who thought, armed only with the knowledge he gained in elementary school, to keep handwritten notes, documenting the details of the civil war confrontation as he experienced it on the geographically extensive front of the war.

The diary kept by this ordinary scribe, a conscious escapee from the world of the voiceless of history, of the army of the unknown, is esteemed as a historical source, with the significance of a bright fragment. This is because the author, with clarity, sincerity, sometimes humor, and sparing on self-referential comments, intertwines his personal experience with that of the collective, that is, with what they all lived as a military adventure and human anxiety — "the soldiers," "the kids," "the comrades." In other words, he captures the social climate of the time, the daily life of military service, attests to the sufferings of the body, the fears of the lurking death, the psychology of the ordinary soldiers, and the behavior of the officers of the National Army.

In the soldier's diary entries, reflections of the world of armed or unarmed military opponents are mirrored. He usually encounters them in circumstances of searches, ambushes, conflicts, skirmishes, small or large battles, sometimes fleeing, sometimes as prisoners, often as wounded or surrendered, and frequently he sees them as dead, even recording the decapitations of those killed in battle. It seems he maintains a personal distance from this act, noting: "they cut off the head of a rebel captain."

The Diary, as a micro-historical document, is the written commemoration of the individualized, yet also collectively experienced, military encounter. It is a personal, experiential testimony that, despite the inherent partiality or subjectivity, rightfully integrates as a distinct segment of the History of the Civil War.