The woodturner from Brno, František Bouček, made five pipes, decorated with an Indian head. He wrapped them up carefully and sent them to his old fellow-fighters from the Second World War. A small incident is connected with each of the recipients of the gifts. The Englishman decides not to give his nephew a sabre for his birthday but to lead him to the way of peace instead. The Frenchman is hurt during a demonstration and has to hide with his friends. He hardly notices the pipe in his faintness. The Greek is a teacher and is taken to be interrogated by the government soldiers. He knows very well that they will want him to reveal all he knows about the people from the village, who were all his pupils once. So he decides to run away and he takes his friend's gift - the pipe - with him. The American is a journalist, and in the ardour of writing down his invented reports, doesn't even know what the pipe should stand for. The Russian recalls the event from the end of the war. At that time, all the recipients of the gifts met together on a little railway station in the North of Germany, where they waited for a train to arrive and smoked together from a single pipe, which then became the pipe of peace.
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