In the morning the empty streets glistened in the rain and everywhere the air smelled sulphurous from the outgoing cannon fire. All along the main road of what was left of the village that was the front line, the houses were wrecked from air and artillery assaults and so too were the trees and even the road itself. Almost everything of the life the village once knew was gone now, sacrificed to the crude necessity of holding a road upon which little passed but time. Measured against the splintered roofs and burnt-out facades that reached nearly to the horizon, it seemed small compensation. But the road wasn’t the end. It was the means. Because if you followed it to the east, it led out of the edge of town through fields of unharvested corn laced with mines and disappeared into the countryside. They said it went to Vukovar. And on a clear day you could still see the Croatian flag flying from the battered water tower that rose up over the trees in the distance. But for now it only went to Vukovar on the maps and in their memories. It no longer went there in reality. And without more troops and weapons, it was too much to hope for any day soon.

So they parked a captured tank under a tree in the yard of a small house like a sinister lawn ornament with CRO ARMY stencilled in large white letters on the turret and its barrel swung down low to cover the approach. Newly dug trenches snaked along the shoulder of the road resembling a hasty water project, half-finished and half-full with rain. The men who would occupy them stood under broken porches and in garages and courtyards, smoking and sipping coffees and taking shots of home-made šljivovica from unlabelled green bottles, watching the weather and listening to the occasional rumble of outgoing rounds. The bombardment had been sporadic and lazy and though it had lasted more than an hour, there had been no response. With little else to do, the men talked and cajoled to kill the boredom while in the backs of their minds they listened for what they knew would eventually come.

Flores walked quickly along the narrow roadside path littered with the spent cassettes of cluster bombs and branches and bits of clothing here and there until he came to a small, hand-written cardboard sign warning of an unexploded mortar on the trail. He held his camera bag steady under his poncho as he hopped over a tangle of power and telephone lines snaking across the ground and walked around a downed electrical pole, glancing about as he turned up onto the road. A pall of blue smoke drifted among the houses and hung low over the streets, tinged with the odour of burning garbage. A blackbird mocked and Flores ran a couple of steps and looked over his shoulder as he headed back down onto the path, thinking about the convoy with all those wounded stuck out there in the middle of no-man's land now that the cease fire had been broken again.

It was a mess, he thought. A fucking mess. And it was going to stay that way as long as everyone was willing to do just enough to keep it contained so they could stay out of it. And all the monitors and relief convoys and good intentions in the world weren’t going to help anybody. It would almost be funny if you didn't have to live with it, he thought, shaking his head and glancing around at the destroyed houses along the ruined road, knowing he shouldn't be so flippant. The people stuck out there in that convoy didn't have the luxury. And neither did those in the houses and basements and bunkers and farms scattered as far as you could see, every one of them holding on to the smallest rumor, the least bit of hope of some sort of salvation as if it were their last piece of bread. Like the young Guardsman sitting on the dirt floor of a front-line basement one day with his rifle cradled against his chest, talking about how the commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Adriatic came from a Croat family. It was one of those curious bits of information that you found everywhere that was as interesting as it was useless. From the look in the boy's eyes it was clear that he was winnowing for any evidence that the tarot of the universe was working in their favor. He wore an American surplus uniform with the name BONNER stencilled over the breast pocket and a World War II vintage American helmet he had scavenged somewhere. It was obvious that there was little short of declaring war on the Serbs that America could do to live up to the boy's high hopes.

At the intersection Flores glanced about as he jogged across and then looked up into the drizzle, feeling the chilly rain on his face and thinking of the Serbs out there, waiting. If you climbed up into the attic of any of the frontline houses and pushed out a clay roof tile or two or poked your head through those that were already missing, you could easily spot the tanks a few hundred meters away, squatting on the rises in the shimmering corn fields or under trees along the edge of the forests or hunkered down near houses or barns. The Serbs had gradually swallowed up most of the countryside around Nuštar until they were surrounded on three sides like a fist in a purse. But after the lines had solidified, they had only used the tanks as mobile cannon to get in close and bombard the town along with artillery. With a long lens you could gaze right into their domesticity, almost smell the sweat they seemed to exude with their unshaven faces and disheveled hair as a soldier with a foam-rimmed mouth brushed his teeth and spat, or someone in a camouflage cap with a neck flap that flopped like a dog's ear in the wind as he paced back and forth, grinding coffee in a brass pipe-like mill with a small crank handle on one end, holding the contraption in his chest as he cranked and cranked and cranked on it like a pepper grinder to make enough for a couple of morning coffees, gazing out across the fields at the ragged rooftops of the town beyond. They poured the grounds into a cup of hot water and let it steep and then drank it off all the way down to the sugared sludge that was left in the bottom. Sometimes they drank that too, soaking it down with a shot of šljivovica for a bit of bite that would pick you up for a while and then drop you down so low that you felt tired and defeated at ten o'clock in the morning if you weren't used to it.

Sometimes they sat about in the yards eating soup and bread and roast pig or lamb, whatever they could find to slaughter or whatever they could scrounge from the kitchens of houses that all looked the same on both sides, ransacked with silverware and broken plates smeared with their last meal scattered on the floor and out the door into the yard. The toilets no longer worked, so they improvised where was convenient with whatever was at hand. Sofas sat out on lawns for naps in the sun. Chickens pecked the dried earth. Occasionally a pig ran about, but never for long. The men dug holes or sat about cleaning their rifles and talking aimlessly and you could pick out the small details of their lives and come so close as to almost imagine the rest. From afar they simply looked like men from anywhere who had given up their day jobs and let their beards go to enjoy the lack of discipline. From their expressions it was impossible to discern their politics if you didn't have ideas about them already each time a tank fired and rolled back on its haunches from the recoil as they picked the town apart one shell at a time.

The Croats liked to boast that the Serbs were cowards who'd rather pot shot civilians than fight, and they believed it because for the time being it was all they had. Without more men and equipment they had to settle for however the Serbs wanted to play, which until that morning had been a waiting game. But as Flores walked along staring at the ground, he wondered how long it could go on. Everyone on both sides knew the towns were the only places the Croats could fight. And if the Serbs wanted them, sooner or later they had to go in and get them. It was as simple as that. And as another round of cannon fire went out from somewhere just down the road, Flores picked up the pace.