Dawn had brought a long column of khaki-coloured armoured trucks rolling into the capital of the mountain kingdom, with headlights cutting through the smoke of morning cooking fires. By evening the mortuary was filled with bodies, the hospital struggled to treat the wounded and the reek of teargas mingled with the smell of burned buildings.
At least 10 people were dead, about 60 had been wounded and the burned hulks of shops and colonial-style government buildings smouldered. In the streets of Maseru, South Africa's decision to send a 600-man force to prop up the four-month-old government of the Prime Minister, Mr Pakalitha Mosisili, was condemned in word and deed.
"It is despicable to say the least. It was unnecessary because everybody knew that talks would eventually resume," said the opposition Basotho National Party leader, Mr Evaristus Sekhonyana.
He blamed President Nelson Mandela of South Africa, who was meeting President Clinton in Washington as his troops went into battle for the first time since white rule made way for democracy.
Mr Frank Ralebitso, a driver for a company whose premises were burned, said the South Africans had fuelled and not quelled the simmering conflict in Lesotho.
"Those SANDF (South African National Defence Force) guys, we hate them. They must go. We have had peace here for the past six weeks and now they have come and destroyed it," he said.
Those with less to say vented their anger on South African-registered cars and South African-owned shops. Some drivers had their vehicles taken from them at gunpoint.
South African soldiers were jeered and abused as they patrolled the streets in their armoured vehicles with helmeted soldiers training binoculars on the civilians watching from the shelter of walls and trees.
South African soldiers talking in the Afrikaans language of the former apartheid government disarmed prisoners amongst the Lesotho soldiers who had backed the uprising against Mr Mosisili's government.