Eight days after the Balkan war started, the Yugoslav government has finally allowed a few foreign journalists to see civilian victims of NATO's bombardment.
No official casualty figures are available, but at the Clinical Centre of Serbia, a 3,600 bed hospital and the most prestigious of four university medical training centres in Belgrade, a total of 22 wounded civilians have been admitted since March 24th.
It is not clear why the authorities have been so reticent about revealing the effect of the war on their citizens. Information is a scarce commodity at the best of times in President Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia.
By its silence, the government may be trying to keep people from panicking. Or it is possible that the numbers of civilian dead and wounded are relatively low and Belgrade does not want to lose international sympathy by releasing the figures.
But a visit to the intensive care ward of the Clinical Centre is a sobering experience.
Dobrica Vukojicic (43), a farmer from Kragujevac, 100 km south of Belgrade, was admitted on Wednesday. He was near a military installation when NATO bombed it. Between his turban-like bandage and the sheets tucked beneath his chin, we could see only a ginger beard and a peaceful expression. Mr Vukojicic was wounded in the head, and is in a deep coma after brain surgery.
"His name means `good man' in Serbian," Prof Mihail Mitrovic, the head of emergency surgery said, "but he will be very lucky to survive. He has severe inter-cranial bleeding and contra-lateral damage to the surrounding tissue around the wound."
Two of the wounded are teenage boys from Loznica, 150 km southwest of Belgrade on the Drina River, Serbia's border with Bosnia. They were injured when a building collapsed on them during a NATO bombing raid. Thirteen-year-old Dejan Lukic's face kept screwing up and his eyes, one of them badly bruised, blinked open and shut. But Dr Mitrovic said he was not in pain. "This means his coma is not so deep. He is starting to wake up. There is a danger of oedema of the brain - damage that can impair his ability to breathe."
A doctor pulled back the sheet to show us Dejan Lukic's fractured right leg. Splints down either side seemed to hold the broken limb together, but a mass of bleeding flesh showed through the gauze bandage. The oxygen tubes from the boy's nose went to an electronic life-support system.
"Now you see why we cannot move patients; it is not possible, he would not survive" Dr Mitrovic said. "There is a shelter 50 metres from this building, but it has no meaning for the patients, only for the staff."
The Serbs' enthusiastic use of the Internet is an odd twist of this war. Earlier this week, car factory workers in Kragujevac told us they had notified President Clinton of their "human shield" status through the net.
Dr Dragan Micic, the deputy director of the Clinical Centre, must have known what a precarious position he was in, but it was demoralising to read it on the CNN website.
"They said NATO will bomb the ministry of the interior and the military general headquarters," he said.
"These buildings are 100 metres on either side of our hospital. Our gynecology clinic is across the street from the interior ministry. We keep oxygen for incubators on the third and fourth floors, and we have no other place to put them. Opposite the general headquarters is our urology department, where we have severe cases who cannot be moved. We do not make any politics. I only ask that you tell the truth."
Serb refugees from the 19921994 war in Bosnia and the 1995 war in Krajina are again paying a heavy price for their leaders' concept of "Serbdom". More than 300,000 are now estimated to live in Serbia, often in abandoned military facilities which NATO has bombed. Nine refugees were killed in one such bombing in the southern city of Nis.
With his milk-white skin and dark, eastern eyes, 14 year-old Ivan Tanasijevic resembles one of the icons that hang in Orthodox churches. Even his head bandages and the scab on his nose do not alter the impression. By a terrible irony, Ivan was driven out of Srebenica, in Bosnia, when Bosnian Muslims first took it in 1992. The Muslims would be massacred in their thousands by Bosnian Serbs three years later. This refugee boy was injured with Dejan Lukic in the building that collapsed in Loznica. He too suffered severe brain damage, and continues to bleed internally.
"His father came and asked to see him," Dr Dragana Vujadinovic, the head of the intensive care ward, said.
"I think he is a farmer. I told him that his son's condition is very bad, and he sat beside the bed and wept."
The previous night, an 18-year-old Serb refugee from Krajina, Boris Grubjesic, died on Dr Vujadinovic's ward.
Strictly speaking, the young man was not wounded by NATO. But suffering from depression at the prospect of another war, Boris Grubjesic threw himself from the top of the Belgrade McDonald's building and broke his neck and skull.
Terrible as the physical wounds of people like Dobrica Vukojicic, Dejan Lukic and Ivan Tanasijevic are, one has the impression that so far, the greatest blow to the people of Serbia is moral.
Over the past decade of Mr Milosevic's rule, they lost most of the country they once dominated. Their economy collapsed, political freedom evaporated and their isolation became almost total.
"They talk about `tough Serbs', but it's not true," Prof Vladimir Kostic said. "We are like everyone else."
Something broke in 76-year-old Milan Lemajic three nights ago. A fat man with eyes swollen shut and swollen, red hands lying limp at his sides, Mr Lemajic is also counted as a war victim. "We believe he was frightened and in a psychological crisis he attempted suicide," Dr Mitrovic said.
During an air raid alert, the old man jumped from a fourth floor window in a Belgrade suburb on Tuesday night. The doctor holds up an x-ray of Mr Lemajic's skull; a network of cracks run around it, "like a watermelon" says the surgeon.
The majority of the 1,200 doctors at the Clinical Centre of Serbia studied in the US, France or Britain. Like their colleagues in the Yugoslav military, they find it particularly demoralising to be attacked by the countries where they forged so many friendships.
Dozens of email and fax messages from European and American doctors whom they worked with are a small consolation as they labour on between the shadow of the interior ministry and the general headquarters.
Perhaps worst of all, doctors fear that the first eight days of war are only a prelude of worse things to come.
Dr Vujadinovic stocked up on antibiotics and pain-killers and trebled the staff on her ward. The news yesterday that three US soldiers had been captured on the Macedonian-Kosovo border and that NATO had bombed a clearly civilian target - a bridge across the Danube in the northern town of Novi Sad - convinced Dr Dragana and her colleagues they are about to see many more victims of NATO air strikes.