Carrying red roses in the bright afternoon sunshine, their white nurses' coats flapping in the breeze, the staff of Kacanik clinic yesterday went to honour three of their colleagues, some of the 35 Albanians killed by Serb forces and buried in a mass grave.
The three nurses, Jehona Raka and Luminje Raka (both 22), and Emsale Frangu (17), were butchered along with at least 19 others when Serb police, enraged by their failure to crush guerrillas in the nearby hills, took revenge on the civilians of Kacanik on the morning of April 8th.
The dead are among at least 35 people killed at various times by the Serbs in April and May.
"This is the tradition for Albania. You bring them roses when they died in the flower of their youth," said fellow nurse Rita Mjaku (24), who survived because she was able to flee from the town clinic to the hills as the Serbs entered the town.
"We escaped into the trees, but we could hear the shooting behind us," said Ms Mjaku. "The Serbs took some of the bodies and buried them, and we came back later and buried the rest. They killed anyone they found, women, little children. Some people tried to run into their houses but the Serbs killed them. Now we must give them a proper funeral."
The graves sit now, plots of drying fresh earth, at the town's Muslim cemetery alongside the main road which has brought NATO pouring into Kosovo from nearby Macedonia. The killings are all the worse for having happened in such a small community. Kacanik, a small town deep in a gorge that leads to Macedonia, had perhaps 15,000 inhabitants before the ethnic cleansing.
The two Raka women, though not sisters, appear to have been distant cousins. One of the difficulties for families is identifying the graves. The Serbs simply dug holes and threw in the corpses.
Kacanik was for months a hotbed of guerrilla activity, with battles raging between KLA rebels in the hills and Serb units trying to secure the border area. In March, Serb forces pushed 3,000 townspeople onto the stretch of road between here and the border. In April, they returned to do worse.
"There were 21 killed from one street," said Lieut Col Naithan Prussian of the US 82nd Airborne division, newly arrived in Kosovo and whose troops now guard the cemetery. "There are 35 graves altogether."
The dead were all slaughtered in a single street, Emin Duraku, the main shopping street, which is now a jumble of ruined burned houses, overturned cars and smashed glass. Ironically, Emin Duraku was an Albanian partisan who fought with the Serbs to liberate Kosovo in the second World War. Now the street is almost empty, apart from one or two old people and squads from the Kosovo Liberation Army.
"Sure, this shocked us, but this is not the first day for us," said the KLA's local commander, Jabiu Zharkin of the 166 Brigade. "They attacked that street when they couldn't fight against the KLA."
He said he had told NATO of two more mass graves nearby, one, in the hills, containing 100 bodies, and that his men were demining the entrance roads to allow war crimes investigators to the scene.
The only bright spot was the arrival home of the first tractor-loads of refugees, their journey made easier because the border control point 10 km to the south was seized the night before by the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army. Meanwhile American attack helicopters thundered in the skies above as convoys of US troops began to drive into Kosovo.
Kacanik is likely to be only the start of the chamber of horrors which awaits the war crimes experts.
Investigators from the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, heading the UN's war crimes investigation, say they want to examine 27 reported mass grave sites, of which Kacanik is only one.