The blood tells the story. If you stick pins in a map for all the places in Kosovo where bodies are stuffed down wells, roasted in their burning homes or left in the fields to rot, you get a pattern. The pattern corresponds to the areas of guerrilla activity of the Kosovo Liberation Army in its war against the Serbs. While this may not excuse what was done, it does help to make sense of the apparently random discoveries of graves and torture chambers across the province.
Some Serb forces, it is now clear, went berserk in the days following NATO's decision to bomb. In a few days of grisly findings, the alliance has doubled the estimated number of killed civilians to 10,000. And that is just the graves already found. Not until the million-plus deportees from Kosovo have been accounted for, and the missing people subtracted, will the true figure be known. And many of the dead, like those put in the ovens of the special forces base at the Feronkl factory in Glogovac, may never be found.
"I have obviously been very saddened by the evidence of mass graves but I have to say I am not surprised," said Mrs Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. "We must face the awfulness of this problem. People must be brought to accountability and responsibility."
Finding the bodies is terrifyingly easy. Get in a car, drive to a village, stop one of the locals, and they will take you to a place, usually behind some trees, down a shady lane, or in a damp basement, where the horrors you see make you glad you could not hear the screams.
Some atrocities were direct reprisals for KLA attacks last year - none of the correspondents who have been in Kosovo for many months were surprised to hear that graves had been found at Velika Krusa, Mali Krusa, Djakovica, Suva Reka, Glogovac and Pec. All were hotbeds of KLA activity.
Some atrocities had a logic, however grim, in which the Serbs, wanting to empty a valley of people, knew that the slaying of a few would encourage the rest to flee. The KLA soldier near Glogovac who showed The Irish Times the site of the execution of his children and 50 other people this week was frank about the reasons. "They knew that if they kill some, the rest will flee."
Other atrocities seem to have been casual. Many, especially rapes, were opportunistic - that is, they were committed in places, such as checkpoints, in which large numbers of refugees were gathered, together with security forces.
Overall, Drenica and the western regions - Pec, Djakovo, Prizren - have been hit hard. The south and east, which stayed out of the war, have suffered less, though ethnic cleansing, looting and robbery was common there.
But the violence was not, apparently random. Rather, those willing to commit it appear to have been ordered to do it - or, perhaps, simply allowed to do what they had long wanted to - by higher authority.
This is where the UN's War Crimes Tribunal comes in. The first stage of their investigations is to collect this grisly evidence - not in the hope of finding direct evidence like finger prints, but to establish that an atrocity was committed, when and where. The second stage is cross-referencing this bank of material with the dispositions of Serb units. NATO has said it will provide intelligence, both from reconnaissance and eavesdropping, which, combined with surviving witnesses, may help identify the culprits.
Already NATO has pointed the finger of suspicion not just at President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and his commanders, but at a number of known special units of army and police. Many paramilitary units were formed from Serbs living in villages and towns in the province, with eyewitnesses likely to provide details.
This worked reasonably well in Bosnia. While only a fraction of those who committed atrocities - 79 - have ever been charged, there is evidence linking thousands more which Bosnia's own courts may one day process.
But the fact is that most of those who commit war crimes get away with it, for the simple reason that there are no witnesses left to tell the story.
The numbers killed, meanwhile, indicate that the West is wrong in blaming all the ethnic cleansing on Mr Milosevic and a tight coterie. In fact, killing that many Kosovars in a few short weeks meant a lot of people were directly involved.
It will also mean that reconciliation is probably impossible, for two reasons. First is simple hate on the part of the Kosovars at what was done to them. Second, is fear. They know that those paramilitaries, given the chance, would do it all again.
Against this background, disarming of the KLA looks to be one of NATO's wildest fantasies.