In the eight years since Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, its body politic tearing away in successive violent convulsions, Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and the pride of a federation that had lost four of its six republics, had never been touched.
Before Wednesday night, NATO said it attacked Serb forces in Kosovo province first. But from the onset of cruise missiles and aerial bombardments, Belgrade was assaulted. Despite some damage to schools, factories and housing, it was apparent even in official Yugoslav statements that the Western alliance kept its word in striking mainly military targets.
Contrary to initial rumours, the first 10 fatalities admitted by the government turned out to be soldiers, not civilians. But the destruction of sites in and around the capital was a powerful psychological blow.
The residents of Belgrade watched with incredulity and rage as buildings and factories in densely-populated suburbs, and even near the city centre, exploded in flames - like the Fourth of July military camp in Vozdovac, near downtown Belgrade, or Pancevo town, just across the Danube river and home to the Utva military aircraft factory.
The Batajnica military airport in the suburbs north of the city was burning furiously when we drove past it after another air raid on Thursday night. About the same time, anyone watching Toska mountain on the outskirts of Belgrade would have seen a Serb anti-aircraft missile intercept a cruise missile in mid-air explosion.
Serb claims to have downed three NATO aircraft are believed to refer to unmanned cruise missiles - perhaps the reason Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic singled out air combat forces yesterday for praise.
No Serb can be sure that he, his friends or family might not end up as "collateral damage". And in a war of muddled motive and unpredictable endings, there is an intense fear that NATO will soon move to "dual-use targets" - bridges, water pumping stations, electrical power.
And why not us, the civilians? they ask in Belgrade shops, restaurants and offices convinced that "Medvede Albright" (Albright the Bear) or "Zaba Albright" (Albright the Frog, "because it's slimy", a young woman explained) wants them all dead.
Belgrade television even found a Serb family who had sheltered the US Secretary of State when she was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in the 1940s.
NATO bombed the military technical institute in the Zarkovo neighbourhood, where an old friend, a 64-year-old Orthodox church worker who is recovering from a hip replacement operation, heard the explosions. "This time, we really have done nothing," she said plaintively on the telephone. "Surely this time the world will understand that?"
And when the Serbs hear satellite television interviews in which Kosovo Albanian spokesmen claim their villages are being shelled, their journalists, professors and politicians snatched from homes, to be summarily executed by Serb forces, the good citizens of Belgrade prefer not to believe them. Consider the "terrorist" Kosovo Liberation Army source, the Serbs say.
That NATO spokesmen reiterate these allegations merely confirms in their minds what the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Vuk Draskovic, said yesterday: "All Serbs now believe that the bombings were ordered by the KLA, that NATO is in the service of the KLA."
To visit Belgrade is to see the film negative of this war, where black is shown white and shadow becomes light, where oppressors feel they are the persecuted. Mr Draskovic turned the world's condemnation of his people as "ethnic cleansers" on its head.
"For the sake of truth and justice please inform your public that all the other states in former Yugoslavia have become ethnically pure," he lectured journalists. "There are no Serbs left in Croatia, in western or northern Bosnia." The Kosovo Albanians, he claimed, want to force the Serbs from their homeland and create an ethnically-pure state, and NATO wants to help them.
With his beard and angular face, Mr Draskovic looks as if he has stepped from the annals of Serb folklore. Before founding the Serb Renewal Party he wrote several bestselling novels, including Noz (Knife), which portrays Muslims as traitors and murderers and claims they are merely Serbs who converted to Islam under Turkish occupation.
The film version of Noz came out this month. Despite the war the citizens of Belgrade are queueing outside 15 cinemas to see it. Throughout the city, billboards advertising the film show the word Noz in blood-dripping letters on a black background.
Well-educated, polite and otherwise cultivated residents of Belgrade need little prompting to vent their hatred of ethnic Albanians.
"You should see the Albanians who come to see me," Teresa, a gynaecologist, said. "They refuse to speak Serbian. We have to find interpreters for them. And they have so many babies. Believe me, if a few hundred of them moved to central London, each woman would have 15 children, and in a few years they would claim England belonged to them.
"My husband worked in factories in Kosovo. The Albanians do not know how to run anything, so Serbs have to do it. The rule is that for every Serb who is hired, an Albanian has to be hired alongside him. No other country in the world has treated its minorities this well."
The air-raid sirens went on and off all day yesterday. But already people are wearying of running to cellars. In the smoke-filled lobby of a Belgrade hotel, Dragan invited us for coffee.
"I don't believe you are really journalists," he had sneered a few hours earlier, echoing a faction of the government which wants to expel foreign journalists it suspects of serving as NATO spies. But like many of his compatriots, Dragan soon relented.
"Anyone can stay here. I welcome foreigners", he said. "Anyone but Albanians, I loathe them. I cannot believe this kind of people exist."
The word "terrorist" seems to have an almost automatic association with the word "Albanian" in the Serb vocabulary, much as Israelis associate the words "terrorist" and "Arab". And far from admitting to discriminating against the Albanian majority in Kosovo, the Serbs believe they have been betrayed by a people they tried to help.
"Do you know what privileges they had?" a former stewardess for the grounded Yugoslav airline JAT asked as she sipped her coffee. "They had their own schools and newspapers in their own language and they weren't satisfied."
Was the enmity between Serbs and Albanians even deeper than the hatred they felt towards Croatians and Bosnians? "Yes," the former stewardness exclaimed. "They were always so uncivilised, so dirty. They didn't want to speak Serbian."
The young man from the tobacco shop up the road chimed in. "Let them speak their own language, I don't care," he said. "But Kosovo is our country and they cannot have it. When the Albanians came to the Balkans they were a barbarian nation who refused to integrate and they became sly and crafty."
Now the Serbs of Belgrade are paying dearly for their prejudice, and the blind eye they turned to Mr Milosevic's depredations in Kosovo. In just three days, their capital has become a ghost town where scarcely any traffic plies the streets and forsythia bushes bloom in empty parks in the glorious spring weather so propitious to NATO bombers.
Despite strict orders from the Minister of Trade, the black-market price of diesel quintupled overnight. There are shortages of mineral water, bread and fresh milk.
People are tense, their eyes circles from lack of sleep. Shared misfortune has made them more polite to one another, and distrustful of strangers. "You send me missiles, I bring you bread," the hotel waiter told us at breakfast, alluding to a proverb in Orthodox scriptures which urges wronged parties to return bread for thrown stones.
"I am sorry. I hate all foreigners," he added. But when we see him again in the afternoon he is smiling. "Let's be friends", he pleads, reaching to shake our hands.
There is a similar ambivalence towards Western television, which the Serbs blame for "misinforming" the world about the reality of Kosovo. Everywhere you go, the TV is set to BBC World. A quick comparison of yesterday afternoon's programmes shows why.
More US B52s had taken off from Britain to bomb Yugoslavia. Nis, Pristina, Urosevac, Danilovgrad had all been hit, the BBC reported. When President Clinton appeared on screen to blame President Milosevic another waiter, this one mild-mannered and skinny, muttered behind us: "I would like to fuck his mother."
But when we turned the channel to Radio Television Serbia the waiter lost interest. Here was television news in the old east bloc style: President Milosevic seated at a table with top officials, discussing the NATO attack and praising the Yugoslav military for "successfully completing their task".
We saw a high-ranking official inaugurate the 38th international motor show in Belgrade, no doubt Serb Television's way of telling its viewers that life goes on.
Then we had the Bulgarian Vice-President on a fraternal visit to Belgrade, announcing that Clinton, Blair and Solana are worse than Hitler. The last two World Wars crop up eerily often in this new war, which may well be the last of our century. Yet the roles switch depending on whom one is hearing.
At the beginning of the week President Clinton implied he was Winston Churchill fighting Hitler. But the way the Serbs see it, they are still fighting fascism. Old Serbs who fought alongside French and British forces in the first World War are tearing up their sepia photos, Mr Draskovic told us yesterday. Serbs had been killed by the Nazis in the second World War for saving US pilots.
"The US, France and Great Britain were our wartime allies", he said. "Not in our wildest dreams did we believe we could be bombed by our wartime allies."