‘Get it into your head! They’re not coming. We’ve been here too long already, should have been gone a quarter of an hour ago. Mother of God, you want to stay, Zoran, you stay, but I’m off.’
Until then he had been the undisputed leader of the village and its defence. Now his authority was stripped from him. He attempted to reason with them one last time: ‘A few more minutes. He shook my hand. He took as payment what I brought him. Without them, we’re defeated and dead-’
A clear whistle pierced his skull – the sound of an incoming tank 125mm shell, an artillery 152mm shell and an 82mm mortar. They were all rooted to the spot. A flare lit them. The whistle became a symphony because three or four shells were in the air when the illumination flare burst. The dawn had trapped them. A machine-gunner fired. In the moment before the first shell came down, the machine-gunner laced the corn with bullets. The flare hung, poured white light on them. Zoran saw that Tomislav’s son and Andrija’s cousin had crumpled. Their faces showed shock, surprise, and then the blandness of death.
The first mortar detonated. Zoran dropped and felt the mud ooze against his face. Since the fight for the town and its satellite villages had started nearly three months before, he had seen several men die: on the front line in the slit trenches that were reinforced with felled tree-trunks, two had been speared by timber splinters; in the command bunker, where there was an area for the wounded, men had slipped away with neither fuss nor rancour. A Cetnik with an unkempt beard had thrown down a jammed rifle as he sprinted towards a strongpoint and had collapsed at the single shot to his chest.