The flight into Macedonia has resumed in earnest. Once again, Blace is host to a wretched straggle of humanity, clutching their small, exhausted children and their few pathetic belongings, their walking sticks and crutches, boarding buses bound for God knows where.
Forty-seven arrived on Friday and 300 on Saturday. Yesterday, nearly 1,000 came through, encouraged by news of the increasing numbers who had crossed safely before them.
One train with just five carriages (normally, they take up to 15) pulled into the station here yesterday, packed with another traumatised cross-section of the Kosovan Albanian community.
They ranged from tiny babies to a 92-year-old woman who had lost all her family; from wizened old farmers to the three watchful young men who stepped nonchalantly off a bus due to depart for the camp at Cegrane, and headed casually for a taxi before being retrieved by police.
Many of the women and old men had clearly donned all the clothes they could wear before leaving home - the layers providing some sort of protection against chilly nights spent in the woods and mountains while in Kosovo, but becoming intolerably oppressive under the blistering heat during the hours of waiting in no-man's land and later on the clammy, tightly-packed buses.
In the line, many of the women tried to soothe their wailing babies while they themselves wept silently. For them, weeks of terror and intimidation had culminated in the pandemonium at Urosevac city about 20 miles away, where they were among thousands fighting desperately to board the train. Babies were pushed in through windows, brothers were separated, old men and women stumbled in the crush.
Some had been living in the woods and mountains or at the side of a railway track for up to a month. Some had been forced out of their homes at the point of a gun; some were simply starved out. Many hadn't eaten for up to four days.
Those who had remained in apartments had felt increasingly fearful and imprisoned there as tension mounted, their movements severely restricted, their freedom to communicate with neighbours withdrawn and Serb shopowners - with no shortage of supplies by all accounts - refusing to serve them.
Albanian teachers described how their civilisation crashed down around them as they were left with no children to teach.
One woman sobbed as she described how her father-in-law's body was discovered not long after desperation had driven him out to look for food. Another woman from the village of Sojev saw her husband and nephew shot dead in front of her children. Another had lost all the men in her family; some were dead, others had fled.
Many had been wiped out, robbed of everything they owned. Men came thumping on doors at 5 a.m., demanding everything of value in the house. (Much of this behaviour may be drink or drug-fuelled. Dr Mejreme Rexha, an ethnic Albanian who worked in a Pristina hospital up to a few weeks ago, told The Irish Times that, every night, uniformed men crowded into the hospital demanding injectable drugs).
Many described how Serb forces had forcibly emptied whole neighbourhoods, enabling them to blend into village or city life (at least from the air), turning family homes into military barracks and billets and using them to provide shelter for camouflaged tanks and artillery.
When these traumatised people finally made it on to the train yesterday and out of the nightmare, they had one more hurdle to jump - the brutal insensitivity of Serb border police.
Justice Marcus Einfeld, a judge of the Australian federal court, as well as a well-known human rights advocate and Austcare's ambassador for refugees, walked behind the border post yesterday morning and witnessed the rough yells and screamed orders directed at small children who dared to move a little out of the queue.
"This is very much a children's exodus, with a much higher proportion of children than I've seen in 30 years. The idea of keeping children in a stern, narrow line for one to two hours like this is unthinkable. There are no smiles, no courtesies, just screams and whistles. You don't have to push and scream at old people either. They know well that these people have already been traumatised".
And after that, came the long, baking three-hour wait in the buses. They looked extremely wary at first when a few of us waved and smiled and passed in chewing gum and cigarettes, but soon they were waving back enthusiastically, while a Macedonian policeman looked on indulgently. But the source of these people's trauma could be gauged by their reaction as two heavily-armed Macedonian soldiers sauntered past.
Every single head on those buses, children included, suddenly jerked up and turned to follow them, terror written across their faces.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of their kinfolk remain behind amid talk of Serb moves to close the border with Montenegro and Albania. So little Macedonia stands by impotently, waiting once again to be overwhelmed.