Some 20 kilometres from Skopje, a tiny, one-runway airport set in the kind of mountainous terrain that makes pilots nervous, is becoming the centre of the greatest human airlift in living memory. The word "Diaspora" rears out of the history books into our everyday reality, tearing into our image of a modern, civilised Europe.
While the world looks to NATO, the UN and Milosevic for the next move in their chess game, it is endgame for many of these broken souls, for any semblance of the world they knew.
Surreal is a word much overused in this war but viewed from the little Republic of Macedonia, no other will do. In the intermittent Skopje sunshine, people sit in Macedonia Square, sipping fine local beer at the London pub, or browse in sports shops of a kind seen in any Irish town. A few yards away, the Den Mert Fu Italian restaurant serves some of the best pizzas in Europe. The bomb shelters, snug beneath the magnificent 1500-year-old fortress, are used to cultivate mushrooms. The only sign something might be up is the number of sparkling, new pick-ups tearing around, emblazoned with the names of the UNHCR or a myriad NGOs.
Meanwhile, no more than 30 minutes to the north of Skopje, lies the border crossing of Blace, where trains and buses have been dumping their human cargo of up to 11,000 Albanian Kosovars daily, on the Serbian side.
There, half kilometre-long streams of human wretchedness wind from the border post down into the dust-bowl that is Blace transit camp and days later, back up another dusty slope into buses bound for some stinking refugee camp. Small children with knapsacks or battered wooden suitcases troop desolately to the buses, in the heels of their elders, in the eye of a 100 cameras, against the undignified backdrop of a massive NGO banner, "Action Against Hunger".
On Wednesday, the miserable flow is suddenly dammed. In the late afternoon, an eerie silence hangs over the border post, evidence that Macedonia has finally snapped. Even as the government insists the border is open, it's clear that someone, somewhere has decided otherwise. As some 20 busloads of refugees leave the camp for the new hell-hole at Cegrane, Macedonian soldiers are down in the gorges searching for "illegals".
At the border post, desperate new arrivals are beaten back into no-man's land and to another freezing Balkan night in the open. An Albanian interpreter working for a television crew hears the news through heaving sobs.
A young mother has just arrived with her wounded nine-year-old son. His 11-year-old brother died in Kosovo of gunshot wounds. The mother, reasoning that if this became known, the Serbs would kill them all to "kill" the news story, hides the weakened nine-year-old and his wounds all the nightmarish way to the border.
In the distance, the majestic snow-capped Shara mountain serves as a monument to another fleeing mother and her child, found frozen to death in its high reaches a few weeks ago. As we turn back for Skopje, Macedonian military, for the first time at this location, pull us in to check our accreditation.
Yesterday, the government - after weeks of negative publicity caused by the failure of the international community to fulfil its promises - finally admitted the policy now is one refugee taken in for every one taken out.
"We are not Africa. This is Europe. We are the cradle of civilisation. We do not deserve this, we have standards," insisted the deputy foreign affairs minister.
And as the international community - with the shining exception of Germany and a few others - sat on its hands, Macedonia, with its hard-won stability, plurality and relative prosperity, teetered on the brink.
The danger cannot be overstated. In Skopje, the charming Macedonians try hard to temper their age-old prejudices with their undoubted humanity. For them, separatist-minded Albanians - who already comprise over a fifth of the population - en masse spell trouble in every way.
Not 45 minutes away, lies the town of Cegrane, accessed through narrow roads peopled by suicidal car drivers along with horses and carts driven by farmers. A huge English banner runs the width of the street: "Cegrane welcomes NATO".
At the back, where up to 10 days ago rolled just another foothill of another beautiful mountain, a feat of German engineering has carved out the clay terraces on which some 35,000 displaced people now live - making it by far the largest camp in Macedonia - in row upon row of tents, just a few feet apart.
As the refugees flood in, the tent city climbs further up the hill, amid eye-watering dust, a stomach-churning latrine for every 245 people, a long queue for a few telephones, and a small all-purpose shop. On the notice-board, a picture of a smiling 12-year-old boy has been placed there by his parents. He hasn't been seen since they fled their village.
While their elders queue for life's necessities, small boys play football. The muezzin's call to prayer from the town mosque vies with the boys on the megaphones, shouting out the names of family members not seen since the chaotic leaving of Kosovo. They make way for the much-admired young German army units marching through, armed not with the weapons of war but with sledgehammers, to erect another few thousand tents.
The most surprising element of this war for many observers is how it has revised their view of armies. Sworn peaceniks from places like Germany and Canada will return home with an altogether more benign view of soldiers and the army way.
Sixty minutes' drive south of Skopje, another kind of tent city is digging in for a different mission. Just beyond the village of Krivolak, past serried rows of Challenger tanks and Warrior combat vehicles, an Irish Guards battle group of the British army is in training for whatever NATO or the UN has to throw at them.
The "Micks", as they're known, are 10 per cent southern Irish and 40 per cent Northern. They are decent, reflective, intelligent; concerned that their parents in Galway or Cork or Donegal know that they are well, in no danger, and in fact, are in a kind of holiday camp.
Most of them are here because the Irish Army wasn't recruiting or didn't want them. There's no sense of "Rambo" in this bunch. None of them makes a speech about the glory of death or war. "We've got to stop the atrocities in Kosovo," says Kenny.
"No-one here really wants war," says Cornelius. "Everyone wants the blue beret. But if it amounts to NATO, then that's what we're paid to do."
Their young, vulnerable faces suggest that what worries them most is the vast crime scene that is Kosovo and the sights that will confront them there. "With all our training," says Cornelius, "there's no training for scooping up small children's bodies."