The last two days have been busy: the enemy tried to break out of the city. As people say: ‘It’s easy to get into Sarajevo, impossible to leave.’ There was some heavy fighting, and for a time it was more exciting than usual. Just what the doctor ordered.
They started to bombard our positions to the east and west of the city soon after dark, but it was a pitiful display. I wouldn’t have noticed anything different if someone hadn’t told me what was happening. They have no heavy firepower down there, although there are rumours of American-made assault rifles and anti-tank weapons now getting through. After they’d fired at us for about an hour, convoys of trucks, the leading ones laden with soldiers and followed by others full of huddled civilians, made their bid for freedom. There was something frenetic about it all, a desperation accentuated by the crashing gear changes and labouring engines of the trucks. After our cannons found their range, there was also plenty of shouting and screaming. The scene was lit up by exploding shells and the flicker of flames. Across the sky, phosphorescent tracer bullets stitched haphazard paths. Some people tried to escape from the disabled trucks, and we picked them off as they ran for cover at the sides of the road. We caught a few of them, but in the poor light it was difficult to tell how many. Many trucks were abandoned, some bursting into flames. A few succeeded in turning around and heading back to where they’d come from, bolting back to the safety of their holes.
It struck me as a particularly futile exercise, and I couldn’t even see the sense in us retaliating – apart from the fun of doing something different and breaking the monotony. Why not simply let them flee the city? If a few people escaped, so ‘what? If everyone left, what did it matter? If they had succeeded in breaking out, where were they going to go? They didn’t have the manpower to surround us, that was for sure. So they’d have been faced with a long drive through territory that we hold, with little prospect of reaching their own people. We’d be able to pick them off one by one. It was, like most aspects of this war, quite pointless, but also momentarily entertaining.