DJENERAL JANKOVIC, Yugoslavia -- The 15 members of the Kosovo Liberation Army came down out of the hills, walking at an easy gait, barely noticing the ransacked houses and smashed storefronts that the Serbs had left behind in this little town just across the border from Macedonia.
They were met by the Royal Gurkha Rifles, a British army unit made up of volunteers from Nepal, who had crossed into Kosovo at 5: 07 a.m. yesterday, the vanguard of an international army that will in time add up to 48,000 soldiers. The Gurkhas were holding the main road, by now a dusty unbroken stream of tanks and trucks and the armor and materiel that an army on the move requires.
The KLA men, some draped in bandoleers, were carrying rifles, automatics and an ancient machine gun. They had returned to the village they once called home, after nearly a year in the forest.
Its residents were gone yesterday. A lone donkey walked the sweltering lanes. A bloody bandage lay on the ground near a Serbian military post, abandoned a few hours before. At one house, where roses bloomed in the garden and clothes were strewn everywhere on the floors, an empty, open suitcase lay on the front step.
The KLA men wanted to see a British commander, they told one of the Gurkhas. They wanted to cooperate, to work on removing the mines and booby traps undoubtedly left behind by the Serbs, so that their families might return to rebuild their homes.
The Gurkha soldier asked them to lay down their arms. They refused.
That brought, in a few moments' time, Maj. Ian Thomas.
"What I have to tell you is, our orders are to disarm everybody in the area of this route," he said, speaking with an interpreter alongside. "We want to cooperate. But I cannot allow people to walk around here with arms. We can guarantee protection."
"You can guarantee protection on this road," said Mehmet Ballazhi, the 32-year-old leader of the KLA squad. "But you can't guarantee in those hills."
"I speak to you as soldier to soldier," replied Thomas. "Give up your arms, and let's be friends."
"It's not a question of being afraid," said Ballazhi. "It's a question of our orders."
"Your higher headquarters has agreed," said Thomas.
"We haven't heard this," said Ballazhi.
"Trust me as a soldier and an officer of the British army," Thomas said.
The sun beat down ferociously. Two truckloads of Gurkhas quietly wheeled into position up the lane, with heavy machine guns trained on the KLA squad, which was lounging by the side of the road.
Three soldiers took up positions a few feet on either side of Thomas. Ballazhi said he would have to call his commander, but it would take several hours to hike back up into the hills.
Thomas suggested that the KLA men do just that, and that he would let them take their weapons along with them while they conferred on whether to surrender them.
Ballazhi quickly agreed. His men hoisted themselves up and, still swaggering a little, sauntered out of town.
"If I force the issue now," Thomas explained, "we'll have 15 dead people." It was better at this point, he said, to keep the great thrust northward of the NATO peacekeeping force on track.
But disarming the KLA will prove to be one of the bigger headaches faced by NATO in its occupation of Kosovo. (Disarming the Serbs may also turn out to be a formidable task.) Actually bringing peace to a region of such strong hatreds and national beliefs seems next to impossible.
A few hundred yards from where the Gurkhas met the KLA, three disconsolate Yugoslav customs officers sat at the border crossing, watching the NATO equipment go by.
They had been ordered by their superiors to remain at their posts, said the commander, who identified himself only as Pera.
This was the border point that led to the infamous refugee camp at Blace, Macedonia. It was here that Yugoslav customs officers could be seen from the Macedonian side removing the license plates from refugees' cars. It was here, the refugees said, that customs officials stole their cars and extorted money from them.
A sea of cars lay parked in a huge lot down a slope from the highway. Pera argued that it was the fault of the Macedonian police, who wouldn't let cars in. Some refugees, he maintained, simply wanted to walk in, didn't want to have their cars with them.
"Nothing happened to any Albanians here," he said. "We gave them bread. Tell the world that we're not hostile to anyone."
He said he wasn't afraid even though the Serbs are pulling out of Kosovo. "God is with us," he said. "Though I think Satan has won."
Ballazhi, the KLA commander who wouldn't surrender his weapons, had seen things differently.
"They have to get out of here. They must," he said. "All the Serbs must get out of Kosovo. I'd make an exception for those who did not take part in massacres, but the people at the border have to go."
The British convoy pushed onward.
Just north of here the road crosses a series of bridges and tunnels, cutting through a river valley with steep hills on either side. It is perfect ambush country. U.S. Apache and Black Hawk helicopters swooped constantly overhead on lookout. Tank turrets swiveled along the route to keep the convoy's position protected. A halt to remove what may have been mines from a tunnel led to long delays.
For many miles British troops had stretched a wire alongside the road -- beyond the wire, there was no guarantee the ground was free of land mines.
The town of Kacanik, like Djeneral Jankovic, was deserted. Some houses were burned. Many were not. Windows were smashed everywhere.
Farther north, the road comes out of the river valley and runs through flat farmland, past fallow fields no one has tilled this year, ablaze with wildflowers. Still, no one could be seen.
Then, at an overpass where the road to Urosevac turns off, a column of Yugoslav tanks ground by, withdrawing. A mile or so farther, a Yugoslav tank sat off the right side of the road in a field, while villagers jeered at it.
This was in a town the Albanians call Lugixhi, a town where the Serbs had not gotten around to driving people out. Now the Kosovar Albanians were out on their own, shaking their fists at the Yugoslav tank, while others cheered wildly for the British.
"NATO! NATO! NATO!" children shouted. "Welcome in Kosova," read a banner in English. People threw flowers at the tanks.
Teen-age girls tried to talk to the soldiers when the column halted; fathers held their sons' hands and pointed out the tanks -- tanks that to the Kosovar Albanian people signal the end to their long nightmare of Serbian domination.
Sheer delight was in the air.
Everyone, it seemed, was trying to get in the view of television cameras, because, as Daut Reqica explained, they were hoping that relatives abroad might catch a glimpse of them and know they were safe and alive.
NATO's arrival, said Reqica, means the Serbs won't come around anymore extorting money from them, it means their town won't be burned to the ground the way Babush was Friday, it means the looting and shooting that are accompanying the Serbian withdrawal won't touch Lugixhi.
A few miles down the road, the NATO convoy passed another Serbian column. Spectators on the roadside gave the three-fingered Serbian salute. A few tractors bounced down the road, the trailers filled with the belongings of Serbian farmers who believe there is no place for them in the new Kosovo, who are withdrawing, the war's newest refugees.