President Slobodan Milosevic had the effrontery to claim his country had won a victory thanks to his "peaceful policies". But the Yugoslav army must have been glad to get out of Podujevo.
A former Kosovo Liberation Army stronghold in the north of the province, Podujevo changed hands several times, and the Serbs' hold on it was always tenuous. One of the soldiers I talked to yesterday, a medic from Nis, had four friends shot there the week before last, one of them fatally.
So it was not surprising that Gen Nebojsa Pavkovic, the head of the Yugoslav Third Army, began his pull-out from Kosovo in Podujevo.
As we left Pristina to follow the departing troops yesterday, smoke rose from two or three burning Albanian homes in the northern suburb of Vranjevac - a last spiteful gesture by the Serbs - and a handful of old Albanians with hollow eyes stood along the main road to Belgrade to watch the dust-covered buses filled with soldiers.
On the outskirts of Podujevo an estate wagon sped past us, carrying four men with shaved heads and bushy black beards, their rifle barrels showing through the car windows: militiamen, a rabble.
There are destroyed villages all over Kosovo, but Podujevo had been fought over. Overturned cars had served as barricades. Sofas, chairs, twisted metal, an old cooker lay in the deserted streets; the sort of place where you find landmines and snipers.
Smoke from a burning house drifted towards us. Two horses munched on grass in an overgrown garden, and we finally happened upon a small group of frightened Serb civilians.
Where was the army? They had left, half-an-hour ahead of schedule.
We caught up with the tail end of the convoy a few kilometres later. Young conscripts with short haircuts waved cheerfully from the back of a truck, glad that the war was over and that they were going home.
"We live for freedom," said a banner in Cyrillic stretched across the highway.
Among the thousands of troops we watched leaving Kosovo, there were disciplined men with intelligent faces who would not have looked out of place in any NATO army. There were also overweight, middle-aged men in grey-green reservists' clothing. And there were unkempt ruffians wearing ersatz uniforms: the "uncontrolled elements" alluded to with embarrassment by some army officers.
The mixture of things military and civilian - one of the greatest difficulties that confronted NATO in its bombing campaign - was also apparent.
Civilian lorries carrying equipment were driven by soldiers. There were white refrigerator trucks, a plethora of vans with red crosses, even a handful of soldiers on tractor-pulled wagons.
For 20 kilometres (12 miles) we wended our way in and out of this exodus of Serb forces, overtaking trucks loaded with ammunition and artillery shell boxes, communications vans towing generators, olive-green engineering equipment, a few old Russian armoured personnel carriers and dozens of ordinary tour buses filled with soldiers.
After 150 vehicles we gave up counting and turned back to Pristina before reaching the front of the convoy, which was by now into Serbia proper.
Not one vehicle had a scratch on it. Where had they been hiding for 11 weeks, to have escaped such a fierce bombardment? An armoured Russian BMP mounted with multiple rocket-launchers drove past the ruins of an old Orthodox church.
I counted five Praga mobile anti-aircraft artillery pieces, a funny old beast with a podium-like gunner's turret to one side. Their crews waved and smiled, but the encounter was chilling. A few hours earlier, an Albanian who managed to stay in Kosovo through the war had told me how the Pragas were used to shell columns of refugees within the province.
A soldier held a framed portrait of Marshal Tito out the back of his truck. The message was clear: Tito created the Yugoslav army. He didn't hide in bunkers, but fought with his troops, and was wounded.
Outside the cafe where I'd seen soldiers resting on three previous trips down this road, women, children and a few reservists stood waving three-fingered Serb salutes at the interminable convoy. From the other direction, driving south from Serbia, came empty buses, a tank transporter and lorries, on their way to pick up more men and equipment.
Some soldiers stared listlessly from the back of their trucks. One fair-haired young man lay stretched out on the tailgate, his hands behind his head, smiling into the sun. A few nervous foot-soldiers puffing heavily on their Marlboros were positioned by the roadside, to guard against KLA attacks.
An officer from Novi Sad stood beside his Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier. "I'm a soldier and I have no political views," he said when I asked what he thought of the pull-out. "No comment."
But his lips trembled and his eyes were angry.
There were a few burning houses on the road back to Pristina, three or four; after nearly three months of "ethnic cleansing" there is not much left to burn in Kosovo's ghost towns.
Just north of Luzane is a bungalow that used to be inhabited by Yugoslav soldiers and the interior ministry police known as MUP. There is still a sand-bagged antiaircraft artillery position on the front lawn, but not a soul in sight.
The withdrawal slowed at Luzane, where NATO killed at least 34 people in a bus when it bombed a bridge on May 1st. So the departing Serb forces had to cross a substitute, single-lane bridge.
We were forced to stop next to a burned-out house as they hurtled down the rutted track in clouds of dust. These troops had come from Prizren, in south-west Kosovo near the Albanian border.
They were rougher than the convoy out of Podujevo. Many still had tree branches and camouflage nets on their trucks and helmets, and dozens of Mr Milosevic's MUP were mixed among them. Two dozen soldiers perched on old sofas in the back of a blue rubbish truck.
One of them had his arm around an Alsatian dog. Another swigged from a bottle of Slijvovica, while his companion fired volleys of Kalashnikov bullets into fields of brilliant red poppies, blue lupins and yellow mustard flowers.