The last day of Saddam Hussein's regime started with the usual deadly ruckus of bombing, artillery and gunfire - and reports that US troops were converging from the north and south-east of Baghdad towards the city-centre.
Some invisible frontier had been crossed overnight. Downstairs in the Palestine Hotel, almost none of the Information Ministry officials who helped, bullied, bored and financially exploited foreign correspondents showed up for work.
Outside, white sheets hung from the balconies, a reminder of the two cameramen killed when a US Abrams tank fired a shell at the hotel inhabited by the foreign press on Tuesday. A reminder, and a plea to the advancing Americans: "Don't shoot. We're journalists."
My minder reported for duty, albeit late. "I was almost martyred twice," he panted. "I nearly drove into three American tanks near the Yarmook Hospital, and four more in Haifa Street."
As we headed up Yassir Arafat Street in Karrada, I noticed that the militiamen, police and Saddam Fedayeen who'd ruled the streets had vanished. "It is useless to carry a gun against a tank," my minder said. Until yesterday, he was a staunch supporter of the regime.
City services broke down last week and piles of rotting garbage lined the streets. In a bakery queue, I asked a middle-aged, middle-class Baghdadi how he felt. The minder was out of hearing range, but it will take time to break the conditioning of 30 years of dictatorship.
"Maybe I can tell you soon," the man answered. "We are afraid."
The baker was not frightened. He walked out carrying bags of hot, fresh bread for me, grinning broadly. US troops were already in the slums of Saddam City, a few miles up the road, and he knew it. We could hear the loud "c-r-r-u-m-p" of outgoing artillery fire, and shooting, but the baker's joy outweighed fear or intimidation by the minder.
"I am very, very, very happy," he announced. Then he turned to my imposed escort and taunted him, in an extraordinary show of bravado.
"You are from the Ministry of Information, I believe. The ministry has been bombed! Yesterday, I saw your minister drive by in an old car - not a limousine - and he looked very upset!"
Most of east Baghdad was still nominally in the hands of the regime, but we saw not a single soldier. The bridges were undefended. We stopped at Saddam Medical Centre, across the street from the bombed-out defence ministry. Two military tents were pitched between the hospital and the river bank and an armoured vehicle was parked beside an oleander shrub ten metres from the hospital.
In the Adnan annex - named after Saddam Hussein's late uncle, Adnan Khairallah, whom he allegedly had killed in a helicopter crash - we found a scene worthy of Hieronymus Bosch's Tryptych from Hell. The 20-foot-wide corridor of the out-patient department had been turned into an emergency room. The first patient had his arms held upwards, paralysed in an arc, covered in burn cream. His face was so badly burned that I had to look away.
On another hospital trolley, doctors were performing an emergency tracheotomy to stop a man suffocating in his own blood, which poured on to the floor. An orderly tried to push the liquid away with a sponge mop into a pool of blood and discarded tubes and syringes in a side hall. Everywhere there were burned and bleeding men, weeping, groaning, unconscious.
"The Baghdad Hospital has no water and no power, so we've taken over the burden," said Dr Khaldoun Brahim al-Bayati, an ear, eye, nose and throat specialist and the hospital's director. "Yesterday, more than 150 severely-wounded people were admitted. We are short of anaesthetists, so they have to wait for surgery. We peformed five brain surgeries, and each operation takes three hours."
His teaching hospital for post-graduate medical students normally takes cases on referral. "Now we are a front-line emergency hospital," he noted, "operating on electrical generators and with insufficient water".
Dr al-Bayati had not slept for six days. Last weekend, his home in north Baghdad was destroyed in a US bombardment. Neighbours sent word that his wife and children had moved to safety, but he's had no word of them since.
"I have two little twin daughters," the hospital director said, holding a hand flat to indicate their height. His voice broke and his eyes filled with tears. "I told them I might not see them for a time, that I had a humanitarian mission . . ."
The Abrams tanks on the far side of the Bab al-Maddam bridge began firing, dangerously close to the hospital. We followed a trail of blood back into the makeshift emergency room.
"This man is dying, at this moment," Dr Sabah Sahib said, nodding towards a large, middle-aged man covered with shrapnel wounds. The man heaved forward, then fell back with a thud. "When the shelling stops, there will be a new rush," Dr Sahib predicted.
We made our way through the hospital trolleys, loaded with men whose limbs hung by shreds of flesh, men with disfigured faces. In the lift to the 8th floor, a young surgeon struck up a conversation. "We are running out of dressings, IV fluid, antibiotics and anaesthetics," he said. "We had a three-month supply, but it's almost gone now."
Dr Sahib accompanied us through room after room full of wounded men, hundreds of them, all with hollow, vanquished eyes. There were few uniforms in sight - a pair of black army boots on a window ledge, a couple of men wearing the black trousers of the Saddam Fedayeen - but most of them looked like soldiers.
The "fierce resistance" so often cited at US military briefings led to this: a terrible beating, broken bodies, for those who fought and survived. The scenes at the Adnan Hospital help to explain why the will to fight went out of Baghdad yesterday.
The rooms were so overcrowded that beds were crammed into central aisles, so one had to walk sideways to talk to patients. I asked why there were so few women and children when doctors kept insisting that most of the victims were civilians.
"They often don't survive, so they don't come to hospital," Dr Sahib answered, unconvincingly.
There were, of course, exceptions: a five-year-old boy, wounded in the family car during an air raid, with a brick at the end of a rope to hold his broken leg in traction; a pretty nine-year-old waiting for an operation on her legs after she was caught in the bombing of Mansur.
The patients were terrified by the tank bombardment we could hear so close by. On one floor, a half-dozen women had been moved into the windowless corridor to make them feel safer.
A nurse wept on a bench in the crowded hospital foyer. Dr Sahib showed us to the door, stopping to listen to the tankfire and gunfire as if testing the wind. Just inside the door, a child on a trolley was receiving a blood transfusion.
As we sped back towards the Palestine Hotel, I saw armed Iraqis for the only time yesterday: four militiamen with rocket-propelled grenades, waiting at the eastern end of the Bab el-Moaddam bridge. But when the time came, a few hours or, at most, a few days later, would they really want to die for a regime that so many had already abandoned?
I suspect that the bridge defenders will try to escape, like the dozens of "Arab volunteers" I found sitting in front of the Palestine Hotel. There were Syrians, Palestinians, Jordanians and Algerians among them. Iraqi officials had claimed that there were 6,000 volunteers, half of them determined to commit suicide in "martyrdom operations" against US soldiers.
Though some now claimed to be students or agricultural labourers, a few admitted that they had come to defend Iraq against American invaders. Each time they tried to leave Baghdad, they claimed, US forces turned them around.
"This is a very sad day. Iraq will be occupied," an Algerian told me. "Why does this always happen to the Arabs?"
As he spoke, an American aircraft dropped a bomb on the other side of the Ishtar Sheraton, a few hundred metres away. The crowd that always mills under the Palestine's portico scattered. TheArab volunteers didn't budge; they'd seen far worse in combat.
Before he tore up his government identity papers, asked to be paid and went into hiding at his sister's home, my minder read the regime's awful newspapers with me, for the last time.
Saddam Hussein's photograph was on every front page, up to the last day. Al-Iraq quoted Mohamed Said al-Sahaf, the information minister. "The Iraqi people will defeat the aggressors," the headline proclaimed. "The Americans and British are lying to the media to hide their casualties."
"This cloud will pass," said the banner headline of Ath-Thawra. It, too, made Mr Sahaf's last press conference the front-page lead. Babel, the mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, said: "This is the day of sacrifice, so be on your guard for this fire, and cut its tail . . . The Great Iraq continues its steadfastness."
At that very moment, looters were rampaging through Uday's office in the building housing the Iraqi Olympic Committee.