THE onslaught began at 9 a.m. on a morning as still, cold and grey as a gravestone. Huge thuds and crashes rolled across the frozen landscape of northern Dagestan and echoed around the foothills of neighbouring Chechnya.
The shadow boxing and posturing were over Russia's military machine was moving in.
Six helicopter gunships circled the village of Pervomaiskoye, blasting it with rockets as they reeled against the skyline like huge, malevolent insects. Flares came tumbling out of them, decoys against heat seeking missiles. The Russian artillery opened up, like some ghastly timpani.
If this was, as claimed, a surgical operation to free more than 100 hostages held by Salman Raduyev and his Chechen fighters, what would a full scale assault look and sound like? Shell after shell slammed into the settlement, which soon lay beneath a gauze of dust and smoke.
At one point, a Russian tank began spewing black smoke and then exploded an apparently rare triumph for Raduyev's men in this unequal and grotesque contest.
By lunchtime, the heart of the village lay behind a curtain of flame. And yet for most of the afternoon, the assault continued uninterrupted. It seemed the Russians, who had planned to take the place in a day, were finding it harder than they expected to overcome the 150 rebels.
Almost every building in the village seemed to have been blasted, but we could still hear the crackle of machine guns as the Chechens fought back.
Not 100 yards from where we stood there were three big Russian field guns, well out of the range of the Chechens, who were armed only with semi automatic rifles, heavy machine guns and rocket propelled grenade launchers.
We watched the gunners lounging around, hands in pockets to avoid the bitter cold.
A radio call came through from their command centre and they quickly loaded their cannons with 122mm shells, ducked briefly, and fired. Then they lounged about again, like youths standing at a bus shelter.
That they may have wiped out their fellow countrymen - the Chechens were holding scores of men, women and children - seemed to be a matter of spine chilling unconcern.
"What am I going to do?" said Sulleman Makhodov, as he watched the battle from a ridge. The 60 year old pensioner has lived in Pervomaiskoye all his life. "I have a wife and four children. Where will we live? How will we live?"
His friend, an elderly refugee trembling with rage, said, "Everyone in there will have been killed in five minutes. It is a terrible, terrible thing to do."
How could one disagree? It was hard to watch this spectacle without feeling deeply sickened. No one can sensibly justify the rebels' behaviour - first seizing a hospital in Kizlyar and taking 2,000 hostages, then exposing more than 100 captives to a likely death at the hands of an outraged Russia.
Yet it was equally impossible to watch such destruction without smelling the awful whiff of political expediency.
As the battle raged in front of us, the ego of an injured and thunderously angry President seemed to be in play. Though ill and unpopular, Boris Yeltsin has shown every symptom of a man preparing to run for re election. He knows he must win back the respect of a nation in which many banker for strong and uncompromising leadership.
No effort was made to stop television cameras from recording the battle from a grandstand position in a neighbouring village. Rather it was a spectacle that the Kremlin seemed to want us or at least their fellow Russians to witness.