People in Yugoslavia's capital city, Belgrade, struggled to come to terms with the fact that the air strikes feared for so many months had finally happened - and will keep on happening.
Streets that should have been crowded with the famously hectic Belgrade traffic were almost empty. And few people ventured out, despite a sudden change in the bleak chill weather of previous days with a day of sun and perfect blue skies.
But many things are upside down now in Belgrade. By day, with no bombs falling, there is no traffic; yet the night before, as the skyline flamed crimson, the roads were busy with commuters.
Throughout Yugoslavia's tortured decade of war, one place in Belgrade stayed the same: McDonald's. Even in the depths of Western trade sanctions during the war in Bosnia, the fast-food restaurant's only concession was to cut out the French fries.
But now, the morning after NATO's air blitz, Belgrade's brand new drive-in McDonald's was closed. The manager stood forlorn smoking a cigarette outside his chrome store front by the red plastic chute of a slide in the children's playground.
The pattern was the same across the city, with many businesses closed and others short-staffed as people stayed at home.
Three times yesterday the air-raid sirens wailed, but the only sign of bombing came with four distant thuds just after dawn. The timing of the sirens is in itself a mystery - they go off when there are no bombs, but stayed quiet during Wednesday night's inferno.
The mood on the street is one of disbelief. For eight years of war during the break-up of Yugoslavia the citizens have grown used to the privations of conflict - be they poverty, trade sanctions or the distant threat of major air strikes.
Throughout Bosnia's war, visitors would often be asked: "Will NATO bomb us some day?" In the past year of fighting in Kosovo, NATO had made ever more direct threats to do this. But conversely, Belgrade's citizens had grown blase.
Even with the skyline brightly lit up by orange boiling flames on Wednesday night, the roads were busy with trams and traffic, oblivious of the ordinance flying above their heads. By late afternoon yesterday, the few shops that had opened were closing early. "We are finished, we are going home," said the tired-looking operator of one of the plastic booths from which citizens buy their newspapers.
These newspapers - almost half the titles failed to appear - were mostly dominated by solemn accounts of the war, with banner headlines accusing NATO of terrorism.
The front page of the morning paper, Svedok, was a blank sheet dominated by the bold red headline: Balkans In Flames.
Yugoslavia's state television did its usual job, swamping the airways with patriotic film about the second World War, plus news dominated by accounts of NATO "terror" raids. Bulletins heralded the triumph of Yugoslav forces, which claimed to have shot down two planes and six cruise missiles. There were also sombre accounts of the death of 10 civilians and the wounding of 48 more in the raids.
One Serb said he felt a strong sense of deja vu during the raids. Neden, a young Belgrade waiter, fled from Croatian armies which overran the Serb-held province of Krajina three years ago. Now, hearing explosions, he said: "I felt very good, I felt like I was back home again."
Others are frightened. I told a receptionist at a central hotel that she should be careful about going out late at night, with more bombing likely, and her eyes filled with tears. A waitress said she had brought her mother to stay with her in one of the many unused rooms in the hotel, hoping that because it was used by journalists it might somehow be safer than the family home in the suburbs.
"I am very frightened. I have been frightened for many days. I don't sleep, there's nothing I can do about it."
Meanwhile, confusion reigns at the top. At the first post-bombing conference held to give Yugoslavia's response to the NATO bombing, Deputy Prime Minister Mr Vuk Draskovik floundered. This former writer with a few wisps of grey hair in his thick black priestly beard became lost in his own rhetoric as he criticised NATO.
"We are victims, because we are for the law of power," he said, then quickly corrected himself. "We are for the power of law, excuse me," he said. "NATO is for the law of power."
He said Yugoslavia was ready "immediately" to sign a peace deal which would give autonomy to the mainly Albanian province of Kosovo, but he said there would have to be a few changes to the peace plan proposed by the West. "We are the victims because we are defending our country from the project of greater Albania," he said, referring to the demands of some Kosovo Albanians to join with Albania proper, a move he said was an "project to establish a Nazi ethnic Albanian state." There was now no possibility that Yugoslavia would agree to NATO's other demands to allow the alliance to send peacekeepers to Kosovo. "NATO troops? They are killing our children, they are bombing refugee camps," he said. "After that, who can expect this nation will tell them - `please would you like to come here as peacemakers or peacekeeping forces' ?"
But behind the rhetoric, Yugoslavia is under pressure. Barring a last-minute reprieve, it has only till the end of the month to pay Russia and China an oil bill of £60 million - a sum equivalent to Yugoslavia's entire remaining foreign exchange reserves. Belgrade had been hoping to raise cash by selling the state monopoly on cement-making to a French company, but this deal and what little foreign trade Yugoslavia still does are likely to be now on the rocks.
President Milosevic himself is now a shadow of the man who, in a single thunderous speech in Kosovo 10 years ago, crystalised Serb nationalism and catapulted himself to power.
A decade of war has left him a virtual recluse in a former royal palace he uses as home. He gives no interviews and few public appearances. Addressing the nation on Wednesday night, his words were tough, urging his countrymen to pull together. But the body language was hesitant, the wide-browed face flabby, and his eyes did not look straight at the TV camera.
In a way, Yugoslavia's wars have now come home. From their humble beginning when tanks were sent against ethnic Albanian rioters in 1990 through to independence wars by Slovenia and then Croatia all the way to the holocaust of Bosnia, it is the first time for most Belgraders to have actually tasted war. And as the sirens kept on reminding them throughout yesterday, there's much, much, more to come.
Chris Stephen adds from Moravica, Serbia: Yugoslav security forces in Kosovo yesterday used hundreds of ethnic Albanian civilians as "human shields" to get protection from marauding NATO jets.
Sources in the province said that civilians, including woman and young children, were rounded up by Serb troops from the village of Qirez and arranged in a large mass at the centre of a column of tanks and armoured vehicles.
The entire column then moved off along the highway to the town of Srbica, a centre of fighting in Kosovo's Drenica region in recent days.
A source at the Geneva headquarters of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army said by telephone: "The people were rounded up and pushed into the middle of the column. They were human shields but they were not there to make protection from the KLA. They were there to protect the Serbs from NATO."
In the past two days, Serb units have been trying to keep out of sight of patrolling NATO jets but yesterday saw clear blue skies offer fighter bombers perfect visibility creating problems for any Serb units on the move.
The KLA last night issued a statement from Geneva urging NATO to intervene quickly with ground troops in the province to stop a massacre. With the KLA units themselves depleted there are fears of a general Serb offensive to sweep through the Drenica region, in central Kosovo.
The KLA also said it would not "take advantage" of NATO air strikes in the coming days to improve its position on the ground.