The Pillars of Hercules

The chetniks were famous for their daggers and their muddy boots and their long hair, and there was something about their filthy faces that made them seem more ruthless and frightening, like the Huns and Visigoths—their distant ancestors—who had raped and pillaged their way through here at the end of the fifth century. Chetniks also were driven by the worst and most merciless engine for violence there is—religious crankishness.

In October 1991, the Lazo family in Lapad became very anxious, noticing that by degrees their Serbian neighbors had crept away. Soon the shelling began and lasted through November. They cowered in their house, twelve of them, Ivo and his parents and wife and children and some cousins. The shelling continued. It was now December. Many people had died, many houses had caught fire. The water was cut off. “We carried water from the sea to use in the toilet.” They shared a well for drinking water. There was no electricity. It was cold; some days it snowed.

In a horrible and pitiless way it is interesting how gutless and patient soldiers can be, even when they have their enemy pinned down. The war all over the former Yugoslavia was—and still is—the epitome of this sort of cowardly onslaught. In almost every siege, in Sarajevo and Mostar and twenty other places there has been no forward motion. The attacking army found a convenient position on a mountain or a road or at a safe distance at sea, and then for as long as it had artillery shells it bombarded the target, pinning the people in their houses.

This was why the war seemed endless: instead of infantry attacks or guerrilla fighting or even aerial bombing, it was a war of sieges, like the oldest Mediterranean warfare. Every coastal town or port in this sea had been under siege at some point in its history—Gibraltar had fourteen of them, Malta had known even more—Turks attacking crusaders in Valletta harbor, British attacking French during the Napoleonic war; Phoenicians, Romans, Goths, Vandals, Turks, Nazis, the U.S. Marines and my American uncles had all made war in these Mediterranean ports. But there was a significant difference between invaders and besiegers. Siege was hardly a military art; it was a simple method of wearing down and starving and demoralizing a civilian population. It was a massive and prolonged insult, carried on by a merciless army with a tactical advantage.

The Serbian army had massed their tanks on the north side of town, on the road, near Slano, where I had seen the bomb damage. That was the forward line, the little villages of Trsteno and Orašac, where there were holiday homes and time-share bungalows built by Germans and British people in happier times.

There were also tanks on the road south of Dubrovnik, around Cilipi where the airport was—half an hour by road from Montenegro; and more tanks on the eastern heights that Lazo called Jarkovitze Mountain (it was not on my map). The ships were a mile or so west, off shore. So Dubrovnik was completely surrounded, and shells were falling from the four points of the compass.

“My daughter Anita was very worried,” Mr. Lazo said. “I said to her, ‘Go to the Old Town. You will be safe there.’ ”

There was an almost mystical belief in the sanctity and inviolability of the Old Town. Because of the enormous walls, ten feet thick and four stories high; because of the beauty of the town; because of its historical importance—its association with Venice; its great trading history, site of the oldest apothecary in the Mediterranean; because, most of all, of the town’s religious connections—St. Blaise had lived and died here, St. Nicholas was its patron saint—for all these good reasons, the Old Town was a refuge.

Anita Lazo fled there with a number of others, and on the sixth of December, the Feast of St. Nicholas—the timing was deliberate—the Old Town was shelled.

“I looked up and saw the tanks on the mountain,” Mr. Lazo said. “They were like matches lighting—the fire and then whouf—the bombs.”

Hundreds were killed, as many as 250 civilians in that siege alone, and the destruction was enormous. Anita Lazo survived. Mr. Lazo drove me to a point overlooking Lapad Harbor, showed me the burned-down freezer plant, the ruined buildings, the rubble, the boats that had been shelled and sunk, still lying dead in the water as hulks. This was the newer part of town, not a priority; about half the roofs had been repaired.

“They didn’t come closer. They bombed. But to take the city—to capture it—that is very difficult,” Mr. Lazo said. “We had Kalashnikovs and other guns. We could defend it, man to man. But still the bombs fell.”

The siege lasted three months—tension, noise, eerie silences, rumors; no water, no lights. Not long before they’d had as many as seventy thousand tourists in a season. Now they had—how many?

“We have you,” Mr. Lazo said. “Ha!”

We went to Slano where there was hellish damage and more sunken boats.