APOLOGY: A should be for alphabet: the device I am resorting to in some desperation to structure my thoughts on this subject: my relations vis-è-vis two Yugoslavian wars. This is my fourth attempt at organizing the material, the deadline looms and the only virtue of this catch-all structure is its transparency. An ABC...? You know the writer's trouble. So, a pre-emptive strike on exaggerated expectations. A, in this instance, must be for Apology.

BAD FAITH: Primary sources for records of the second Austro-Turkic war of 1787-89 are only available in this country through British Museum's Burney Collection. A badly catalogued selection of eighteenth-century newspapers has been transferred to microfiche and is available for readers in a windowless room of the North Library Gallery. It is a vile working environment; neon-lit, unventilated and the heat from the projectors parches what air there is. A fortnight's digging gave me the details I needed to piece together a picture of the earlier war. I went to see the current conflict first-hand. So, with my impeccable credentials thus established... Except that this gambit - that I have knowledge, that you do not - will not wash. Yes, I have done the legwork, but the assumption of superiority based on this experience takes no account of the deracinating effects of the experience itself. Recrossing the River Drina to escape the present-day conflict, far from understanding it better, I felt I understood it worse. War is a special case; as a writer it makes you less capable, not more. Let B stand for Bad Faith, the general rubric for any account of a war that offers 'I was there'as a guarantee that 'this is how it was'.

COINCIDENCES: Extend the current conflict about 150 miles east, let Belgrade stand for Sarajevo, and you have the Austro-Turkic war of 1787-89. The same participants, the same hesitant foreign interventions, the same muddled aims, the same atrocities. I wrote about this war in my first novel which was completed three months before the present war began. A historical novelist rarely gets chance to check his rendering against reality and, viewed from London, some of the parallels appeared striking enough - little villages and towns whose names I had unearthed and promptly forgotten were popping up in the conflict: Bosanski Brod, Gradiska, Dubica, Zvornik. I had researched and transcribed details of an ill-equipped refugee camp at Karlovac for instance, and the beating to death of a Muslim prisoner-column two days'march from there. Trnopolje, Omarska and Manjaca, where this act has latterly been repeated, are all within fifty miles of the current Red Cross camp at Karlovac. I was seeing events two centuries old on the Six O'Clock News.

DOUBTS: A sense that the war as I had written it, having now become available as an experience, was somehow inauthentic. The early reporting of the present conflict was necessarily fragmentary. Martin Bell's reports for the BBC in particular were always at pains to indicate the information that wasn't available. All this cast a great deal of retrospective suspicion on my own effort. I wanted what I thought I had before - the full story - but this was no longer true. What I had was the pieces of a war.

ESPRESSO: War is serious and this will seem too trivial to mention, but E is for Espresso. I met an Austrian war correspondent called Karl Wendl in November 1992 at a party in Vienna. We were both trying, unsuccessfully, to get some coffee. We were both extremely drunk. The previous night, Karl had had a dream. He was standing on a dock in Serbia. Below him in the water was a submarine. Karl was trying to hitch a lift to Venice to get an espresso. In the circumstances, it would been more reasonable of me to pursue the espresso line of conversation (this after all what had prompted this odd disclosure), or even the submarine. Instead, I asked him if he had ever been to Serbia.

FARCE: We spent the rest of the night drawing maps of Yugoslavia on paper napkins and comparing notes on the two-hundred-year-old war I had written about in my book and its modern equivalent, which he had then visited seven times. We never got our coffees. Instead, we planned a Serbian submarine-hunt. (They have, by most accounts, sixteen.) This is stupid little story, and events would overtake our plan in any case, but it's quite true and, in as much as it was the first in a chain of events that would eventually have me dodging bullets in Sarajevo, I find its absurdity quite prophetic. F is for Farce, which like an off-colour joke at some supposedly momentous occasion, can also find its place in a war.

GUN: G, rather obviously, is for Gun. I have handled guns, am reasonably at ease with the idea of device for firing projectiles. The guns in Bosnia are different. Their stocks have not been lovingly polished, Their barrels are unoiled. The metal they are made from is black and scarred with little nicks and scratches. Almost everyone I meet here carries a gun, but they are careless of them, waving them roughly on the ground. These are not treasured possessions and there is nothing iconic about them - they would look ridiculous hung above a fireplace. It is apparent at a glance that a Zastava Kalashnikov was never intended for pheasant. These guns are roughly tools for the job of shooting people.

HEADS: On 12 March, 1788, the Daily Universal Register reported that the Ottoman (which is to say Muslim) forces, far from taking prisoners, were killing any Austrian solders unlucky enough to be captured and cutting off their heads. In April, the same paper (now renamed The Times) related that a group of headless bodies had been discovered in an overrun Turkish camp near Dubica, northern Bosnia. A codicil to this story was published on 27 May. Apparently a sackful of ears cut from the heads of Austrian dead had been suspended from the gates of seraglio in Constantinople. This is the story of a disappearance, or rather it is a story with its central fact missing - a bad story. In narrative terms it doesn't really work. Such deficiencies are, at one level, the reason I went to the latter-day version of this war. I went to find what I, the passages on war in my novel and this story in particular lacked. H is for the Heads.

ITINERARY: Karl Wendl, Riccardo Herrgott (our photographer)and I drove from Zvornik to Vlasenica, where we spent the night. The next day we reached Sarajevo, slept in the Serb barracks at Lukavica, and the following day spent some hours in Grbavica district in the centre of the city. Then we drove back to Zvornik, recrossing the Drina at ten-thirty that night.

JUSTIFICATION: Or the moral accounting for one's actions. All sides in the current war need to be seen to be in the right. The worse the atrocities the stronger the urge. Justification is having trouble keeping pace with events.

KOSOVO: An official working for the Serb Ministry of Information at Pale told me this story. On the eve of the battle of Kosovo in 1389, King Lazar Hrebelyanovic gathered his Serbian kinsmen and, looking forward to the coming battle, told them they must fight for the Kingdom of Heaven, not for the Kingdom of Earth. The battle of Kosovo was to be about more than territory. The next day, he and the best of his nobles were slaughtered by the Turks. The story is preserved in the song-cycles of the Serb guslari. Nationalism and poetry have always enjoyed a close alliance in Serbia (witness Dr Radovan Karadzic's lyrics aspirations). In the Serbian historical consciousness, Kosovo might be seen as a signal realization: that a war could not be fought and won by aiming over the heads of the enemy. Henceforth their wars would be about earth, not heaven. The current war falls readily in this context: its talk is all of enclaves, havens, corridors, areas which are disputed or controlled or regained. Kosovo is presently being touted as where this war will happen next. Ask the Serbs why they are fighting and they will talk about a distant past or a spectral future. Kosovo and all the other 'Kosovos', are a way of not talking about what's happening now - an amnesia of the present.

LOVE: L in an ABC is always for Love. In Vlasenica there is a graveyard for the victims of current war, forty-three of them on 13 December 1992; undoubtedly more by now. Behind it, stretching up the hill, are graves dating from the war of 1939-45. There are more than four hundred of these. Hanging on a wall in the Serb Ministry of Information at Pale is a map showing mortality rates in Bosnia for 1939-45. The colours range from light to dark, from zero to one hundred per cent. About a fifth of this map is black. Vlasenica is a murky green colour, which the key tells me means sixty per cent. Even though (or perhaps because) it has killed so many of them, the Bosnians love their land - Serbs, Croats and Muslims alike.

MUJAHEDIN: Their presence in this war somehow persisted as a rumour long after it should have become a generally acknowledged fact. In July 1992, a group of mujahedin were captured by the Serbs in the region north of Banja Luka. They had travelled on Saudi Arabian passports to Vienna where they had acquired visas from the Croatian Embassy. One - his passport gave the name Saed al Garaf - had a camera. The Serbs developed the film in it and found heads. I was shown these photographs by the Serbs in Pale. The heads had been cut from the bodies of Serb fighters killed by Saed and his comrades. Some had their eyes gouged out, others looked strangely peaceful. I leafed through the prints and thought of a group of headless bodies found two hundred years before. And these mujahedin had been fighting around Travnik and Banja Luka, which is not so far from Dubica... Of course this line of thought is ludicrous, but putting Humpty together again is a strong novelistic instinct and I confess that I would very much like these gruesome holiday snaps to clear up my two hundred year mystery. Earlier wars are often used to justify later ones. Reports of headless bodies. Photographs of bodiless heads. I would at least like to establish a correspondence. Trace a parallel or two.

NARRATIVE: War severs the relations between events. But paradoxically war's deep incoherence urges the necessity of these relations even more forcefully. What will happen next? The question has an obvious relevance if you are actually in this situation. The fact that you can never get an answer is what keeps you constantly at risk. This information is not being withheld: it actually doesn't exist. In its absence fabulous contortions result. Asked where the Bosnian Serbs got their oil supplies from, Radovan Karadzic explained that, by extraordinary stroke of luck, an enormous cache, stored secretly during World War Two, had been discovered in a cave. Note the stock ingredients (cave, secret, cache) and the central role played by chance in this story. He was a little vague on the cave's exact location, too.

OUTRAGE: The instinct for psychic self-preservation flattens the peaks and through of your emotions. I anticipated, but never felt, outrage in Bosnia. Possibly, the 'out-'is instructive. In Geneva or the House of Commons or on Capitol Hill, outrage is invoked with some frequency. Being 'in', the '-rage'comes at a higher price.

PHOTOGRAPHY: A photograph enhances the prestige of its subject. A photograph steals your soul. Both attitudes are in evidence amongst the soldiery of Bosnia. Some pose. Some wave you away. Some pose and then rip the film from the camera. A baby-faced chetnik hung out the back of a lorry, carbine in one hand, cap in the other. A useless shot - he was smiling - but why not? Snap, snap, snap. The lorry pulls across us, his CO leaps out, demands the film. High drama! Babyface, apparently, has family in Sarajevo. The theory is that the Muslims in Sarajevo identify Serb families from newspaper photos of their relatives, then shoot them. Perhaps it's true. We test it. 'Sarajevo?'we ask solicitously of the waver-offers. They nod sadly. We commiserate. A few minutes of this and they pose mournfully with their machine-guns, resigned, it would seem, to the inevitable massacre of their families. The 'pose and rip'merchants remain problematic.

QUESTIONS: Karl interviewed General Gvero, commander of the Serb forces around Sarajevo. Karl asked, 'Do you think Sarajevo might one day be partitioned, as Berlin was in 1945?'Then, 'Dr Karadzic's plan (to offer safe-conduct out of the city to any who want it) is workable?'And lastly, 'Are any of the three sides capable of wining this war?'General Gvero spoke for over an hour, according to the translator, was very impressed by Karl's questions. Most of his interviews come in well under five minutes. A few weeks before the outbreak of the Gulf War, Karl put the following to Saddam Hussein: "Mister President, for decades the whole Arab world has searched for a leader strong enough to stand up to the West. I would ask you now", a pause, "are you that leader?"

RUMOUR: Here's some tittle-tattle from the Sarajevo rumour mill. Dr Karadzic's son Saskia is, naturally enough, a staunch supporter of the Serb cause in Bosnia, brave, upstanding, a devoted son, etc. Jusuf Brasnica, better known as Juka, is a petty gangster turned warlord on the Muslim side, wounded three times, famed for a series of daring raids, drives a BMW 7-series. He commands a militia of several hundred men based on Mount Igman. Saskia and Juka have been friends since childhood. Saskia regularly sneaks through the lines to meet with Juka. They drink, talk, laugh. Perhaps they are in love. That's the rumour.

SOURCES: Headless bodies again: the reports in the Daily Universal Register cited above would have been compiled from second-hand gleanings originating from "briefings" given by the Imperial Ambassadors in London and Brussels. The ambassadors'information came from the Office of Correspondence in Vienna (essentially an organ of censorship, though not fabrication) which derived in turn from dispatches sent back by the army. The provenance of this information does not inspire trust and I suspect that the whole story was recycled from some earlier incident, possibly belonging to another war entirely.

The heads are more firmly documented. There are the photographs. There is also, I was told, some particularly nasty video footage. I saw lists of names and passport numbers. With the indictments piling up against their own militias, the Serbs are naturally keen for this evidence to be accepted. Their motives are bad but the heads, I think, are for real.

TRUTH: Traditionally the first casualty of war in present-day Bosnia it suffers something more analogous to death by a thousand cuts. In its place there are degrees of probability, increasing or decreasing likelihoods, hard and soft information, conflicting versions. Three days before we arrived in Sarajevo, several news agencies had reported that the Serbs had closed the road from the airport. This act, it is generally agreed will, be the first move if the Serbs mount an all-out assault on the city. Unfortunately, the report was false. So clear-cut a case is rare. It is more usual for the presented reality to bend obliquely from the truth. "Alija Izetbegovic is President of Bosnia" seems incontrovertible, until you stop to wonder what "Bosnia" is .

UNIFORMS: Uniforms, in war, are intended to distinguish the combatants. In Bosnia, however, all sides wear the same uniform - that of the former Yugoslavian Army. The correspondent Kate Adie tells a story about having to ask one group of soldiers the identity of the soldiers they were firing on, then having to ask the identity of those doing the firing. The real distinction is between degrees of uniform. Full uniform implies a professional soldier under command; someone unlikely to shoot you without good reason. Part-uniform suggest a militiaman - something of an unknown quantity and thus more frightening. No uniform is very bad. But worst of all, for some reason, are people wearing tracksuits.

VICTIMS: Before the war, Slavko Milanovic used to be the director of the Kamerni Teatar '55, an avant-garde theatre in Sarajevo. Now he works for the Serbian Ministry of Information. He is quiet, urbane, very literate, a leading member of the Sarajevo intelligentsia when such a thing existed. At first I had Slavko pegged for a victim of this war; not an obvious one, but still someone whose life had been transformed utterly and would never be the same again. Through the noise of the shelling, we talked about productions of Bunuel and Jarry who, I couldn't help thinking, would have approved of this scene.

WOODSMOKE: Everyone in Bosnia smells faintly of stale woodsmoke. This is easy to explain. Although the army is supplied with oil by Serbia (we saw the freight containers lined up in a siding at Zvornik) the rest of the country has very little or none. Even the Serbs barracks at Lukavica only run their generators for five hours a night. If you want to be warm, you burn wood. In the Muslim areas of Sarajevo, trees beyond sniper range have been cut down to stumps, and the stumps themselves hacked out with hand-axes. The temperature in December rarely rises above five degrees and can fall to twenty below. Not to smell of woodsmoke is to be at best very cold and at worst frozen to death. I associated this smell, reasonably enough, with life.

To write about causes and objectives suggests that there is a passage from one to other, that the war follows it and this is the "story". Unfortunately this is nowhere discernible from within the war. When I smell stale woodsmoke my mind does not leap to the Vance-Owen plan. And the converse: thinking in strategic terms misses the essence of war, its irresolution and sloppiness, its inconsistency and refusal to assign fixed meanings to anything. The pot does not stop the water boiling over. In fact in as much as the removal of these trees opens up new lines of fire for the snipers, you could say that they are the fire under the pot. You can smell of stale woodsmoke and still get killed.

X: The first village we reached was Drinjaca. There were houses with gardens, a cow or two out the back, chicken runs and pigsties. Then, in the midst of these, there would be a house gutted by fire, its windows out and roof missing. A few more occupied houses - kids in the garden, Mum putting out the washing - then another fire-blackened wreck. Sometimes there would be a terrace of four or five dwellings with one destroyed in the middle. The others would be untouched, as though some low-tech surgical strike had taken place. Underneath the soot it was possible to see the sign used to mark these houses out: a circle, and within it an X. We saw this sign in every village we passed through.

YESTERDAY: A stretch of road, three hundred metres at most, somewhere between the town of Vlasenica and a little village called Han Pijesak. The sky is cloudless and if this ridge lay below five thousand feet the temperature would probably be above freezing. The road lies in a shallow crease: the land balloons up gently on either side, then flattens out and extends to the treeline a hundred metres or so distant. The men who work this land live with their families in the loose collection of little houses about half a mile behind us. It's been snowing, so the fields are white. A ridge of snow has collected in the middle of the road, but preceding vehicles have worn a pair of tramlines which wee can follow. This is a good metalled road, well maintained, easy driving.

Yesterday, at the checkpoint we are now approaching, we were prodded back into our car at gunpoint, the film ripped from the cameras, and directed into a firefight by the irregulars manning it. Today we have just passed five corpses lying face down in one of the fields I have just described. So, we are on this road, within these events, and it would be reasonable to ask at this point "What happens next?"

There is something intensely human in this question, and something telling in the fact that war rubs it out. We reach the checkpoint and see faces familiar from yesterday. They wave us through with a smile. Yesterday may as well not have happened.

ZVORNIK: We have just been shot at, but now we are almost at Zvornik, where the bridge crosses the Drina, war ends and peace begins. A trade-off at the checkpoint will result in us giving a lift to a soldier who lives on the other side of the river. He has a little English, mostly the titles of Beatles'songs, and starts to sing, "We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine..".

Writing this now, I have only just realized how apt it is. We never did find our Serbian submarines. Karl makes a stab at singing along. The soldier knows the whole song. He is, by some margin, the most cheerful soldier we have met. We can't wait to get rid of him.

[ Lawrence Norfolk, A Bosnian Alphabet, Granata, No. 43/1993. ]

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