Today, if Smajlovic embodies anything, it is a city approaching the limits of its mental and physical endurance. The Serbs still shell the city. And all across central Bosnia, Muslim-led government forces are being routed by a combined Serb-Croat assault. Most dispiriting of all for Sarajevans, Europe and America seem to have written off their struggle. The Clinton administration hasn’t pushed its plan to lift the arms embargo, having earlier abandoned the VanceOwen peace plan after it was rejected by the Serbs. Now mediator Lord David Owen insists that President Alija Izetbegovic accept the partition of the republic into Serb, Croat and Muslim states. Izetbegovic-speaking for a majority of Bosnia’s collective presidency-refuses.

But that defiance leaves Sarajevo’s 300,000 residents in limbo, desperate and alone. More and more lives seem devoted to nothing loftier than sipping weak orange drinks in a cafe or pursuing black-market coffee. meat and cigarettes. For many, the last straw was the total cutoff of water and electricity two months ago. Tens of thousands must now haul heavy containers to and from a river or public spigot in a weary parade that gives this center of European culture the look of a Latin American village-and threatens public health. Says a 25-year-old psychology student: “At the beginning, people said, ‘We’re united.’ Every one seemed happy because we’re together. We’ll survive, we’ll win. We’ll share all the crappy parts of fife. But now…“her voice trails off. Amid the grinding struggle to survive, public opinion has become increasingly divided between bitter-enders and those who urge surrender. “There are two sentiments,” says the daily newspaper Oslobodjenje. “‘Let them divide us, just so long as we can live normally in peace’ and ‘Fight on, because we can’t let them divide us after so many have died.’ It’s hard to say which is stronger.”

Another feeling is spreading through the city like an emotional epidemic: rage at the West. In Bistrik, a neighborhood just a few hundred yards from the front line, mourners gather at a funeral for Muslim children killed by a Serb mortar. They listen as Imam Vehbija Secerovic, whose own son was one of the dead, condemns Bill Clinton and U.N. SecretaryGeneral Boutros Boutros-Ghali: “They watch and approve of these crimes just because we are Muslims and believe in God. But we will meet Allah in paradise, and they are going to hell.” Perhaps inflamed by the imam words, a crowd of onlookers shouts at nearby Western journalists, charging that TV footage of the funeral will help Serb gunners target it. Sure enough, a shell explodes a hundred yards away-and when the initial shock recedes, mourners head for the journalists, tearing at a Spanish TV crew’s cameras and flak jackets and pounding on their jeep as they flee. Elsewhere, undisciplined Bosnian army units have robbed fuel and flak jackets from reporters-the first such incidents in a town where the foreign press was once regarded as a vital channel to the outside world.

The military leader of Bistrik is the man who put cellist Vedran Smajlovic to work in the trenches. He is Musan (Caco) Topalovic, the flamboyant commander of the 2,800-man 10th Mountain Brigade, a leading exponent of the theory that the siege could be broken if only Izetbegovic would make everyone pitch in at the front. His buses, emblazoned DIG TO VICTORY, traverse the cafe quarters, scooping up ablebodied men for trench duty-deputy ministers as well as singers and actors. Caco told a local reporter that the idea came to him last winter, when he brought a wounded soldier to the city-only to find the cafes full of people with government ID cards exempting them from frontline duty. Says soldier Amel Ramovic, 22, a former textile school student: “We all stand by Caco. He rounds people up because he wants the ones with money to fight.”

Bosnian government officials seem embarrassed by Caco and the divisions within the city that his crusade has exposed. “We don’t need popular Robin Hoods,” says Mustafa Hajrulahovic, commander of the Bosnian army’s First Corps. “The main reason for young men to be hanging around town is that we don’t have enough weapons at the front.” True enough, and the army has even arrested a couple of Caco’s men. But given his popularity among fighters, the army seems incapable, or unwilling, to bring him to heel. Recently Caco tried to press-gang 30 leading members of the military police, setting off a street battle between branches of the Bosnian armed forces that left one dead and several wounded. It wasn’t the first time that rival units have battled for power in Sarajevo.

It probably won’t be the last. More than half a century ago, George Or-well wrote of his return to Barcelona after months on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. He was struck by the changes in the city. Apathy and materialism had replaced classlessness and republican elan; unity had given way to intrigue, conspiracy and, eventually, open warfare among the city’s leftist factions. Maybe the seeds of corruption and infighting had been present all along, Orwell concluded. Sarajevo is not Barcelona, 1937: Orwell’s city was not directly besieged, and Bosnia’s political scourge is ethnicity, not ideology. But perhaps there is a parallel. No city under prolonged military pressure sustains the level of selflessness and apolitical heroism that it aspires to and that is imputed to it by outsiders -especially when the outside world does so little to foster hope. Soon, Sarajevo’s victimization at the hands of Serbs may be compounded by further discord within the siege lines. Even Sarajevo’s people are only human.