The boat from the Italian port of Bari that goes to Durres in Albania is packed with young men in their 20s. They have black leather jackets, next to no luggage and stories of dispossession and murder back home.
They are the Kosovo Diaspora, migrants who left Kosovo over the last decade to work in Germany or Switzerland or to avoid conscription into the Serbian army. Now they're coming home, to join the Kosovo Liberation Army. There are said to be 20,000 of them in northern Albania, not counting the fighters who remain inside Kosovo itself, and their numbers are growing by the day.
I travelled to northern Albania with them in a minibus, a dozen young men who had arrived in Albania for the first time the day before from Germany. Only two of the 12 had any military experience: one, Hasan, had worked in the old Yugoslav army as a mines expert, the other, Mentor, had been an officer in the KLA the year before.
"About 500 of us have arrived over the last three days," said Hasan, who'd worked in Germany for nine years.
But the Serbs, I said, had the heavy weaponry and the tanks; the KLA just had Kalashnikovs. Weren't they afraid? Mentor laughed. "Fear? We have no fear. But we do have morale."
Hasan nodded vigorously. "We're all volunteers here. And the best soldiers fight of their own free will. We just want our own land back. And so we're fighting with our hearts. I don't care what the odds are. I don't care how long the training lasts, whether it's a few days or a couple of weeks. All I want is to get a Serbian soldier in my sights and to shoot." He pulled the trigger of an imaginary rifle. But the KLA hadn't been able to protect Albanian civilians so far, I said. "They were outnumbered," said Mentor, the mines expert. "One village, with 100 houses, was surrounded with 150 tanks. What can you do against so many tanks?"
Not surprisingly, they were all in favour of the NATO bombardment. And they had a simple solution to the problem of NATO's reluctance to commit ground troops in Kosovo. "Give us the weapons," said Mentor, "and we'll do the job ourselves."
Were they paid, I asked. There was a murmur of disapproval from the young men at the back of the bus. No, they chorused. One piped up: "If Ireland was invaded by the Russians, would you want to be paid to fight?" Hasan added: "We've given up jobs to come here, all of us. I took a month's leave from my firm, but I don't think I'll be going back."
As we passed through the mountains of Merdita, an endless convoy of refugees, in lorries, buses, combi-vans and cars, with mattresses balanced precariously on top, passed in the other direction: the human remnants of "ethnic cleansing". To begin with, the volunteers waved at the old men in the carts, but eventually there were just too many of them.
"The Serbs can never make up for what they've done," said one, as we passed another busload. "Never. We're fighting now, to the end."
Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist based in London