THE window of my room at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo looks out over destruction on the scale of Berlin in 1945 - wrecked buildings, weed-grown streets, piles of rubble. Every window is smashed, every wall pitted with bullet-marks.
In the normal way, people have to run across the open ground there because there is always at least a couple of snipers who have it in their sights. In the past few days several people have been killed or injured there - a journalist going out on a story,a government driver sitting in his car.
The little stuttering run which everyone does is known with the gallows humour of war as the Sarajevo Shuffle; and yet when I looked out of my window this morning no one was doing the Sarajevo Shuffle anymore. They were just walking across the field of fire as though it were any other rubble-strewn stretch of ground, picking there way thoughtfully and with care. There was no crack of sniper fire, and no crash of artillery echoing round the hills above us.
It was something no one has really experienced in this city for 22 months - a peaceful day. The kind of day which you might confidently expect to survive.
The delicate ceasefire, which began on Wednesday, was the product of two things. One was the massacre of 68 people in the open air market, which caused the kind of revulsion and anger across the world which thousands of deaths in Sarajevo previously had not aroused, since they came piecemeal in ones or twos up to a dozen at a time.
The other factor was the arrival of a new United Nations military commander in Sarajevo and a new mood of determination and robustness. Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Rose is educated, literate and proud of his good French.