Like most decisions, we made it late and there was a huge scramble for the door. The foreign press corps in Belgrade had been expecting to be told to leave since well before the Nato bombing campaign began, but for most of the day only a few had actually been told to pack their bags.

These, it must be noted, were ejected in menacing circumstances. Several were woken in the night and told that they should be out of the country by morning. But by lunchtime the bulk of us were still there and still broadcasting (albeit not with the ability to send television pictures by satellite.)

Ordered to leave

Arkan, the Serbian paramilitary leader, arrives at the Belgrade hotel where the journalists are staying

But the doubt was in all our minds. The Serbian Information Minister - we were told by our London desk - had ordered us to leave by midnight and apparently we had all been informed of this by fax. But with one or two exceptions, none of us had seen any paperwork ordering us out.

Should we stay until physically ejected, or should we take advantage of the uncertainty and head for the border? Having been held by the Serbian police for several hours the night before, I was in no mood to test their understanding of this ambiguity.

But as with any journalist on the major news story of the day, we didn't want to abandon Belgrade unless there was no option.

The balance tipped sometime around 4pm. Rumours and news spread fast amongst the press corps, especially if we're all in the same hotel.

CNN's producer had been expelled. German television had received the fax. Reuters were heading for Hungary. Then Arkan turned up in the lobby. The man who many see as responsible for thinking up the policy of ethnic cleansing caused something of a major stir without even speaking to any of us.

Mass exodus

We hastily called a group meeting. None of us wanted to leave without being officially told to do so. But none of us had a lot of faith that Arkan's boys would see our side of this argument. We decided, reluctantly, that the only option was to head for Zagreb in neighbouring Croatia.

The rest of the press corps must have been holding similar discussions because the lobby was now packed with a babble of journalists waving passports and credit cards, shouting into mobile phones, humping silver boxes out onto the street.

I've not seen the mass exodus of the world's press on such a scale since the last ferry from Kinshasa during the Ebola crisis. It's not a pretty sight. We were forced through lack of car space to leave several of our boxes of equipment in the hotel storage.

We hastily paid our local translators and fixers their wages. Without their insight and contacts our work in Serbia would have been impossible.

They have been with us for many years, through the darkest days of Bosnia, and now the war had come to their hometown. We shook hands warmly and promised we'd be back. Their courage is far greater than ours.

The road to Belgrade is -as they say - only a few inches on the map. Three hours and we'd be in the Zagreb Intercontinental bar someone said optimistically.

At the checkpoint

The night sky of Novi Sad lights up as journalists head for Zagreb

I had my worries about the border crossing, especially given the array of different nationalities in our group, the amount of gear we had and the fact that two of our three cars were potentially not allowed to leave Serbia.

"Perhaps they'll just wave us through." said the colleague who'd been planning the session in the Intercontinental bar.

As we sped along "The Motorway of Freedom and Brotherhood" that joins the two countries who fought the most bitter war in Europe since 1945, I kept wondering if we'd made the right decision.

Way off to our right in the direction of Novi Sad we could see anti-aircraft rounds lighting up the clear starlit sky. We got to the border in good time, but our hearts took a group plummet when we saw the line for customs.

The world's press were - one by one - having every item of luggage searched. Bag by bag, book by book, tape by tape.

The first wave of inspectors who opened our bags were inquisitive but polite, bored even.

Then the thug in the blue ski-jacket stepped out. He looked as if he'd seen a bust-up or two during the war and didn't go in for banter. He took every bag and scoured every corner. He took every videotape, every cassette and mini-disc, even every CD.

At times he became aggressive, shouting at us in Serbian. He wanted a plastic bag for the confiscated material. He seized on a map of Yugoslavia and threw it to one side. He confiscated a colleague's Learn Spanish CD.

There seemed no logic to his menace. By the end of five hours, a pile had been separated out on the tarmac. It was the sum total of recorded material, audio and video, that the BBC and CNN had produced in Belgrade.

The next problem was the car. It had been hired in Belgrade and they didn't want it to cross into Croatia.

We hatched several plans involving leaving it at a nearby motel with the CNN vehicle and have our Belgrade fixer pick it up the next day.

But Bluejacket had a better idea. We were told to leave the car, with the keys, at the customs point. No arguments, no receipt. We crossed the border minus a week's work, one car, 4,000 Deutschmarks and all our reserve of patience.

Postscript

If you spot a group of journalists in a hotel anywhere near a war zone, you can be pretty sure that somewhere lurking in their midst is a bottle of single malt whiskey.

The Intercontinental bar - that fabled Nirvana of our trek - was closed. We improvised and camped down in the hotel lobby. The Glenmorangie eased the frustrations and we were soon laughing and joking before we fell into our beds at 6am.

As I write, the Serbian authorities have agreed to re-admit us to Belgrade - but now there is a problem with visas. Our fixer has just phoned to say that the air-raid sirens are sounding again in the capital and we're all anxious to get back and report.

The plight of journalists covering a war is minimal and irrelevant compared to that suffered by the people who try to live their lives in the firing line. We're taking an evening off, happy in the knowledge that tomorrow we can get back to our work of reporting on their fate.