Croatian Hospital Copes With Siege Of Its Own Surgeons Sew. Lives Ebb And Flow. Like The Shellings, The Victims Just Keep Coming.

SLAVONSKI BROD, Croatia — The soldier had no name, no papers. He was a big and robust man, and so it took him a long time to die.

He lay still on a basement operating room slab yesterday. He was a tank gunner on the Bosnian front who had taken a sliver of shrapnel to his heart.

For many long minutes, the surgeons cut and sewed, cut and sewed at his pink wounds. A nurse squeezed a hand pump to force oxygen down his windpipe. A tall intern pressed down hard, again and again, on the soldier's chest so that it heaved mightily and then dropped.

The man's feet turned a pale blue, then gray, and the surgeon rose up and said: "Stop. He is gone."

The nurse reached out and, as if turning out a light to go to sleep, switched off the computerized monitor that showed no life left in the unknown soldier.

The passing of this young Bosnian was an unremarkable event in Slavonski Brod, where soldiers and civilians are rushed daily to General Hospital, some of them to die. Since March, the Croatian town has been under siege from Serbian gunners across the Sava River who send artillery rounds whistling into homes and shops in the city center and toward Croatian military targets outside town.

Yesterday, as a nurse mopped the gunner's blood that had dripped into perfect circles on the floor, another Muslim soldier was wheeled into the basement operating room. Parts of this man's stomach and intestines had been blown out and lay now atop his chest.

"Perhaps we can save him," said a physician, Josip Bijelic, staring at the mess, but the faces of the weary nurses suggested otherwise.

Hope is a fragile thing in Slavonski Brod, where the hospital's director says 700 people have died in the operating room since March and 6,000 - including 1,100 civilians - have been treated for wounds. Every day, the shelling fells more civilians and the nearby war disgorges more dead and dying Croatian and Muslim soldiers.

In town, it is a capricious kind of killing. One moment, people are walking the streets, enjoying a sunny day, and in an instant they will bolt for doorways and basements as shells and rockets explode all around. Most survive unharmed. A few do not.

People die performing the most prosaic tasks: posting a letter, buying milk, tending roses in the garden. Everyday life is so perilous that most of the town's children have been bused out to safety, some of them as far away as Spain and Belgium.