It was no overstatement. During a seven-hour drive through southern Rwanda toward the front lines, we passed burned-out villages, wrecked bridges and refugees burying the dead. Former prisoners freed by the rebels walked along the roadsides in bright pink jail suits, with nowhere to go. Everybody who could has fled, but that left hundreds of children. An Italian priest in Nyanza is caring for 900 orphans, many of whom were found wandering the countryside. Everywhere he goes, he said, he finds them sitting alone in the road or clutching their dead parents inside their houses. His most recent find: the 2-year-old daughter of a Tutsi government official. When the official discovered that his father, mother and other relatives had been massacred by government forces, he was so distraught that he shot his wife and children, then killed himself. A bullet passed through the baby’s lung, but she survived.

As Rwanda’s nightmare deepens, the peacemakers. too, are fighting despair. “The indiscriminate killings of civilians that we witnessed in front of our own eyes, we’re trying to prevent it, we’re trying to re duce it,” says a Red Cross official in Nyanza, “but there’s so little we can do.” His prediction: the two-month-old orgy of bloodletting will go on and on. Even churches, the traditional refuge of the ethnic Tutsi minority during periodic pogroms by the majority Hutu tribe, have been turned into killing grounds. In town -after town the churchyards are strewn with bleaching skeletons. Even the victims’ would-be protectors are targets. When Tutsi rebels last week liberated nearly 40,000 people Aho had sought shelter in a Roman Catholic Church center south of the capital, they killed three bishops and 16 other priests. “The churches have been used as sanctuaries and many people have been killed there,” a rebel official told me. “It was easy for these soldiers to associate the massacres with the church.”

The wrecked capital has its own horrors. Early last week Hutu militiamen massacred nine priests and 63 civilians in a church in the Nyamirambo district, southwest of the city center. Days later scores more were killed in an attack on Tutsis hiding in a nearby church. U.N. officials are impatiently awaiting the arrival of 5,500 fresh U.N. troops, which they say will give them the manpower and transport to move refugees into safer areas. But the actual deployment of the troops has been delayed, first by U.S. objections over Ahat officials considered a dangerously open-ended mission, more recently by bureaucratic haggling over which kind of armored vehicles the Pentagon will supply, how the African peacekeepers will be trained and how much the United Nations will pay to lease and move the trucks. Jean-Guy Plante, the U.N.’s military spokesman in Kigali, says it could take weeks before any substantial number of fresh troops arrive. In New York, the estimate is at least a month. Relief executives are outraged at the delay; U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has called it a “scandal” that the Security Council has been so slow to move against what he terms genocide.

U.N. troops waiting for reinforcements in Kigali must also worry about simply surviving. On Thursday, a rocket screamed in and blasted the top floor of their four-story compound. It broke through two walls and shredded the contents of an empty room where six soldiers sleep. One of them, a Ghanaian soldier, came down from the roof to survey the damage. “We can’t go out on the streets, we can’t even stay in our rooms,” he said. “What can we possibly do?” The main option-for him and Rwanda seems to be: wait out the slaughter and hope to survive.