In a field of flowers, the wreckage of war in Libya

Benghazi: The attack seemed to have come out of clear skies onto a field of wildflowers.

Littered across the landscape, some 30 miles south of Benghazi, the detritus of the allied airstrikes on Saturday and Sunday morning offered a panorama of destruction: tanks, charred and battered, their turrets blasted clean off, one with a body still caught in its remnants; a small Toyota truck with its roof torn away; a tank transporter still on fire. But it did not end there.

For miles leading south, the roadsides were littered with burned trucks and burned civilian cars. In some places battle tanks had simply been abandoned, intact, as their crews fled. One thing, though, seemed evident: the units closest to Benghazi seemed to have been hit with their cannons and machine guns still pointing towards the rebel capital.

To the south, though, many had been hit as they headed away from the city in a headlong dash for escape on the long road leading to a distant Tripoli.

"They were retreating," said Col. Abdullah al-Shafi, an officer in the rebel forces which had clamored desperately for the help that arrived on Saturday. "Soldiers had taken civilians cars and fled. They were ditching their fatigues."

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Among it all, across an area the size of four football fields dotted with trees and white and yellow flowers, hundreds of Libyans solemnly picked through the debris on Sunday, gazing at the results of a last battle in Colonel Moammar el-Gaddafi's a desperate assault on Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital.

At one point, the onlookers carefully extricated the body of a soldier from the remnants of a tank, turned to cinder like five more bodies, unrecognizable on the roadside.

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From the debris it was not possible to piece together the full details of the final battle, and some questions hung over the carnage: had Libyan insurgents pinned down the rebels, as some of them claimed in news reports, or was the damage exclusively the result of allied airstrikes?

At least part of the answer was evident overhead, where jets could be seen across the region -- some circling nearby, some screaming through on their way to somewhere else. As allied commanders gauged that the Libyan government's air defenses had been, at the least, severely damaged, it was clear that the air campaign was entering a new phase, where ground targets were being actively hunted by allied attack aircraft.

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But some people here said there was still ground fighting, too, farther down the road toward the strategic crossroads town of Ajdabiyah. But those reports could not be immediately confirmed, any more than the precise details of what had happened on the roadside.

From the look of things on Sunday, it was not immediately clear whether the loyalist column, now turned to ashes, had still been advancing or was staging at this place on the highway. Soldiers appeared to have been trying to bulldoze sand into berms on one flank, with the highway on the other.

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But given the distance from Benghazi, it was clear that Colonel Gaddafi's forces had been moving into position, at least to encircle the city or possibly reinforce advance units already there.

"This is all France," a rebel fighter, Tahir Sassi, told a Reuters correspondent as he surveyed the devastation on Sunday. "Today we came through and saw the road open."

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The monuments to the loyalists' last maneuver were not the victory so often trumpeted in their propaganda. Empty ammunition boxes lay discarded among the flowers. Armored personnel carriers still smoldered alongside wrecked rocket-launchers. Craters pitted the fields, as if there had been multiple strikes, apparently by the pilots of the French warplanes that took credit for firing the first shots in the international, American-backed effort to contain Colonel Gaddafi's forces.

In Benghazi itself, the scene of heavy fighting on Saturday as leaders met in Paris to set their imprimatur on the campaign to contain Colonel Gaddafi, the city on seemed quiet on Sunday. The fighting had sent a panicky exodus of fearful Libyans flowing to the east as thousands tried to escape. But on Sunday, hundreds of cars clogged the roads, bearing residents back past makeshift barricades made of refrigerators, a swing set, a set of garish columns -- a surreal montage of war.

In the city, a tire repair shop had reopened and a butcher shop, but many remained shuttered. Long lines formed at the gas stations in this oil-rich land.

The military campaign in these parts had once seemed to see-saw as the rebels seeking the ouster of Colonel Gaddafi tried to push west to Tripoli, his stronghold, while loyalist troops sought to push them back east. The air strikes came with the pendulum swinging in the loyalists' favor, stopping the advance -- at least in one field of wildflowers -- with the abruptness of firepower concentrated on targets that had not previously needed to fear attack from the skies.