In a war being fought in remote, semiarid hills, the most visible front is the public relations front.

Today, both sides agreed upon where the real blood flowed: on the same portion of disputed border where war erupted last May and reignited on Saturday morning after an eight-month cease-fire, and on a second front near the small Eritrean town of Tsorona, gateway to a strategically important larger town halfway to Asmara, the Eritrean capital.

The enemies also agreed that Ethiopia supported its troops with warplanes, and shelled a town called Adiquala. Ethiopia claimed to have destroyed a radar station there.

But in the statements issued by each nation, the day's events were secondary to the question that has preoccupied both governments since long before the first shot was fired: namely, who fired the first shot.

Eritrea's Foreign Ministry proclaimed in today's "Update on the Faltering Ethiopian Offensive": "After claiming for the past two days that the current large-scale attacks were initiated by Eritrea, [the Ethiopian government] has now been forced to admit -- by the weight of incontrovertible evidence -- that it is the party which has unleashed the offensive."

Ethiopia's official spokeswoman meanwhile repeated her government's line blaming Eritrea for the "full-scale attack" that started it all.

The world may never know who is right. Satellite photos betray only troop movements, not the opposing fire that might have provoked them. Electronic intercepts of military radio transmissions surely could tell the story -- "especially stuff like, 'They're attacking! They're attacking!' which you always get at the start of these things," one analyst said.

But such intelligence, even if gathered by U.S. eavesdropping apparatus, rarely becomes public in African wars, especially those that involve a U.S. ally. And the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict involves not one but two allies.

"We're trying to stare down the middle," said an African specialist in Washington who asked not to be named. "There are no bad guys. They're all friends of ours who have temporarily taken leave of their senses."

Each country clearly craves the moral high ground. Analysts agree that both sides are so preoccupied with the question of who fired first because almost nothing else about the conflict is clear. The border dispute at the nominal heart of the fight is a mare's-nest of counterclaims supported by competing colonial maps. And the dynamic between the formerly friendly nations -- part of the same country until Eritrea became independent nearly six years ago -- is as nuanced, personal and bitter as any family feud.

Yet both sides appeared truly shocked when the crisis erupted in May. After a violent but tiny skirmish, Eritrean President Issaias Afwerki sent tanks to occupy land that been more gently claimed by each country for years. Since then, the lines on each side have hardened -- diplomatically, with the successive failure of peace attempts by the United States, the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) -- as well as militarily. Each side has an estimated 200,000 troops in service.

"You can't, in the end, follow it logically," said a relief official in Nairobi. "At the end of the day it's not who started it, but why it started in the first place. It's amazing that after nine months it's as unclear as it was in May."

The high ground changed hands frequently when fighting broke out in June. Ethiopian officials stewed when their airstrikes on the Eritrean capital dominated the first television images of the conflict. Days later Eritrean officials winced at coverage of their own planes' bombing civilians at Mekele in northern Ethiopia, a strike that hit a primary school.

In the uneasy truce that followed, Ethiopia courted sympathy by printing full-color posters of the carnage and distributing equally graphic booklets -- but expressed impatience with the international criticism of its policy of forcibly expelling Eritrean citizens by the tens of thousands.

Eritrea, meanwhile, was widely viewed as stalling, repeatedly asking for "clarification" of the OAU peace plan that Ethiopia accepted early on. In the new year, Ethiopia announced its impatience in terms that grew stronger so steadily that when fighting broke out -- on territory Eritrea had occupied since May -- it was widely assumed to have been launched from the Ethiopian side.

"Everyone knows they started this," said Yemane Ghebreab, a senior Eritrean official.

"I disagree with that," said Selome Taddesse, the Ethiopian government spokeswoman. She argued that recent events -- including the U.N. Security Council adoption of the peace plan, and a plea by the head of the OAU for Eritrea to sign it -- were effectively isolating Eritrea.

"Their style of public relations is to win the international community at any cost. If they have to lie, [they] lie," Selome said. "We have waited for nine months. We were in no rush to start this thing, especially when things were going toward us."