Razed to the ground by Ethiopian bomber planes, this town in the Sahel mountains went underground.

The fighters hid offices, hospitals, factories and schools beneath the earth.

An old syringe, some glass phials and a rusty medicine bottle cap still testfy to the presence of an underground field hospital that operated around the clock just behind the battle line.

"We were three surgery teams and the hospital was always full," said a former nurse called Timnit, now a 43-year-old mother of four, recalling old times in the hospital.

"When I arrived, I didn't know anything about nursing. We learned the job day by day with the injured fighters coming from the front. When the doctors carried out an operation, we assisted by holding torches between shoulder and neck to have our hands free.

"We slept on the floor. Sometimes there was nothing to eat for several days so we just drank water with salt. When we were lucky we had lentils."

Elsewhere, a few rusting chassis and auto parts are a reminder of a mechanical workshop hewed into the rock, where war damaged tanks and trucks were repaired and sent back to battle.

The mountain-top cemetery of the martyrs here is a short distance away from the trenches where the fighters could look down on the troops of the Ethiopian communist strongman Mengistu Haile Mariam.

From these rocky and arid heights, the guerrillas could observe every movement in the valley below, which is littered with the hulks of burnt-out tanks.

Ethiopian troops never managed to penetrate the defenses of Nakfa, after which the Eritrean currency is named.

For a country with only 4.4 million people today, the casualties of the 1961-1991 independence struggle -- at least 65,000 dead -- were an enormous burden. To these are added the 19,000 Eritreans killed in the 1998-2000 border war with Ethiopia, which still has not resulted in a definitive demarcation.

With a median age of only 17 1/2, the majority of the population has been born since the independence war, but the memory of the conflict is kept alive in families here.

"So many of our brothers and sisters have died, around Nakfa and in the country as a whole,"said Tewolde Hayelom, 39. "On Martyrs Day, we don't eat, we don't drink and we don't enjoy ourselves. Even the small children don't eat."

In little cemeteries dotted all over the mountains there are no headstones, but small piles of rocks on the ground still strewn with shell and cartridge cases recall the thousands who died defending a 200-kilometer (120-mile) line of trenches along the crest of the range.

"It is because of their lives that we are here today," said one 50-year-old former fighter, Debressai, still wearing the typical black sandals of the guerrillas.

"It is impossible to say how many fighters were at the front, because even thouse who did not wear a uniform, the inhabitants of the region, participated in the struggle."

The commemoration of the martyrs, he said, would be a simple occasion. "We will meet in the cemetery and we will walk in the valley."

In the coastal capital of Asmara, thousands of Eritreans took part in a candlelit march through the streets Saturday night.

President Issaias Afeworki -- a former leader of a guerrilla army that experts consider to have been one of the best in the world -- expressed "our high respect for our martyrs, who gave their lives so that our existence as a people and sovereign nation can be assured."

WAR.WIRE