As the death toll mounts across Syria – and calls grow louder for the rebels to be armed with Western weapons – the fear on the ground is that things are only going to get worse.

Can there be a contrast anywhere in the world greater than the views on the road to hell?

The rebel outpost where arms, medicines and journalists stop off on their way to Homs is a rural idyll. As the cold but gentle light of a Levantine spring morning rises over fields and apricot orchards, a log fire and sweet black tea provide a tinge of warmth. Outside, the dew settles on the early blossom of an almond tree leaning against the ragged eaves of what was until recently a farmer’s cottage, the mattocks still resting in the yard.

Its regular occupants now, a happy-go-lucky band of bearded warriors, childhood friends and cousins from a nearby town, josh and pray together, never too far from their guns. The only pause in their laid- back demeanour comes when they look out over the poplars that line the back road to the city, and contemplate the horror of fractured bodies and imploding that is unfolding there, just a few miles away, before the world’s YouTube screens.

“It’s impossible”, “He’s got it surrounded”, “No one can get in or out”, “It’s a massacre”, they say, one after the other. The Sunday Telegraph was treated to this ritual earlier this month, a few days before Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times journalist, and Remi Ochlik, a French photographer, on the way to their deaths last week.

The television loop in the background showed another rolling cloud of smoke, focused briefly on another child’s battered face in the morgue, caught a grainy image of a tank turret, half-hidden from view, recoiling.

And then, of course: “We need weapons. What can we do with these old guns?”

It is clearly true. The rebel army is not quite the scattered, ill- disciplined bunch of Islamist crazies sometimes suggested in analyses filed from London and Washington. But the view from Homs is also different from that presented by the rebels’ propagandists, who like to imply it comprises a unified force under a central command that, along with the brave demonstrators now roiling cities across the country, is on the verge of driving President Bashar al-Assad out of office.

It has nothing to compete with the columns of armour advancing down the main road from Damascus towards the rebellious cities not just of Homs but Hama, Idlib, Deir al-Zour, and Deraa; with the new Russian tanks said to be immune to rocket-propelled grenades, on which the rebels mostly depend; with the latest generation of heavy-duty mortars, also provided by Russia, bigger in their indiscriminate destruction than any that have been used before; with multiple rocket launchers, said by some specialists to be able to latch on to a satellite phone signal for better targeting command centres – and informal media centres. But these are but a fraction, some diplomats believe, of what the regime could call into play if it “really got serious”.

“If we are kept to our current fighting resources, maybe he will last a year, or more, before he falls,” Abu Arab, the commander of the Free Syrian Army in western Homs province told The Sunday Telegraph in an interview at the outpost. That is significantly longer than rebels outside the country predict and, more to the point, the diplomats who hope they will achieve their aims without a significant external boost to those resources.

For that is the question now facing the Western powers and their new allies in the Arab League as they contemplate Assad’s bombardments and the immutable refusal of Russia and China to join a united front against him. On Friday, the well-meaning foreign ministers of 70 nations met in Tunis, a swirl of kandouras and keffiyehs swishing past the concerned, decent faces of Europeans and Americans in suits desperate to talk about humanitarian aid, medical supplies and the best chances for a stable Syria.

Speech after speech outlined the different form of humanitarian corridor that could be opened to evacuate the wounded civilians of Baba Amr and Khalidiya. Stern threats of sanctions were issued, oblivious to the fact that even those already put in place by one forum or another have been ignored by neighbours such as Iraq and Lebanon, and backers in Iran and Russia.

The big players foreswore mention of arms, and certainly the use of direct force. The era of liberal intervention, that dream of offering a military shove to the forces of freedom and democracy that created unexpected, explosive change in previous nightmares from Kosovo to Libya, is officially dead.

Even in secret? “I’m aware of no such discussions,” said one “Western diplomat”, senior enough to be “in the room”. “We think it would make things worse, and hasten the slide into civil war,” said a “British official”. A third talks of the over-reaching consequences of reigniting the Cold War, turning what is a localised conflict into a new stand-off between America and her allies and an emerging – but not yet fixed – Russian-led axis. “There are political costs involved in being seen to arm the opposition,” that diplomat said.

It is the line that David Cameron and William Hague have pursued from the beginning, when it seemed overwhelmingly sensible. Conscious that the success of the campaign in Libya was a damn finer-run thing than it appeared at the time, they as well as Washington took one look at Syria’s powerful military, complex sectarian politics and strategic sensitivity and determined to shout loudly from the side. At a time of defence cuts on both edges of the Atlantic, and after bruising experiences in neighbouring Iraq and with men still being lost in Afghanistan, no one was spoiling for a fight. And, unlike in Libya, powerful voices in Syria itself, oppositionists who had been in jail for years for their beliefs also spoke out against Western action. Even yesterday, one anti-government activist in Homs itself, Mohammed Saleh, said he supported the opposition but rejected even the supply of light arms.

“Anyone who supports us with weapons just wants Syrians to kill each other,” he said. “We will triumph by man, not by arms. If we win through the weapons, militants will take charge, and we will need another 40 years for a new Syria. A triumph of militarism stands against that of democracy and freedom.”

He spoke, as he pointed out himself, in a city of “universal murder” in which no convention, no ambulance even, was safe. Yet when asked what he wanted to happen instead of airlifts of anti-tank weapons, his words were uncannily similar to the diplomats’ when they were asked the same question in a marbled hotel lobby.

“We need international observers,” he said. “We want a calm dialogue during the handing over of power,” he said. “Syrians are capable of the rest.”

Or, as one of the diplomats put it – the aim is still to implement the Arab League plan, for Assad to cede power to his vice-president, and deliver a “Syrian-led solution”.

But is that how it really is? It is all beginning to look rather unbelievable.

Everyone, in the absence of war, opposes it. When the Assads were putting down a few peaceful protests with excessive force, we wrung our hands but subconsciously decided that this was, sadly, the way of the world.

Once war begins, however, democratic populations are uneasy if they are too one-sided. The arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia seemed sensible as a warning to militaristic, hubristic tyranny; when the then foreign secretary Douglas Hurd later argued against lifting it for the Bosnians on the grounds it would create a “level killing field”, he was widely ridiculed.

In Syria, too, there is now an un-level killing field.

And so, responsive as they must be to their TV sets, the politicians who turned up on Friday were not quite as black and white as they might have appeared in their public statements. There is a strong lobby among Gulf states, which cannot stand Assad’s alliance with Iran, to “speed things up”. With a swish of those kandooras, the Saudi delegation walked out on Friday afternoon, announcing that it was time to arm the rebels. And they went straight to meet with US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, whose closing press conference proved to be a masterpiece of innuendo, in which even her expressed opposition “to a protracted civil war” seemed to hint at something else. She broke off, for example, to praise the spirit of reconciliation between Kosovo and Serbia. Could it really be a coincidence that the Kosovo campaign marked the great conversion of her husband, President Bill, to liberal interventionism, at the end of a presidency that began with pulling troops out of Somalia and saw its most humiliating foreign policy moment when he stood aside in the face of Rwandan genocide? Mrs Clinton was the strongest administration voice urging President Obama to war in Libya, and she is said to be more gung-ho now in private than she lets on.

Look at the Saudis and the Qataris, The Telegraph was repeatedly told. No one knows what they are up to – at least, officially – but the Syrian National Council says the insurgents of the Free Syrian Army are already getting arms and equipment from somewhere. And for the future? “No options are off the table if diplomacy fails,” the third diplomat says, in a carefully negotiated quote. “We will reach for the tools we have.”

“We are looking at what is most likely to deliver peace and stability to Syria,” says diplomat number two. “But there’s increasingly a sense of frustration and urgency.”

In the besieged rebel stronghold of Qusayr, near Homs, an opposition activist described Baba Amr as Syria’s Guernica, the town in Spain pulverised by the Fascists and their German allies at the start of the Civil War, an early introduction to the art of aerial bombardment as an agent of terror. In that war, too, the Western allies stood by, unwilling despite liberal condemnation to abandon a cautious neutrality as democracy was snuffed out.

In truth, Syria is not 1930s Spain, and the sceptics can say they at least “have a plan”. They say that Assad’s money is running out, his troops defecting, even those around him only loyal from fear. “We know from many sources that there are people around Assad who are beginning to hedge their bets,” Mrs Clinton said. “They didn’t sign up to slaughter people and are beginning to look for a way out.”

Yesterday, Syrian forces killed at least 26 civilians, hours before a referendum was due to be held on a new constitution called by the regime. Meanwhile, in Homs, where the regime’s onslaught has been bloodiest, the International Committee of the Red Cross made an unsuccessful new attempt to evacuate wounded journalists who have been trapped for several days. Elsewhere in Syria, at Ezaz in northern Aleppo province, six civilians, including a woman and a girl, were gunned down when security forces clashed with army defectors, a human rights group said. Police also opened fire on a demonstration of some 4,000 people in the Sayef al-Dawla district of Aleppo city, at the funeral of a civilian killed on Friday.

Those close to the action say that there are efforts to consolidate the Free Syrian Army’s structure and line of command before arming it, so that its backers “know what they are dealing with”, a continuing matter of concern with Libya’s militias. “We want it to have some sort of command and control structure that has some kind of responsibility,” an official says. “If we want the dwindling chance of a peaceful solution, we need someone who can say not only when to shoot but also when to stop shooting.”

But the voices of the damned get ever louder. “Protect civilians, by any means, even through military intervention,” said Abu Abdu al- Homsi, an activist with the Homs Revolutionary Council. “Some opposition groups, who live abroad, sat in front of their computers, say that they reject the military intervention, they don’t feel what we are suffering here.

“We did not call for foreign intervention until we reached the stage we had no choice but international rescue. The humanitarian situation is dire, most of the houses in Baba Amr are destroyed, women and children killed, those not dying from the bombing starving or sick in their besieged houses.”

When the moment will come, we may never know. It is likely that Gulf money – with or without government approval – is already funding supplies. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are rarely in the habit of public announcements on such matters – but that did not stop the Qatari flag being raised over Benghazi and Tripoli last year, in recognition of the small but rich emirate’s munificence.

The rebels will not hold Homs, or Deraa, or Idlib, in any military sense of the term for many months. But their grasp on the Syrian countryside, an ideal territory for the lengthy guerrilla tactics for which Abu Arab was clearly preparing, looks strong for the time being. And if it slips, will we have it in our hearts to abandon them? As the diplomats were keen to insist, we are not rushing to war. But the drift is in but one direction. * Additional reporting by Magdy Samaan in Cairo (© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2012. 02/26/12)