1914
A dreadful moment
It’s one of those great turning points in history. A young terrorist, disappointed at missing his target earlier in the day, is astonished to see the man appear, being driven slowly toward him again in an open car. He steps forward, aims at the middle-aged couple in the back seat and fires his pistol …
Had Gavrilo Princip missed; had the driver taken the correct route; had the Archduke not insisted on seeing the victims wounded in the previous attack, would Austria and Serbia have fought anyway? Would World War I still have broken out? Would 20,000,000 have died? Would my great-uncle Bill still have suffered shell-shock on the Western Front and wandered away to be lost forever to his family?
The slow collapse of the Turkish Empire meant that it was withdrawing from parts of southeastern Europe it had ruled for centuries, leaving a political vacuum that both the Kingdom of the Serbs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire wished to fill. A particularly contentious area was Bosnia, with its mixed population of Orthodox Serbs, Muslims and Catholic Croats. It was ruled by Austria but coveted by Serbia who wished to build a pan-Slavic state in the region. A teen-age Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, wished to see his nation join Serbia and associated himself with the Black Hand, a terrorist group linked to the Serbian secret police. When the Black Hand learned that the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, would be visiting Sarajevo they saw an excellent opportunity to create an outrage that would lead to a war of liberation. They trained and supplied Princip and five others for a murderous attack on the royal procession.
However, on the day, things did not work out as planned. The first two would-be killers, armed with pistols and bombs, froze as the Archduke and his wife Sophie drove by. Farther on, the third threw his bomb but it bounced off the royal car and exploded on the street injuring 16 people. The bomber atttempted to commit suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill but it was old and had lost its potency – he then leapt into the river but discovered it was only knee-deep. He was arrested and beaten up by the crowd as the motorcade proceeded on. The Archduke reached the safety of the town hall but then insisted on being taken to the hospital to visit those wounded by the bomb. The route — which was the wrong one — took the car to the spot where Princip was standing. He took out his Belgian semi-automatic FN .38 and fired the shots that would start World War I.
Princip was too young to be executed so he was imprisoned and died of tuberculosis in 1918. Three of his co-conspirators were executed and a dozen others involved in the plot were imprisoned. But what of the Serbian masterminds of the plot who were safe inside their borders? In 1916 when secret talks were carried out between Austria and Serbia about a possible peace, the Austrians demanded an end to such plots and the Serbian Regent, who was himself concerned about the power wielded by his military and intelligence agencies, obliged by arresting those who had planned the assassination. Three of his officers were executed on trumped-up charges and others thrown in jail.
Despite the horrific results of Princip’s actions, the killer is still a hero in Serbia. In 2015 that country’s president attended the unveiling of a statue in Belgrade to the terrorist and proclaimed: “Princip was a hero, a symbol of liberation ideas, tyrant-murderer, idea-holder of liberation from slavery, which spanned through Europe”.
