Europe's Last Summer (20 page)

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his family

Aerial view of Sarajevo in 1914

The Archduke and Duchess begin their day in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914.

The scene of the first assassination attempt

The royal couple leaves the city hall.

The arrest of Gavrilo Princip

Emperor Franz Joseph I

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and
Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan

Colonel Edward House,
Wilson's diplomatic envoy

Serbian Prime Minister Nicola Pasic

The leader of the Austro-Hungarian Army, Conrad von Hötzendorf

In turn, Cabrinovic, though he admitted knowing Princip, denied any knowledge of what his friend had done. If Princip, too, had made an attempt on the Archduke's life, it must have been (according to Cabrinovic) because he harbored similar feelings and had arrived at the same conclusions as to what had to be done.

The correspondent of the London
Times
reported on June 29 that Princip and Cabrinovic "are said to have assumed a most cynical attitude during their examination" and to have persisted in claiming that nobody else was involved.

Their story—that two friends by coincidence had tried to assassinate the same public figure, independently of one another, on the same day in the same place, at roughly the same time—was inherently absurd. The reason they had no more plausible account to provide was that they had made no effort to devise one: theirs was a suicide mission; they had swallowed their cyanide; they should have been dead, and therefore in no need of a cover story for the authorities.

As the questionings continued, the police threw out a dragnet. Not merely Cabrinovic's family and the Ilic family with whom Princip lived, but more than two hundred leading Bosnian Serbs were arrested in Sarajevo alone. Princip felt guilty about this; it was wrong, he felt, to stand by and let innocent people be punished for what he had done. In any event (though accounts differ) Cabrinovic had confessed some elements of the conspiracy to Judge Pfeffer. Princip wanted to reveal only the names of fellow conspirators—after all, they had volunteered for a suicide mission.