The Trigger (32 page)

My last lift dropped me at the edge of Sarajevo on a bypass high on a hillside. The modern road was constructed along the tunnelled route of the old mountain railway built by Hans Fronius’s grandfather and gave a wonderful view of the city down below. As I walked down the slope, hungry and tired from the road, my mind was filled with the image of Princip reaching here in early June 1914 determined to commit what he regarded as a ‘noble act’.

An Assassin’s Luck

Archduke Franz Ferdinand posing as a pharaoh in 1896 while convalescing in Egypt from tuberculosis, the same disease that would eventually kill his killer

The last moments of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as his car turns off the Appel Quay, his killer – not visible – waiting among the crowd in front of the Moritz Schiller corner café

After several days of summer storms, Sunday 28 June 1914 dawned clear in Sarajevo. It was the day of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s official visit to the city. He had arrived in Bosnia by train three days earlier with his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, the royal party staying in the smartest accommodation then available in Austria–Hungary’s newest colony, the Hotel Bosna, situated six miles west of the city in the village of Ilidža. Built as a spa resort by Austro-Hungarian colonists close by the source of the Bosna River, the hotel had been lavishly refurbished for the imperial visit, the four-storey façade bedecked with garlands and a royal suite of rooms specially constructed, complete with a private chapel where the couple could take mass.

As inspector general of imperial forces, the Archduke attended two days of military manoeuvres by soldiers from the 15th and 16th Army Corps in the plains and foothills around Mount Igman, a programme that culminated with an official dinner on the Saturday night at the hotel. The Sarajevo garrison orchestra played ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz by Johann Strauss while guests enjoyed a menu including blanquettes de truites à la gelée, pièce de boeuf and crème aux ananas en surprise, accompanied by wines shipped in from vineyards across the empire. The royal party was due to leave by train late on Sunday evening, so the ceremonial visit to the city was the only showcase opportunity that the people of Sarajevo would have to see the heir of an empire that had ruled Bosnia since 1878. As it was a weekend, crowds were expected along a ceremonial route widely advertised in advance – the streets swept, the citizenry encouraged to turn out in large numbers and to hang imperial flags prominently from windows and balconies. Local police and militia had received specific orders not to picket the route, so that the local population would have the best possible chance to see the man expected to rule as Emperor one day.

It is hard to imagine a more robust symbol of Habsburg pomp than Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Fifty years of age at the time of the tour of Bosnia, solid of build and with a bushy, upturned moustache groomed in the style of a hussar, he was known for his short temper, ardent Catholicism and hatred of Hungarians – a people he regarded as parvenu upstarts within the dual monarchy of Austria–Hungary. As a nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph, he had been brought up without any expectation of ever succeeding to the crown, launched instead on a career of military service within the imperial army, which began when he was still at school. He was only twelve when first commissioned as a lieutenant in the infantry and, as a senior member of the Habsburg dynasty, he rose quickly through the officer corps, fast-track promoted through his teens and early twenties. Photographs of him as a young man show him mostly in uniform, taking a salute on horseback, sitting in the officers’ mess alongside other similarly moustachioed figures, larking about in sports kit, posing with a riding crop in his hand; and all the time his uniform was accumulating more and more insignia of rank.

When not away on army duty, he had enough inherited wealth as one of Europe’s richest men to indulge his passion for hunting at the many castles and estates he owned across the empire. In one day’s hunt alone he shot 2,140 game birds and animals, and he was said to be such a marksman that he could hit a coin tossed into the air. A bout of tuberculosis (the disease that would kill Gavrilo Princip) led Franz Ferdinand to travel to warmer climates to recuperate, with one of his trips taking him to Egypt. Haughty though this man undoubtedly was, he also had a sense of humour, posing for a photograph inside a stylised pharaoh’s coffin, his fleshy, bewhiskered European face peeking out from an otherwise Middle Eastern framing.

His life had changed dramatically with the murky events of 1889 when the Emperor’s son, Crown Prince Rudolf, died in a suicide pact with his mistress at the Mayerling hunting lodge near Vienna. Within a short time Archduke Franz Ferdinand found himself established as heir apparent, groomed to take over from the elderly uncle who had sat on the throne since 1848. Fiercely loyal to the empire, Franz Ferdinand was still enough of his own man to challenge convention on occasion, not least when he fell in love with Countess Sophie Chotek von Chotkowa und Wognin. For centuries marriage had been employed by the Habsburgs as a device to ensure the survival of the dynasty – a web of rules and traditions that demanded royalty marry royalty. As a countess, Sophie was regarded as unsuitable, not high enough in rank to marry a personage expected one day to be Emperor. Ministers met and chamberlains tutted, Franz Ferdinand all the time being put under enormous pressure to break off the relationship and make a union with a more acceptable candidate, a princess or an archduchess. Obstinately he refused and a compromise was reached in 1900 when, in front of the Emperor and an assembly of imperial archdukes and other officials, he swore a solemn oath renouncing any claim to the throne or royal privilege by Sophie and their children. The date on which he took the oath was 28 June.

At court in Vienna, the oath meant Sophie, forty-six at the time of the Sarajevo visit, could not take her place next to her husband at ceremonial events, obliged to wait in line behind archduchesses and others more favoured by protocol. The Archduke appealed to his uncle for the rules to be eased, but his reactionary relation refused. The decision for Sophie to join Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia was made because it was a rare opportunity, so far from the imperial capital, for her to play a fuller, more prominent role in public. The photographs, taken as the couple took the short trip from the Hotel Bosna by train and limousine into Sarajevo on the anniversary of the oath, show her at her husband’s side, smiling warmly under a wide-brimmed hat, wearing a flowing white dress, a parasol raised against the Balkan sun. Next to her the Archduke wears the ceremonial uniform of a three-star general in the Austrian cavalry, his corpulent frame crammed stiffly into a high-collared tunic of bright-blue cloth heavy with gold braid, buttons and medals; a sword hanging from a band straining around his waist; white gloves, spurred boots and black trousers trimmed with red. On his head he wore a cocked military hat or stulphut with a bushy cockade of vulture feathers, which were dyed pale green and so delicate they moved in the breeze.

At the exact moment these photographs were being taken, Princip’s group of assassins was taking up position in the centre of Sarajevo, aware of another anniversary that happened to fall on that day. More than half a millennium earlier, in 1389, the medieval Serbian nation suffered a traumatic defeat at the hands of the advancing Ottoman army at the battle of Kosovo. It took place on 28 June, a day kept holy in the Serbian Orthodox Church as the feast day of St Vitus. For centuries St Vitus’s Day has been enshrined in Serbian mythology as signifying the end of independence and the beginning of foreign occupation – a day of such importance that early on the morning of the Archduke’s visit an annual remembrance service had been held at Sarajevo’s Orthodox church for the Serbian patriots who had fallen at the battle of Kosovo.

The assassination team had grown, after Princip, Grabež and Čabrinović arrived overland in Sarajevo in the first week of June. Although he was so careful about secrecy, Princip had written before leaving Belgrade to his old Mlada Bosna confidant and former room-mate in Sarajevo, Danilo Ilić, to inform him of his assassination plans. With more weapons at his disposal than could be used by three attackers, Princip asked for extra manpower. At the trial he said he wrote ‘in a sort of allegorical form’, but the meaning was clear enough to a friend with whom he had discussed many times the inspirational example of Bogdan Žerajić, the young Bosnian would-be assassin who had shot himself in Sarajevo four years earlier. Ilić recruited three more young men to take part in the assassination: Mehmed Mehmedbašić, a Bosnian Muslim carpenter in his mid-twenties; Cvetko Popović, eighteen; and Vaso Čubrilović, seventeen – the last two both Bosnian Serb students.

Some historians have dismissed Mehmedbašić’s role as a deliberate ploy to camouflage what was exclusively a Serbian plot, but this ignores all the evidence from Princip and others that their plan was motivated by the Yugoslav ideal of striking back at the occupier in the name of all south Slavs, a dream shared by many Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat activists. The older man had handled weapons before and knew how to use a grenade, but the two youngsters had no experience at all, so they were both given basic training once Ilić had travelled by train to Tuzla and collected the weapons cache, carefully following instructions to identify himself through the pre-arranged signal of the Stefanija cigarette packet.

Ilić stored the weapons in a bag kept under his bed at his mother’s house on Oprkanj Street, taking them out surreptitiously for training purposes. On a number of days in late June the narrow Bembaša gorge of the Miljacka River, upstream from the old city centre of Sarajevo, echoed to the sound of gunfire as the new recruits were shown how to shoot. Ilić would himself be unarmed on the day of the attack, roaming among the crowds gathered for the imperial visit, but he was the one who oversaw the distribution of weapons to the six would-be attackers: Mehmedbašić and Čabrinović were each issued with a grenade, while he made sure that Princip, Grabež, Popović and Čubrilović all had a Browning pistol and a grenade. The plan to not be taken alive meant that cyanide was procured, probably from a local pharmacy, although none of the team members knew how much was needed to make up a fatal dose.

As the day for the Archduke’s visit approached, Princip grew increasingly anxious. He sought the company of his books and would later tell the Austrian psychiatrist, Dr Pappenheim, how his sleep was disrupted. ‘Read much in Sarajevo. In Sarajevo used to dream every night he was a political murderer, struggling with the gendarmes and the police,’ the doctor recorded in his notes. Princip paid one last visit to his brother, Jovo, in Hadžići, but gave no clues about what might be about to happen, pretending that all was still on course with his academic career and lying to his brother that he had passed the Eighth Grade exams in Belgrade. Shortly before the attack Princip made a final pilgrimage to the grave of Žerajić, while various witnesses reported that on the eve of the assassination, as the Archduke’s party enjoyed the grand dinner at the Hotel Bosna, the normally sober, teetotal Princip had a drink of red wine.

The Appel Quay, the wide riverside boulevard in the centre of Sarajevo constructed by the Austro-Hungarians shortly after they occupied Bosnia, had been chosen by the plotters as the site for the assassination. Josip Stadler, the Catholic Archbishop of Sarajevo, would later say that the boulevard on that fateful Sunday had become a ‘regular avenue of assassins’. The crowds of onlookers were expected to be thickest here, providing good cover for the six attackers, and the Archduke’s party was due to process slowly along the boulevard – which was lined by buildings on one side and open to the river on the other – pausing at various official locations, such as the main post office and a military guardhouse, before arriving for a formal reception at the large, newly built town hall at the far, eastern end of the thoroughfare. The artist Hans Fronius was a schoolboy aged eleven at the time, but as an adult he could still remember the scene as the crowd’s excitement surged, imperial flags fluttered, cries of ‘Long Live the Archduke’ rang out and puffs of smoke emerged from cannons firing salutes in the old Ottoman fortresses overlooking Sarajevo city centre.

With military precision the convoy of cars carrying the royal party left the barracks next to Sarajevo’s main railway station at 10 a.m. sharp. It drove the short distance down to the Miljacka before heading slowly along the Appel Quay, the ripple of applause and cheers through the crowd on both sides of the road warning the attackers of their target’s imminent arrival. Mehmedbašić was the first of the assassination team to be passed by the Archduke’s car, but he did nothing, later saying that a gendarme appeared close by him in the crowd. He said he felt he would be spotted if he tried to take out his grenade. No such restrictions hindered Čabrinović, who was next along the ‘avenue of assassins’, standing on the river side of the boulevard a few hundred yards further up, opposite a girls’ school. As the vehicles approached he snapped the cap off his grenade and threw it at the third car in the convoy, an open-topped Gräf & Stift limousine carrying the Archduke and his wife, sitting next to each other on its bench seat upholstered with black leather. Although the grenade was well aimed, striking the folded canopy at the back of the car a few inches behind Franz Ferdinand, the timing was out. It fell harmlessly to the ground, giving the royal car enough time to drive clear, and only exploded under the next vehicle in the convoy, badly damaging its bodywork and injuring its occupants. Witnesses reported that as the grenade flew towards him, Franz Ferdinand raised his arm in reflex. More dramatic fictionalised accounts would later claim that he bravely caught the grenade and tossed it aside.

All along the route the sound of the blast was clearly audible, with many in the crowd unsure if the explosion was simply a part of the ceremonial salute, as Čabrinović jumped down the masonry wall into the Miljacka River ten feet below the level of the pavement and ran splashing through the shallows, pursued by gendarmes. Before he was grabbed he had time to gulp down his cyanide, but it failed to kill him, instead making him foam at the mouth and retch, giving his pursuers the opportunity to arrest him. Within a matter of minutes he was being bundled off to Sarajevo central police station, just as the wounded from the damaged vehicle were being tended. The scene was later captured by Fronius in a charcoal drawing that shows his father, the state doctor, standing in a landau carriage as it clatters along the Appel Quay carting some of the injured off to hospital.