One Morning in Sarajevo
by David James Smith
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99
IF BRITAIN had been invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940, with Oswald Mosley at the head of a Quisling government, resistance would have begun immediately. Had he been Hitler’s regent in London, instead of Prague, Heydrich would have been assassinated on the streets of the capital. His killers would have been captured, tortured and shot, but their names would be revered to this day and the story of their exploits would be recounted in many books.
For Britain, then, read Bosnia in 1914. The country had been annexed by the sclerotic Austro-Hungarian empire eight years previously. A puppet parliament sat in Sarajevo, propped up by the military. Hatred of the occupying power was rife, particularly among ethnic Serbs, who feared their own country was next on the invader’s hit list. The surprising thing about the assassination of the heir to the throne on June 28 by a young Serb in the Bosnian capital was not that it happened, but that it took so long to happen.
This being the Balkans, there were a great many false starts to the enterprise and, in the end, it was almost an accident, but Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old student, succeeded in shooting dead Archduke Ferdinand as he rode by in an open-topped limousine, together with his unpopular wife Sophie for good measure. The killing is generally held to have triggered the Great War although, as David James Smith points out in this fascinating account, the European powers were already preparing for war. Another pretext would have been found if the Archduke’s dozy driver had taken the correct route on that fateful day.
But he took a wrong turning and then halted right in front of the young assassin. Princip averted his gaze and fired twice, killing his victims almost by fluke. He and the other plotters were swiftly rounded up and the brains of the gang, Danilo Ilic, spilled the beans on everyone involved, and some who weren’t. There was a show trial, which Princip dominated with an unrepentant hauteur. He was saved from the gallows by his youth – Austrian law forbade capital punishment under 20 – but died in chains in prison. Three conspirators were hanged and others received long prison sentences with the younger ones – some only teenagers – perishing in jail.
Serbian military officers belonging to the Black Hand in Belgrade, who provided the weapons, escaped punishment but many of them died, too, in the ensuing war when Austria used the assassination in Sarajevo an as excuse to invade Serbia, unleashing a chain of events that annihilated a European generation. Viewed through Princip’s revolutionary eyes, this was a result for the Serbs. The Habsburg empire collapsed and their dream of a united nation of south Slavs – Yugoslavia – was realised.
Princip is not forgotten, even in Sarajevo, though the city, now largely purged of Serbs after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, would plainly like to do so. He and his fellow “heroes” are commemorated in a chapel in St Mark’s cemetery, where they were reburied after their bodies were clandestinely returned. “Blessed are those that live for ever more” runs the inscription on a memorial arch.
On the boulevard by the River Miljacka that runs through the centre of Sarajevo, two footprints are let into the pavement at the exact spot where Princip fired his pistol. Tourists stand in them and mimic the shooting. I did it myself, 40 years ago, when there was rather less likelihood of attracting retaliatory fire. Smith has done that and very much more, even tracking down nonogenarian relatives of Princip’s ill-assorted gang and finding fresh documentary evidence. He is to be congratulated on a fine piece of political and literary detective work, which held this reader enthralled.
Paul Routledge
