The Trigger (4 page)

The fallen of all wars would be commemorated, but for me the power of the service came in being drawn back to the epic sacrifice of the First World War. The poppies worn by us all were symbols born of the Western Front. Stanzas of Great War poetry would be read out by the officiating priests. Even the timing of the event kept alive the moment on Armistice Day in 1918 when the guns fell silent on the Western Front: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The image of Princip’s filthy tomb would keep coming back to me. Had all these people died for a cause so fundamentally opaque that the person who initiated the whole catastrophe could be despised by his own countrymen?

The more I read, the less clear it became. The histories all seemed to cover the same ground, worrying at the same bone of diplomatic blunders and grand strategic plans that led to mass military deployment and bloody stalemate. None seemed to address fully the catalyst of it all – Princip and his Bosnian homeland, the wellspring for conflicts of such far-reaching importance.

To understand better not just the fouled tomb, but also the ongoing power of the First World War, I decided to return to Bosnia. I would follow Princip’s life path, trekking where he trekked, from the village out west where he was born; I would explore the Balkan towns and cities where he studied, worked and travelled, and would piece together as far as possible the setting and detail of the assassination, his influences and his motivations. It was a journey that I hoped would fill out my vision of the man who ghosts sketchily into the received history of the First World War. And, by grounding him in his homeland, I hoped for a clearer understanding of a place that retains, as I witnessed through the war of the 1990s, a powerful hold over some of the twentieth century’s most troubling events.

The author, left, as a reporter during the Bosnian War

Light and dark loops showing minefields near Bugojno

The Balkans might today carry a reputation for remoteness, but research has revealed this to be a relatively modern attitude. In antiquity, this mountainous region on the south-eastern edge of Europe – in effect a peninsula bounded on three sides by sea – formed part of the core of the Roman Empire; indeed, one of the later Roman emperors, Diocletian, was born there. Fragments of his palace can still be seen in the Adriatic port of Split, incorporated in the tumbledown muddle of the old city on the waterfront. The region was then known as Illyria, a place name that William Shakespeare would fancy as the setting for Twelfth Night.

‘Balkans’ is a much more modern term, a Turkish word for ‘a forested mountain range’, which only entered common usage in the nineteenth century when the area encompassed the Ottoman Empire’s territory in Europe. The Balkan Peninsula today includes Greece and Albania to the south, and Bulgaria to the east, but it was the western sector of the Balkans that came to be dominated in the Middle Ages by those who would be known as south Slavs. Before the arrival of foreign occupiers, these people ruled through a series of recognisable states with borders that fluctuated over the ages. At varying times in the Middle Ages there existed recognisable nations of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, states that were never powerful enough to rule the entire Western Balkan region, but which left a heritage of national identity strong enough to survive through to the present day.

Gavrilo Princip, history’s ultimate teenage troublemaker, was only nineteen when he fired the pistol that killed the Archduke in 1914, and he was to die four years later in an Austro-Hungarian jail, his bones eaten away by skeletal tuberculosis. But even during so short a life, he had crossed rich contours of European geography. In the late summer of 1907, aged thirteen, he walked across roughly one third of Bosnia after his parents had decided there was no life for him in Obljaj, the impoverished village of his birth. It lies way out on the western fringe of Bosnia in the area known as Herzegovina, so it was eastwards that he and his father headed, their belongings strapped to the family’s horse. A journey that would change not only Princip’s life, but the course of global history, began when, as a boy, he left the famously rocky highlands of Herzegovina and climbed over the mountain passes into the tighter, greener valleys of central Bosnia.*

The overland trail eventually led Princip and his father to a railhead located in the town of Bugojno. From there they travelled by train through the fertile valleys of the Vrbas, Lašva and Bosna Rivers, the last of which rises at the foot of mountains close to Sarajevo and is the origin of the country’s name. Eventually the train delivered them to the capital, then a city of roughly 50,000 people, with schools big enough to promise the young boy far greater opportunities than anything available back home. His father returned to Obljaj, leaving the young Princip in Sarajevo to embark alone on his secondary education.

At this point in its history Bosnia was an outpost of Austria–Hungary, the last creaking iteration of the great Habsburg Empire that had grown to rule parts of central Europe since the thirteenth century. With its imperial capital in Vienna, the empire at the start of the twentieth century was a sprawl of peoples and languages, reaching from Bosnia in the south to Poland in the north, from the Swiss Alps in the west to the Ukrainian steppe in the east. Cherished by the novelist Joseph Roth as a ‘large house with many doors and many rooms for many different kinds of people’, Austria–Hungary had grown dangerously unwieldy. The 1905 edition of Baedeker’s travel guide for the area noted that in some parts of the empire vehicles drove on the left, while elsewhere they drove on the right. It did not say what happened when the two driving styles collided.

As the twentieth century began, the stiff tunics worn by Habsburg imperial officials were a veneer concealing an empire in decline, home at roughly the same time and for varying periods to several figures who are key to modern history: Leon Trotsky, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Tito. James Joyce lived there for almost ten years, teaching English to Austrian naval cadets in and around Trieste, learning to despise what he would call ‘the most physically corrupt royal house in Europe’. Yet it was in schools across the empire’s Balkan holdings that the green shoots of revolution were perhaps most visible. Youth politics was banned by the Austro-Hungarian authorities, so underground movements sprang up at colleges, amateurishly concealed behind a self-taught web of codenames, oaths and passwords thought up by pupils dreaming of change.

Princip may have sparked a century of turmoil, but he started out as a quiet and exemplary student from the provinces. It was while at school in Sarajevo that he first became caught up in this swirl of anti-Establishment, nationalistic idealism, reading voraciously and learning to hero-worship Balkan assassins who had dared to confront foreign occupiers. There were many of those to choose from, in an era when assassination was a quite standard driver for political change. After completing almost three years at the Merchants’ School of Sarajevo, Princip moved on, switching to the classical grammar-school system, briefly attending one in the northern Bosnian city of Tuzla before enrolling at a second, back in Sarajevo. All the time his growing radicalism made him increasingly unsettled, culminating in early 1912 when he withdrew from the Bosnian school system after taking part in student protests against Austro-Hungarian rule. It meant that to continue his education he would have to look elsewhere.

Still only seventeen years of age, Princip left Sarajevo and headed further east, crossing the Drina River frontier separating the Austro-Hungarian territory of Bosnia from its neighbour, Serbia. After the bunched mountainous terrain of his homeland, this offered a very new and different environment, a flatland of eastern European plain swept over by monumental rivers and ruled from a capital city, Belgrade, built where high ground overlooks the confluence of the mighty Danube and one of its largest tributaries, the Sava. Princip arrived at a time of intense nationalistic turmoil, with Serbia caught up in what history knows as the First and Second Balkan Wars – short, bloody and successful confrontations in 1912 and 1913. Through a series of clashes with Ottoman occupiers throughout the nineteenth century, the south-Slav people of Serbia had won freedom for themselves, recreating part of the medieval nation of Serbia. But they coveted parcels of territory to the south that were still under the control of Istanbul and so, in the two brief Balkan Wars, Serbia moved to win back land lost centuries earlier to the Ottomans.

As a result, when Princip first reached Serbia it was awash with weapons, militia, soldiers and plotters, the perfect place for a militant-minded student to complete his radicalisation. From 1912 the teenage Princip was based for long periods in Belgrade, drifting in and out of school, living on the breadline among a community of disaffected Bosnians who were dreaming of a time when their own homeland, like the new state of Serbia, might be freed from foreign control. Eventually, in the spring of 1914, Princip emerged as the leading figure in a conspiracy of young Bosnians who wanted to assassinate the heir of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that occupied their homeland.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand was due to visit Sarajevo to oversee manoeuvres by imperial troops at the end of June 1914, so in the spring of that year Princip headed home from Belgrade to Bosnia with two other would-be assassins. The route they took involved dodging border guards and wading back across the Drina under the cover of darkness. It was not just the Austro-Hungarian guards on the far side of the river of whom they were afraid. On the Serbian side, there were many elements in the Belgrade government that would have stopped them, if they could. The support that the assassins received in Serbia had come from only a small number of extremists within the military-intelligence community, and the wider Serbian establishment would have viewed any assassination plot with horror. Weakened by the bloody demands of the two recent Balkan Wars, the last thing the Serbian government wanted was to risk provoking an attack by a powerful neighbour such as Austria–Hungary.

Tension rose as Princip’s gang prepared to cross back over the Drina. Now established as the group’s leader, nineteen-year-old Princip ran out of patience with the bragging of one of the others, who was forced to find his own way. This left just two young men to smuggle themselves and their assassins’ gear – four pistols and six grenades – all the way to Sarajevo in time for 28 June 1914 when, after the completion of army exercises, the Archduke was due to enter the city on an official visit. The plotters judged that the Archduke’s city visit would give them their best opportunity to strike.

I became steadily more intrigued as I worked out the route of Princip’s journey. It crossed not only rich territory, but also contours of history that cluster tightly in this turbulent corner of Europe. The Bosnian valleys through which he trekked were where, three decades later, one of the subplots of the Second World War would play out: the controversial decision by Churchill to back partisans under Tito, a communist leader fighting against Nazi occupation. It was a decision that had great impact on the later Cold War, as it shifted Yugoslavia decisively into the orbit of the communist world. For many, the stand-off between the capitalist West and the communist East symbolically began with Churchill’s famous Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946 when he cited Trieste – the port city claimed by Tito’s Yugoslavia – as the divide between the two sides:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe … and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Following Princip’s journey would enable me to explore this crucial leftward lurch in Balkan history.

The route also passed places where some of the most sensitive but unreachable moments of the Bosnian War of the 1990s had played out. When Princip crossed back into Bosnia on his final journey to Sarajevo, he passed through mountains north of the town of Srebrenica. This was where Europe’s worst atrocity since the Holocaust took place in July 1995, when Bosnian Serbs overran a Bosnian Muslim enclave and set about systematically eradicating thousands of its men. Almost twenty years after the atrocity, the bodies of victims are still being identified from mass graves hidden in the range of hills tramped through by Princip in 1914.

By following the route from his birthplace to Sarajevo, on to Belgrade and then back again to the capital of Bosnia, I saw not only an opportunity to understand the influences that shaped Princip, but also a chance to unravel outstanding mental knots within myself, from when I first went to war.

From my home in Cape Town I began work by digging out several of the old ‘set texts’ from my time covering the Balkan Wars of the 1990s as a journalist, books that we outsiders dutifully lugged across the war zone. With nostalgic delight I picked up Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a treasure chest of a travel book by Rebecca West, born of three brief trips through Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second World War. She famously left nothing out, taking five years to compose a tome of 350,000 words, a work that she herself described as ‘an inventory of a country down to its last vest-button’. It is not just loaded with observational riches, but is on occasions irreverent, scatological, bitchy and plain batty. Much of the history within the book is unreliable, but its pluck more than makes up for this. As I reread my old paperback copy I found marginalia dating back two decades. Her complaints about the terrible quality of Bosnia’s roads in the 1930s had come in for lots of underlining and ticks of approval. Some of the wartime roads I had battled along were beyond awful. One thing that stood out more clearly this time was West’s hostility towards Germany, the Germans and all things Teutonic, while praising the vitality, unpredictability and passion of local Slavs. The book is in essence an epic love-letter to the Slavs, written at a time when one of Europe’s great peoples, the Germans, had lost their way under Nazi rule.