The Trigger (8 page)

Aside from these cosmetic changes, the fundamentals of life did not alter for the vast majority of Bosnians spread across the rural hinterland. Academics have carried out detailed studies of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia after 1878, revealing how the new occupiers failed to modernise the country for which they were now responsible. They barely touched the old feudal system, meaning that serfdom continued here well into the twentieth century. They did not fundamentally tackle the social structure in the rural areas, where begs were still able to demand taxes set at arbitrary levels. And they set up yet further tiers of state fees that kept the peasants in penury. Their schools, built with great show in the larger urban areas like Sarajevo, made so meagre an impression on the population that by 1910, after more than three decades of Austro-Hungarian rule, 88 per cent of the Bosnian population could not read or write.

In Obljaj the arrival of the Austro-Hungarians was a long drawn-out disappointment for the Princips. Sitting in the village listening to their history brought home to me the disconnect that so often separates policy from reality. The statesmen leaving the Berlin Congress smugly convinced themselves that the people of Bosnia would benefit from the diplomatic finesse of having the Western Austro-Hungarians replace the Eastern Ottomans. What they had actually done, however, was quite the opposite, sowing seeds of resentment that would eventually destroy the status quo of the entire Western world.

‘Our people came back home to the village after the uprising and they thought things would get much better,’ Nikola said, shaking his head. ‘They built their homes again here in Obljaj and thought that, as Christians now ruled by Christians, they would be better off. But nothing changed. It was still a tough life of survival, struggling to live off this land and paying tax, tax and more tax.’

Just as under the Ottomans, various family members survived by working for the occupiers, retained as border guards or policemen for the foreign empire. I asked the family about the claim made by one historian that Princip’s uncle, Ilija, eldest brother of his father, had served for a time as an Austro-Hungarian gendarme – a question I felt was potentially important, as an influence on the young boy’s motivation for the assassination. Once more, the family memory was blank. Instead they emphasised the dire conditions of life for their forebears at the dawn of the twentieth century, and to do this convincingly all they had to do was relate what happened to six of Princip’s siblings.

‘First there was Bosiljka, who died as a child,’ Nikola said. ‘Then there was Koviljka who was next to die, and Djuradj after her, and Branko after him and two others who were never christened and died without a name.’ It was well over a hundred years since six out of nine children from one family had died, but for the Princip clan that would be too soon to forget.

After two hours of intensive listening, note-taking and tallying what I had read about Princip against what his family remembered, we all needed a break. I could not help noticing that the Princips had not offered Arnie and me coffee – a cultural ritual for visitors that I knew to be almost sacred. They were not being unfriendly. They were simply too poor.

I arched my back extravagantly, and Mile picked up on the cue. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘I need to walk a while and I want to show you something that might teach you a little about Gavro’s parents.’ Mile led Arnie and me back through the village and out onto the approach road where we had been dropped earlier that day. The sun was low in the sky and two teenage boys were walking across the fields carrying fishing rods. ‘Trout,’ he said, catching my interest keenly. Trout-fishing is a love of mine. ‘They are going after trout in the Korana. It’s a beautiful fishing river.’

There was an enthusiasm about Mile that I was beginning to enjoy, a curiosity about my interest in his ancestor. ‘So many people have said so many things about Gavro over the years,’ he said. ‘But they forget he was a country boy from this village. His world was a small world, basically the fields and forests and mountains you can see from where we are standing. He would have gone fishing, I am sure, just like those boys over there. He would have walked the hills I walked, shepherding the family’s flock of sheep like I did when I was a boy. But in those days, people from a place like this never left. They were born here, married here, worked here, died here.

‘Look at Gavro’s parents. His father, Petar – but everyone called him Pepo – was from this village. His mother was Marija – everyone called her Nana – and where did she come from? Well, if you look over there you will see where.’ He was now pointing along the valley to a collection of farm buildings less than a mile away. ‘Don’t laugh, but that is known as Little Obljaj because it is smaller than where we are now, Greater Obljaj. Nana came from there. You basically lived your whole life within walking distance of where you were brought up. And when you ended your life you still didn’t leave.’

He had led us into the local graveyard, weaving his bulky frame through grass and weeds that grew waist-high in places and past clutches of gravestones, many of which were penned behind railings inside family plots. ‘This is where Gavro’s parents lie today,’ Mile said, pointing over a black iron fence.

Some history books tell you that Princip’s father married late and was a lot older than his mother. Their shared headstone suggested otherwise. It recorded them being born in the same year, 1860, which would have made them teenagers when the rebellion of 1875 disrupted their rural lives. While Petar went up into the hills to fight, Marija headed west as a refugee to the area around Knin, a town just across the frontier inside Austro-Hungarian territory, where Miss Irby focused most of her aid effort. The headstone recorded both their baptised and familiar names, so I was able to read that Marija (Nana) died in 1945, five years after Petar (Pepo). That meant that Princip’s mother would have experienced at first hand one of the long-term after-effects of the assassination committed by her son: the Second World War. It brought another round of disruption to life in Obljaj.

‘The Germans and Italians occupied this area, and in the fighting Gavro’s house was totally destroyed,’ Mile said. ‘Poor Nana had to flee along with the others for a while. By the time she died she had suffered so much because of the actions of her son and was drinking a lot. They say it was the drink that killed her in the end.’

We were now out in a recently mown hayfield, with clear sight of the red tiled roofs of Obljaj that run along the hinge between the valley floor and the rocky hillock behind. Take away the power lines and replace the stone tiles with shingles, and the view had not changed since Princip’s time. Mile stood still for a moment and started to speak. ‘The thing that still amazes me about Gavro is how a child from this small place and from that closed time could change the world.’ Down on the river bank I could see a boy sitting patiently and watching his fishing line drift in the slow-moving current.

As we walked back into Obljaj I thought about how static life had been over the centuries for a family such as the Princips. They had been chained to this upland valley, not in the sense of being anchored and given stability, but more in the sense of being trapped, hocked, unable to escape its demands. We, in the twenty-first century, so often romanticise the idyll of pre-urban, agricultural simplicity, but the existence led by the Princips, as for peasants across Europe down the centuries, was far from idyllic. Theirs was a living defined by a crushing yearly battle, trying to husband enough crops and livestock to survive the deprivations of winter and the demands of feudal obligation. As Serbs, theirs was an identity most strongly preserved by the annual cycle of devotions enshrined by their Orthodox Church and by stories told around the fire about the medieval heroes of a long-gone Serbian state. Little wonder those tales were worked up into legends of mythological dimension – the chivalrous deeds of Serbian nobles fighting for good against the evil of occupation.

Gavrilo Princip was born in the summer of 1894, a busy time for a peasant family living off the land in Herzegovina. Marija had spent the day in the fields bundling hay by hand and milking the family cow, when her labour pains came. She had only just made it back into the house when the baby arrived. Family lore has her mother-in-law biting through the umbilical cord. It was 13 July, a day sacred in the Orthodox calendar for the Archangel Gabriel, and although Marija wanted to name the newborn Špiro, in honour of her late brother, the parish priest insisted the child be named for the saint. Gavrilo is the name Gabriel in Serbian. The baptism was carried out swiftly. Nobody could be confident that the new baby would not suffer the same fate as many of his siblings.

‘He was born just up there,’ Nikola told me after we had returned to the house. Miljkan was too immobile to comfortably leave the verandah, but at seventy-seven years of age his younger brother was still sprightly enough to lead me to the next-door plot and was now standing in front of the roofless void where the old stable had been set into the slope of the hill. ‘Up there, just behind, was the main room where the family lived and the food was prepared.’ Nikola was now pointing to a flat section of grassy ground at the same level as the top of the stable. ‘They used to have a hearth in there for cooking, and the smoke went out of a hole in the roof. The floor was made of earth and used to be swept clean every day. The other room, where they slept, was towards us, above where the animals lived, with a wooden floor.’

Nikola’s description prompted me to rethink my understanding of what had once been a two-roomed home lived in by a family of five. This had been a European dwelling inhabited by an entire family at the start of the twentieth century, but it brought to my mind hovels that I routinely come across in rural Africa. The principle was exactly the same: a beaten-earth floor in a dwelling constructed out of stone walls, under a roof made of wood, thatch or branches gathered locally. A rate of child mortality that could kill six out of nine children from Princip’s family sounded more like Africa than Europe. The developed world might despair at modern Africa’s systemic problems, but standing in that garden in Obljaj taught me how recently much of Europe was in a similar position.

With the plot of land as his stage, Nikola began almost to act out this part of the family story. ‘Most of the time the family had a horse, a cow, a few chickens and sometimes some sheep. They were all kept down here.’ He was now peering inside the door of the underground chamber with the collapsed roof. ‘Gavro’s father used to earn money as a postman, delivering packages and letters around the area. His horse was important, so he would be well looked after in there, especially in the winter.’ Bosnian winters have a well-justified reputation for extreme conditions, so much so that in the novel Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh has Charles Ryder’s mother dying ‘of exhaustion in the snow in Bosnia’ while serving there as a nurse in wartime. From personal experience I knew how hazardous winters can be in Herzegovina. In 1994 I had made a good attempt to kill myself by sliding off an icy road in that wintry country, rolling my armoured Land Rover and knocking myself out.

Nikola then led me up the slope to where the living quarters had been. ‘Nana used to have a beautiful voice,’ he reminisced. ‘She sang in a choir, and all the time as she worked around the house. And she always wore traditional Serbian folk dress, with a little bag of sugar tucked away down here.’ He was now gesturing to his waistband. ‘She used to give it to her favourites. Sometimes she gave me some when I was a little child. She always said that she used to give sugar to Gavro because he was such a special boy.’

Special indeed was a boy who made it through childhood in these living conditions. The tuberculosis that would eventually kill Princip in 1918 was most likely contracted while being brought up in these stark conditions, although as a youngster he had been strong enough to suppress the disease. His only surviving older brother, Jovo, was seven years old when Gavrilo was born and there would be one more surviving child, a younger brother, Nikola, born three years after Gavrilo.

Gavrilo is remembered as having inherited his mother’s sharp chin, blue eyes and casual attitude towards religion, while from his more pious father, Petar, came his physique: short and wiry, as befits a farmer scratching out a hard-scrabble living in the highlands of Herzegovina. The most religious member of the family, Petar was known for never drinking, a noteworthy rarity in a community where the making and consuming of plum brandy, or šljivovica, was – and remains – a ritual enthusiastically embraced to ease the hardships of rural life. Petar clearly had something that marked him out within the community. He served for several years as the elected head of the zadruga, the association of local households. For generations across the Western Balkans the zadruga system was the foundation of rural life, a way of sharing earnings, dividing tax obligations and dealing with problems so as to help the maximum number of people. In his journalism Arthur Evans praised it lavishly for being fair and democratic, even communistic. The fact that Petar Princip had the vision to earn extra income as the village postman also suggested that he was more than just another peasant farmer. On official forms such as his school reports Gavrilo Princip would take care to describe his father not simply as an agricultural labourer, but as ‘an entrepreneur’.

Looking at Nikola as he wandered around the plot declaiming the family history, I convinced myself that I recognised his chin. It seemed to have the same sharpness as the one I had seen in the handful of surviving photographs of Princip. I felt I was looking at how the assassin would have appeared, had he reached old age.

Princip grew to take on the household tasks expected of a young boy in the village, tending the chickens, helping his mother around the homestead, working with his father in the fields and watching over the sheep. The rich local pastures of the Pasić plain, still named after an overlord from the feudal period, remained privately owned, but some of the barer hillsides higher up were common land and Princip would spend whole days up there minding the flock as it scrabbled among the rocks for nourishment. Mile said that wolves were an occasional hazard and a shepherd boy would be expected to use a stick or stones to protect his animals.