Because of this anomaly the state prosecutors insisted on charging the indictees not just with murder, but with the more heinous crime of treason. Conspirators to treason could, under Habsburg law, face the death sentence, whereas conspirators to murder could receive nothing harsher than a life sentence. By opting for a treason charge, prosecutors ensured that those aged twenty or over, proven to have been centrally involved in the conspiracy, would hang. This way, at least someone would die to avenge the life of the Archduke.
The trial began at 8.10 a.m. on Monday 12 October 1914 and ran for eleven days. Photographs of the perpetrators being marched into court and sitting together inside the courtroom show Princip at the forefront. Although much shorter than the other prisoners, he dominates the pictures: the sharp Princip family chin prominent, his face whiskery, his eyes defiant. While the other defendants wavered during the hearing, Princip gave testimony that was steadfast and focused, explaining the rage he felt as a Bosnian peasant against the colonial occupiers who kept the rural population in dire conditions, and repeatedly stating his Yugoslav goal of liberating all south Slavs. Some of his co-accused hinted at other motives for taking part in the assassination. One said it was because he was driven by revolutionary socialism, another because he hoped to help Serbs alone, but throughout the hearing Princip consistently said he had acted as a Yugoslav nationalist, not a Serb nationalist.
While armies mobilised across Europe and the first clashes took place on the Eastern and Western Fronts, all was calm in the Sarajevo courtroom on Thursday 28 October 1914, when the three judges returned their verdict after five days of deliberation. The court found Princip guilty of murder and high treason, but ruled that he was not of age to receive a death sentence. Instead he was sentenced to twenty years in jail, with special orders that he be denied food one day each month and be kept in a cell without light on each anniversary of the assassination. The four other armed attackers under arrest – including Čabrinović, who had thrown the bomb at the Archduke – were also too young to be executed, receiving instead stiff jail terms. However, five of the older prisoners, including Ilić, were convicted of treason and sentenced to be hanged – although two of them would have their death sentences later commuted to life. Nine of the co-accused, including Mrs Sadilo, were acquitted of all charges.
The three men on death-row were hanged on 3 February 1915, using nooses strung over coarse wooden columns driven into the ground within the military barracks in New Sarajevo. Witnesses described how drums rolled as the executions were carried out one after the other on a clear winter’s day, the peaks of the mountains surrounding Sarajevo white with snow. Ilić was the last to be executed, the hangman later saying: ‘The third, who had the greatest guilt on his soul, was serene.’
By this time Princip had already been moved from Sarajevo, taken by train in December 1914 to serve out his sentence in a military prison within an old Habsburg fortress at Theresienstadt, in the far north of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Shackled night and day with leg irons weighing 22 lbs, his condition worsened steadily, tormented all the time by cold, malnutrition, loneliness and the refusal of his jailers to give him anything to read. The occasional snippet of news reached him about the war that his actions had precipitated, about the invasion of Serbia by Austro-Hungarian troops, about the death and suffering endured among the south-Slav people he had hoped to liberate. The last known photograph of Princip was taken around this time. He stands shirtless in a jacket next to a studded prison-cell door and what looks like a privy. It was while at Theresienstadt that he was interviewed by Dr Pappenheim, and the clinical notes record how the prisoner ached for something to read, his spirits declining to the point of attempting suicide: ‘It is very hard in solitary confinement, without books, with absolutely nothing to read, suffering most from not having anything to read. Sleeps only four hours in the night. Dreams a great deal. Beautiful dreams. About life, about love, not uneasy.’ When the doctor handed over a pen so that Princip could jot down some thoughts about social revolution, the prisoner said it was the first time in two years that he had handled one.
Following Princip’s journey had shown me how it touched repeatedly on events from the later twentieth century, and so it was in Theresienstadt. While there as a prisoner he was treated for tuberculosis by a local doctor called Jan Levitt, then a loyal medical practitioner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Two and a half decades later the same doctor would return to the same fortress, but in very altered circumstances, born from the fallout of the events sparked by his patient. In 1942 Theresienstadt, now called Terezin, had been turned into a Nazi concentration camp, and Dr Levitt, a Jew, passed through this time as a prisoner, locked up and eventually transported to Auschwitz where he was murdered.
Dr Pappenheim recorded the spread of tuberculosis through the prisoner’s body. On 18 May 1916 he noted ‘wound worse, discharging very freely, looking miserable, suicide by any sure means impossible, “wait to the end”, resigned but not really very sad’. The notes for his fourth and final visit a month later ran to only one line: ‘When permission has come, arm to be amputated, his usual resigned disposition.’ Princip’s right arm was removed for medical reasons some time later, although he lingered on through 1917, the disease spreading all the time. When death came at 6.30 p.m. on 28 April 1918 the death-certificate recorded tuberculosis as the cause. On the wall of his cell two lines of verse were later found:
Our ghosts will walk through Vienna
And roam through the Palace, frightening the lords.
Under cover of darkness, his corpse was handed over that night to a burial party of five Austro-Hungarian imperial troops. They were under orders to place the body in an unmarked grave already dug in the local graveyard, and not leave any traces when they filled it back in. The Austro-Hungarian authorities hoped it would never be found.
CHAPTER 12
More Than One Shadow
After the 1941 Nazi occupation of Bosnia, the plaque in Sarajevo commemorating Princip as a ‘herald of freedom’ is ripped down and presented to Adolf Hitler
The last known photograph of Princip, circa 1915, before dying in prison from tuberculosis
The assassination on the morning of 28 June 1914 might have been the end of Gavrilo Princip’s ‘mystical’ journey, but for the rest of the world it was just the beginning. Look carefully at the photograph of the Gräf & Stift limousine as its wheels turn to make the corner outside the Moritz Schiller café and it is possible to make out that by some strange synchronicity the car’s number plate can be read A111118. It was a sequence with no great resonance before the First World War, but when the four bloody years of fighting eventually ended, it did so on Armistice Day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918: A 11-11-18.
The checks and balances of the grand strategic alliances between Great Power rivals had for decades prevented continental war from erupting in Europe, not least during the 1908 crisis when Austria–Hungary annexed Bosnia. So when news broke of the Archduke’s death there was no immediate sense of any impending crisis that might destroy the old order. At first, the death of Franz Ferdinand prompted nothing but sympathy from the established European powers – a mood perfectly reflected by an editorial in The Times newspaper published in London the day after the assassination:
With the deepest and most profound regret we record today the tragic news of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess Hohenberg . . . The sympathy of the whole world will go forth to the bereaved emperor and all Englishmen will pray that he may be able to bear this final affliction with the fortitude he has never failed to show his deepest trials.
Within weeks, those same Englishmen were being urged not to pray for the Emperor Franz Joseph, but to take up arms against him and his allies. The sense of security guaranteed by the grand alliances proved to be an illusion, a collapsing house of cards, unable to contain any longer the rivalries of the Great Powers, especially that between the era’s global superpowe
r, Britain, and the relatively new but ambitious German empire. No matter how many times the treaty matrix had worked, it took only one failure for the whole edifice to come crashing down.
So it was that in July 1914 a series of strategic manoeuvres, under the cover of agreements intended to protect peace, acted like tumblers falling into place, one after the other, locking Europe onto a war trajectory. A shooting on a street corner in Sarajevo was leveraged into a casus belli for continental conflict through a staggered sequence of falling diplomatic dominoes, one well visited by historians. Austria–Hungary used the assassination as grounds to declare war on Serbia, provoking tsarist Russia to mobilise forces in defence of Belgrade, a move that led the Kaiser’s Germany to attack France pre-emptively through Belgium, leading Britain to declare war on Germany at midnight on 4 August 1914.
The trigger for it all had been the shooting in Sarajevo, an event that on a simplistic level could be plotted through artefacts I explored through my journey. Before travelling to Bosnia, my research had taken me to Austria’s military museum at the Arsenal in Vienna, where items connected with the assassination remain on public display, including the original Gräf & Stift limousine. With the passing of the years the dark paint of its bodywork was not quite as polished as it was on the day of the assassination, but it was still possible to see the bullet-hole on the right-hand side made by the shot that killed Sophie, and the portentous number plate. The Archduke’s uniform was laid out in a display cabinet, the feathers on his stulphut a little limper than they had been on the day of his grand visit to Sarajevo, the breast of his blue tunic still torn where doctors hacked desperately through the material in the mistaken belief that he had been shot in the heart. The shirt he wore, black with his dried blood, is kept in a special presentation case elsewhere within the collection, too delicate for daily display.
I rode a train west along the Danube River valley to Artstetten castle, favourite among the Archduke’s many properties. Sophie’s lowly status in the eyes of Habsburg traditionalists meant she could not be buried alongside the imperial forebears in Vienna, but love meant that the Archduke did not want to be separated in death. So, today, they lie side-by-side in a modest crypt beneath the castle, fresh flowers being laid each year on the anniversary of the assassination. Just as in my village of Hellidon and countless others all across Europe, the small Austrian town nearby has a memorial listing the names of locals who fell in the world wars. But the grey slate plaque in Artstetten can claim something unique. It bears the names of the first two fatalities, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. Touring the museum with its array of family photographs and memorabilia, I was moved to read that the couple’s two sons both paid a high price when Austria was caught up in events rooted in the war that began with the murder of their parents. For opposing the Nazi occupation of their homeland in the late 1930s they were both sent to Dachau, although both survived.
Nearing the end of my own journey, I was able to follow the exact route taken into Sarajevo by the Archduke on the day of his death. The Hotel Bosna had been through turbulent times, occupied by Bosnian Serb forces during the war of the 1990s when, in its grounds, they dug in the guns that used to fire upon the mountain road I had driven so perilously across Mount Igman. After the war ended, the hotel building was one of many taken over as the headquarters of the NATO force sent to enforce the terms of the Dayton peace treaty, but when I arrived in the summer of 2012 it was in the late stages of refurbishment, the receptionist totally unaware of the royal party that once stayed there. The spring of the Bosna River still lies close by, reached by a long, straight gravel avenue lined by plane trees, another instance of Austro-Hungarian outsiders seeking to order Bosnia’s wild landscape. Today the avenue is plied by horse-drawn carriages, dating from the Habsburg colonial era, that carry tourists and visitors.
The Archduke’s party took a train into Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 and I followed by tram, stopping outside the old military barracks in New Sarajevo, where he had formally inspected troops before boarding the car convoy into the city centre. I had known it as the Marshal Tito barracks during the war of the 1990s, a briefly fought-over piece of military real estate that would be occupied by Ukrainian UN peacekeepers who flogged black-market diesel by the jerrycan through holes blasted in the perimeter wall. Only a small section remained when I visited in 2012, its plaster blackened in places from flames that went out twenty years earlier, its masonry still marked with what we called ‘Sarajevo sunflowers’ – the scar left by a shell-strike that would create a deep central crater surrounded by radiating petals of smaller holes gouged by shrapnel.
I walked the route of the limousine convoy from 1914, one that passes close by the National Archive of Bosnia, where relics from the assassination are still to be found: police paperwork filled in by the authorities over in Obljaj when Princip’s parents were hurriedly taken in for questioning; references to the long-gone Vlajnić pastry shop in central Sarajevo, where some of the weapons were distributed by Danilo Ilić on the morning of the attack; a piece of stationery from the coffee-grinding business in Sarajevo owned by Nedeljko Čabrinović’s Habsburg-supporting father; a postcard written in pencil by Princip to a relative, with an Austro-Hungarian postage stamp bearing the bewhiskered likeness of Emperor Franz Joseph.
I walked the length of the old Appel Quay alongside the Miljacka. The river ran calmly by at its low summer level, the even flow broken only by an occasional weir where the water bubbled and churned, plastic bottles bobbing frantically where they were trapped in back eddies. A woman fished for her dinner right there in the centre of this small city, casting her line from close by the spot where Čabrinović launched himself down the stone-lined river bank after throwing his grenade. No plaque marks the spot of his attack, but photographs taken from 1914 show a building that is still there today, the façade unchanged after a hundred years.
At the end of the boulevard I came to the remains of the old town hall, where the royal party was photographed arriving that sunny Sunday morning, its steps then lined by serious-faced dignitaries, some wearing fezzes, others with top hats doffed – yet to receive the imperial dressing-down from the royal visitor so enraged by the grenade attack. A photographer was on hand to capture the departure from the same steps half an hour later, the limousine pointing this time back down the Appel Quay, the gallant count taking up his position on the running board facing the river, the plumes on the Archduke’s stulphut momentarily flattened by a gust of wind.
By the time the Bosnian War broke out in 1992 this monumental building was no longer the town hall, converted instead into the National Library, a building of such prominence it drew fire from Bosnian Serb gunners. In the summer of 1994 I had walked up its steps and taken photographs of what remained, a roofless hulk, the stone columns lining the atrium blistered by the blaze ignited in the bombardment. The striped pink, pseudo-Moorish façade that Rebecca West had derided prompted a more sympathetic response from me, its stonework smudged with soot where the fire had vented through the windows. Almost two decades on, when I visited in 2012, the building was yet to be put right, muffled by scaffolding as it underwent slow reconstruction.
It took me just minutes to walk back down the river past the same domes and minaret captured in the remarkable photograph of the Archduke’s car approaching the turn where Princip was waiting. I passed the spot where the man raised his hat at the royal party and the little boy looked on in wonder, the masonry walls lining the river bank unchanged. The sky above me was as cloudless as on the day of the assassination and, when I arrived at the turning, I rested just opposite on an old stone seat prominent at the end of the Latin Bridge. It was built by the Austro-Hungarians as part of an elaborate memorial to the Archduke, one that was pulled down shortly after the end of the First World War when the occupier was finally driven out of Bosnia. The seat had somehow been spared from destruction, its stencilled Latin legend – ‘siste viator’ or ‘stop traveller’ – allowed to fade with the years
.
The riverside road was busy with trams, cars and other city traffic, but from the seat I had a clear view of the spot, just thirty feet away, where the assassination took place. Sarajevans bustled past what was, for them, just another busy street corner; a traffic warden ticketed an illegally parked car, and an elderly woman, doubled over with age, sat crumpled on the old flagstones of the bridge begging for money, quietly yet insistently.
There was little to tell passers-by of the significance of the street corner opposite me, just a modest plaque set in the wall at ground level with a message that read: ‘From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.’ The neutrality of the wording jarred as I set off on the last leg of my trip.
I knew exactly where I was going. I started along what used to be Franz Joseph Street, the road that begins at the corner where the Moritz Schiller café once stood and is today called Green Berets Street, in honour of fighters who protected Sarajevo during the war of the 1990s. My route then took me across Ferhadija, the pedestrian avenue linking old Ottoman Sarajevo to the new city shaped by Austria–Hungary. It was a street Princip used as a schoolboy on his daily walk to the Merchants’ School. Today it bears scars still livid from the siege, memorial stones to Sarajevans killed by Bosnian Serb shells.
On I walked, nearing the end of a journey that had rumbled over the frets of history. It had taken me from Obljaj through parts so wild they are still roamed by wolves; into archives in Sarajevo missed by observers for whom Princip remained only a half-formed, incidental figure; through a land where the twentieth century’s most influential political force – nationalism – had shown its power both to unite and to divide. Through the course of the journey, and with the help of Arnie, Mile, Džile and many others, I had been able to strip away the filters of history that can obscure the outsider’s view of the Balkans, bringing into focus my mental picture of the young man whose actions led to the First World War. And the journey had gone far beyond the story of an individual, touching a region that cast more than one shadow over world history. I had passed through the same mountains where Tito wooed the West, trapping the south Slavs for decades on the communist side of the Iron Curtain, and had trudged through the killing fields of Srebrenica that brought about NATO’s coming of age and drove others to jihad.