Monday, May 05, 2014

Gavrilo Princip and the June 28 day.

I've finished reading The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark stunning "forensic" examination of the dominoes that fell in the aftermath of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination.

Now comes a book dealing ostensibly with the life and motives of triggerman Gavrilo Princip, except that as seems to be the custom in topics concerning the Balkans, nothing is simple; witness the opening of Clark's book, set a dozen years prior to Princip's shots, as a king and queen are brutally murdered.

At some point, there'll be time for a review of Sleepwalkers. Given my enduring fascination with this topic (see "Red Stars, Black Mountains: What’s Habsburg got to do with it?" for proof), there'll almost have to be a personal reflection on June 28, when the centenary arrives. But how? I'll be thinking about that.

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War – review, by Tim Butcher (Guardian)

Tim Butcher brings his own experience of Yugoslavian conflict to bear on this revelatory portrait of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassin, Gavrilo Princip

At around 10.45 on the morning of Sunday 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip fired twice at point-blank range into the car bearing the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek. The first bullet tore through the collar of Franz Ferdinand's uniform, boring into his neck and opening the jugular vein. The second, aimed at Oskar Potiorek, the Austrian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, went wide, probably because members of the crowd were already trying to restrain the assassin. The bullet flew through the door of the car and was deflected into the abdomen of the archduke's wife. She was already falling into a coma as the driver reversed the car away from the scene and sped towards the governor's residence. The archduke remained conscious for long enough to address his wife with words that would soon be reported across the world: "Sophie, Sophie don't die, stay alive for our children." Within half an hour both of them were dead.

Amazingly, little is known of the young Bosnian Serb whose shots triggered the escalations that brought war to Europe in 1914.

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