The Trigger Read Online Free Page A

of Princip’s actions are overlooked, even trivialised. We all smirked when Blackadder’s numbskull sidekick Baldrick remembered it thus: ‘I heard that it started when a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich ’cause he was hungry.’
    Going to Sarajevo to cover the Bosnian War brought the assassination to life for me. The street corner where Princip fired his pistol is a well-known local landmark; indeed, for years visitors used to be able to stand in two footprints sunk in the cement of the pavement, fanciful representations of where the assassin stood at his moment of destiny. But Princip’s fouled tomb led me to think again. It dislodged in my mind a troubling piece of Great War flotsam: the thought that, in the eyes of some of his own people, Princip and his cause were not worth honouring. The filth I found in that memorial chapel polluted the purity of the sacrifice made by Uncle Alyn, the four men from Hellidon, the legions lost on the Western Front, the Italians buried in the snow and millions of others.
    Princip was Bosnian Serb by ethnicity, but this alone could not explain what I had found. In spite of everything inflicted on them during the siege by Bosnian Serb forces, the people of Sarajevo had not given in to blanket hatred of all things Serb. During the war plenty of Bosnian Serbs had stayed in the city, bravely distancing themselves from the violent nationalism displayed by the more extreme elements of their own community, still committed to the multi-ethnic coexistence that had long been a characteristic of Sarajevo. The city’s Serb Orthodox churches were largely left alone, as were Serb cultural centres and other buildings clearly linked to the Serb community. I had friends who endured the siege inside the city and who were treated no differently by their fellow Sarajevans, even though it was common knowledge they were ethnic Serbs. Through my work as a journalist I often came across a senior general defending the city from the Bosnian Serbs, a man called Jovan Divjak, who was himself Serbian.
    To try to understand more about Princip, I turned to the history books. There was much to consider. There can be few turnkey moments so intensively written about as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In 1960 a bibliography was published that simply listed all books, articles and papers referencing the Sarajevo assassination. It was 547 pages long and had more than 1,200 entries. Like popcorn jumping from hot oil, writing about the incident has continued to emerge since that bibliography came out. But the analysis tended to focus on what happened next; on the actions of foreign powers presumed to have had influence over Princip; on who was or was not to blame for ramping up a minor political act in Sarajevo into global conflict; and on the falling-domino sequence of diplomatic blunders made by the Great Powers. None of it, to my mind, fully explained the fouled tomb.
    References to Princip were common, although primary historical material connected to him is incredibly scarce. He left no diary, and only a few passages of his own writing have ever been found. Austro-Hungarian legal records dating from after the 1914 assassination provide a source, with passages of Princip’s own testimony recorded verbatim, although the original record of his trial was lost in the chaos of the war – a twist for conspiracy theorists who continue to pick at its origins. The paperwork, all 90 kg of it, was last recorded as being in the custody of the Habsburg imperial commandant in Vienna in around June 1915. It was kept in a chest, serial number IS 206-15, but exactly what then happened to it remains a mystery. Fortunately for historians, the two Sarajevan stenographers who covered the case had broken protocol by taking home their shorthand notes, scribbled in pencil on narrow strips of court recorders’ paper, and in 1954 a transcript of the trial was published that is regarded as reliable.
    In the years after