The Trigger Read Online Free Page B

the assassination a large number of friends and associates of Princip had given accounts of the young man they once knew. Some were fanciful, others frankly opportunistic, with some sources even presuming to re-create letters supposedly written by the young man. A book published in 1966 called The Road to Sarajevo, by a Yugoslav author, Vladimir Dedijer, does a fine job of sifting through all this hearsay to produce perhaps the most authoritative history of Princip.
    Born in a village on the remote western edge of Bosnia, Princip had undergone a process of radicalisation at the schools he attended across the region, a journey that culminated in the assassination in Sarajevo. It was a deliberate revolutionary act, one that was intended to lead to the liberation of the Western Balkans. Centuries of occupation and foreign domination had drawn its Slav population in different directions, yet Princip was part of a growing cohort of locals who believed the moment was right for the locals to rule themselves. His thinking was idealistic, dreamy, woolly even – he certainly had no appreciation of how his actions might lead to a world war – and he had no clear concept of what would come after the removal of the Archduke and the Austro-Hungarian Empire he represented. Kingdom, republic, federation – whatever emerged must be better than the tyranny of the outsider. But the key question, from the perspective of the 1990s war, was whether he fired his gun only for his Bosnian Serb kin, or for the higher purpose of helping all local Slavs.
    The Slav lands of the Western Balkans reach far beyond Bosnia alone, and at the time of the assassination in 1914 they were a mosaic under varying degrees of occupation or liberation: for example, Croatia towards the north had for centuries been under the control of Austria–Hungary or its antecedents, and Serbia to the east had only recently and bloodily won independence after generations of Ottoman rule, while Bosnia itself had been carved off the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s and bolted onto the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The mosaic was complex and shifting, but one constant was that its people – from the Julian Alps bordering Italy in the north all the way down to the frontier with Greece in the south – predominantly shared the same Slav bloodline. Ethnographers categorise them as ‘south Slavs’ to distinguish them from other Slav peoples further north (Russians, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks), although from antiquity all Slavs have some common roots.
    Before the assassination, Princip had received a few days of training and some weapons through renegade intelligence officers in Serbia. For some analysts this was enough to conclude that he had purely Serbian interests at heart. However, the freedom fighting group to which he was primarily loyal, Mlada Bosna, or Young Bosnia, had members who came from all three major Bosnian ethnic groups. One of Princip’s fellow conspirators on the day of the assassination, deployed with a weapon on the same mission to kill the Archduke, was a Bosnian Muslim, while another Muslim played a crucial role in acquiring the weapons used for the assassination. A Bosnian Croat family in Sarajevo was entrusted that day with disposing of the weapons after the attack.
    From my reading it became clear to me that historians were remarkably casual with details concerning Princip, in particular the central question of why he took part in the assassination. So monumental were the events and aftermath of the conflict resulting from his actions that Princip’s own story has been overshadowed by the onrush of what happened next – his motivations misunderstood, muddled, even misrepresented. Nothing captures better this casualness than a photograph showing a man being arrested in Sarajevo moments after the shooting on 28 June 1914. Blurry with energy, it is a dramatic image of a prisoner being frogmarched through a melee, both arms pinned as he struggles, a gendarme with a sabre