Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War Read Online Free Page A

for an empire already groaning under the weight of its own contradictions and the frustrations of its oppressed minorities, wilfully to seize Bosnia-Herzegovina. But Franz Joseph still smarted beneath the humiliations of losing his northern Italian dominions soon after he inherited the throne, and of suffering military defeat by Prussia in 1866. The acquisition of new colonies in the Balkans seemed to offer a measure of compensation, as well as frustrating Serbia’s ambitions to incorporate them in a pan-Slav state.
    Given the febrile mood in the provinces, it was rash to advertise the schedule for Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Bosnia as early as March. This prompted one of many groups of violent dissidents, the Young Bosnians, a secret society for students of peasant origins, to seize the opportunity to kill him. They reached this resolution perhaps on their own initiative, or perhaps at the behest of puppet-masters in Belgrade: in the absence of concrete evidence, either view is tenable. One of their number was nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip. Like many figures who have played such a role in history, Princip spent his short life striving to induce people to overcome their instinct to dismiss him because of his slight stature and colourless personality. In 1912, he volunteered to fight for Serbia in the First Balkan War, only to be rejected as too small. At his first interrogation after achieving notoriety in June 1914, he explained himself by saying, ‘Wherever I went, people took me for a weakling.’
    In May, Princip and two fellow conspirators travelled to Belgrade. The city was capital of a young and volatile country, fully independent from the Ottoman Empire only since 1879, a constitutional monarchy that was heart and soul of the pan-Slav movement. Princip knew Serbia well, having lived there for two years. The ‘Young Bosnians’ were provided with four Browning automatic pistols and six bombs by Maj. Vojin Tankosić of Ujedinjenje ili Smrt , a terrorist movement nicknamed ‘the Black Hand’, derived from German and Italian secret societies.
    The group was led by the thirty-six-year-old head of military intelligence Col. Dragutin Dimitrijević, familiarly known as ‘Apis’, after the Egyptian bull god. He was the principal personality in one of three factions engaged in a struggle for Serbian domestic mastery. The other two elements were led respectively by Alexander, the Prince Regent – who hated the colonel because he refused to defer to the royal family – andNikola Pašić, the prime minister. Apis looked the part of a revolutionary fanatic: pale, bald, heavy, enigmatic – like ‘a giant Mongolian’, in the words of a diplomat. He never married, devoting his life to the movement which boasted a hooded initiation ritual and a seal engraved with a skull-and-crossbones flag, a dagger, a bomb and poison. Murder was his business: he had been prominent among a group of young army officers who conducted the 1903 butchery of King Alexander of Serbia and Queen Draga in their own palace bedroom.
    The Black Hand’s influence pervaded many Serbian institutions, notably including its army. Pašić, a sixty-nine-year-old of venerable appearance with his white hair and beard, was an inveterate enemy of Apis, some of whose associates in 1913 discussed murdering him. The prime minister and many of his colleagues regarded the colonel as a threat to his country’s stability and even existence; internal affairs minister Milan Protić spoke of the Black Hand to a visitor on 14 June as ‘a menace to democracy’. But in a society riven by competing interests, the civilian government lacked authority to remove or imprison Apis, who was protected by the patronage of the army chief of staff.
    Beyond guns, bombs and cyanide suicide capsules, there is no hard evidence about what further support or direction Princip and his comrades received in Belgrade. The assassins went to their graves denying Serbia’s official