Gavrilo Princip, at his trial, protested that he had never meant to kill Sophie. His grudge against the Archduke was hardly a personal one. As David James Smith points out in this outstanding new account of events and characters surrounding the assassination, the 19-year-old Princip was callow and unworldly, a good shot with his revolver but lacking anything in the way of contingency plans. He and his fellow conspirators plotted the attack to mark the malign coincidence or deliberate tactlessness which brought Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo on Vidovdan, St Vitus’s day, anniversary of the crushing defeat inflicted by the Turks on the Serbs at Kosovo in 1389. Theme of the ballads Gavrilo and his friends learned in their Bosnian border villages, the battle had fostered a culture of resentment and grudge-bearing easily transmuted into the sort of nationalism which confers identity and significance on downtrodden ethnic minorities.
Supplied with bombs and pistols by a Serbian army officer, the conspirators mooched around Sarajevo for several weeks trying not to look suspicious as they paced out the Archduke’s processional route and visited the grave of Bodan Zerajic, whose suicide following a bungled attempt at assassinating Emperor Franz Josef in 1910 had turned him into a martyred avenger of Kosovo. That the 1914 terrorists succeeded where he had failed was the result, as Smith points out, of a fortuitous mixture of official misunderstanding, technical blunder, peevish punctilio on the part of Franz Ferdinand, determined to go ahead with his programme despite an earlier bomb explosion, and for Princip the pure good luck of being in the right place at the right time. Even had he not happened to be standing on a street corner a few feet from the archducal car as its chauffeur, having followed the wrong route, began to reverse, a major European war would still have erupted. Gavrilo’s two pistol shots merely accelerated the process, earning him the martyr status he craved, even though finally pronounced too young for execution.
A relatively short book unfolding the amplest of perspectives, One Morning in Sarajevo is the most comprehensive study of the assassination yet published in English. The author, a professional journalist, has interviewed the conspirators’ families, tracked down their pistols in a Viennese Jesuit seminary, sifted through the trial documents and studied the notes kept by Princip’s prison psychiatrist. He remains even-handed in his treatment of the murderers and their victims, showing some compassion for poor Sophie Chotek who, even in her coffin, was made to appear insufficiently high-born by being accorded the funeral honours due to a mere lady-in-waiting. Pettiness on this scale makes just as good a case as the annexation of Bosnia for dumping the Habsburgs.
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