The Trigger (16 page)

Arnie continued to nod as the trees came closer and closer. ‘Yes, yes, yes. They had an old Dakota on show. Must have been like the one you read about in Fitzroy Maclean’s book. And I remember there was some sort of aerodrome tarmac, but that would have been built after the war had finished, I guess. I remember it as a modern airbase with the old memorial tucked on the side.’ Zdravko had now turned off the main road and was following a track that took us in the direction of the copse. The terrain here was flat, unnaturally so, and clearly this was what Arnie remembered as the landscaped, communist-era airbase.

I was disappointed at how little was preserved from the partisan era and the bombing raid of November 1943. Zdravko turned along a lane that went through the trees, but all we could see were a few concrete plinths that had been stripped of memorial plaques and text. ‘You are right, Arnie,’ Zdravko said. ‘There used to be a Dakota. It was parked somewhere around here.’ He was now turning from side to side to peer under the trees, but he could find nothing. ‘And the memorial to Ribar used to be well looked after. It was visited regularly during the communist period.’

‘So what happened to it all?’ I wanted to know.

‘In the 1990s being communist no longer mattered,’ Arnie piped up. ‘Being Croat or Serb or Muslim was more important than being communist. All that commie stuff from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was seen as having been against the interests of the different groups. They did not just ignore the commie stuff, they deliberately destroyed it.’

Zdravko shrugged. ‘Sure, the Dakota was scrapped and the Tito-era material destroyed. But to be honest, I cannot tell you if it was the Bosnian Serbs who got rid of it all when they were here, or the Bosnian Croat forces who drove them out. The point was we learned to look back on the communist period as bad for all of us.’

But I was not convinced. My conversations with Zdravko up to that point had all been about the war of the 1990s, when honouring Bosnian Croat history had been so important. Ribar, the principal partisan victim of the 1943 raid, had been a proud Croat. I asked Zdravko for his feelings about the man. ‘He might have been a Croat, but he was a communist more than he was a Croat,’ Zdravko said, hauling on the steering wheel of the jeep so that we could turn back out onto the main road. ‘And if you forget where you are from, then it is right that you are forgotten.’

Zdravko’s indifference was a hollow epitaph for the men killed that wintry morning in 1943. Two Britons, named by Maclean as Robin Whetherly and Donald Knight, gave their lives here, but there is no memorial to their sacrifice.

As our walk progressed, we passed many houses destroyed in the war of the 1990s and still not rebuilt. But even these modern ruins sometimes had links back to the bitter fighting here in the 1940s. On some we saw the letter U daubed deep and capitalised on walls. It was the symbol of the Ustaše, the crypto-fascist, ultra-nationalist Croat group empowered by the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. In this region the U symbol carries with it the same hateful charge as a swastika, yet in the 1990s it had been embraced enthusiastically by some of the Bosnian Croat forces.

Although small on the map, Bosnia felt at times as if it had a Tardis-like quality, a secret inner scale. Arnie and I slogged up hillsides, across plateaus and through woodland, our progress sometimes feeling as if it had stalled. Our conversation would inevitably turn to favourite foods that we would eat and drinks that we would enjoy when the hike was over. But my mind would also dwell on magic, on the power in this hilly land of myth clung to by communities huddling in unenlightened ignorance, unsure of what might be going on not just in far-off capitals like Vienna or Belgrade, but on the other side of the mountain, over the horizon. These days of walking showed me how much space there is in Bosnia for this type of projection, for the imagination to spin heroes and villains out of legends, for fear to ferment into prejudice. It felt not just understandable, but like the natural course for many nations. My own country – Britain – appears settled today, but as I grow older so I have learned how illusory this is. As Joseph Conrad’s narrator, Charlie Marlow, says of Britain in the opening of Heart of Darkness: ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’

We rested for a day in Kupres, where yet more evidence emerged of Tito’s links to this land. Arnie remembered the small mountain town as the place where his family always made a regular pit-stop on the annual summer holiday drive down to the Adriatic coast in the 1980s. ‘We would be in T-shirts and shorts, but whenever we got to Kupres it was always bloody freezing,’ he told me. So it was when we hobbled into town, a preternatural chill in a town where a massive new Catholic church, still framed by scaffolding, made clear that this was a town under Bosnian Croat rule. We both winced from blisters as we walked to a restaurant where Arnie ordered us large wooden bowls of a local speciality, a polenta-style dish called pura, made from locally milled maize that is served gooey with home-made cream cheese.

We sat with an elderly man called Ljupko Kuna, who told us of bear-hunting in nearby mountains. Aged eighty-four, he walked with a cane, his joints worn thin by decades of service as a hunting guide, and his vision had faded a little so he wore spectacles. But with blade-sharp recall he told us about his most famous bear-hunting client: Tito.

‘I only shot with Tito for the last fifteen years of his life in the 1960s and 1970s, but for his age he was a good shot,’ Ljupko said, pouring two sachets of sugar into his coffee. ‘He was very precise as well, never shooting young animals and only going for them when they were trophy age, from twelve to fifteen years old. He never needed more than one shot for a kill. And that is not easy sometimes when the bear is in the wrong position or perhaps hidden by a branch.’ Ljupko said Tito was so keen that he hunted every year, entertaining official guests, and although Ljupko remembered various heads of state fondly, he did not have a good word to say about the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. ‘That man shot at anything that moved,’ Ljupko said. ‘He was incapable of following any protocols when they stayed at the hunting lodge in Stinging Nettle Valley. It was built by the Austro-Hungarians.’

I had seen photographs of Tito hunting and was struck by how Austrian he looked. In one he stands over a slain bear, his hand holding the barrel of his rifle with its butt on the ground. His jacket is Tyrolean green, and the band around his brown felt hat is adorned with a feather, in the vogue of the European hunter. The photograph was almost identical to others I had seen of another keen hunter connected with this area, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had rich opportunities to shoot at imperial hunting lodges, castles and estates spread across much of east and central Europe. The man who would be shot dead by Princip in Sarajevo logged every game animal, bird and trophy animal he shot during his lifetime, and had the numbers displayed on an ornate score chart that I had seen in Austria. The grand total came to 274,889.

‘Tito really felt at home in these mountains,’ Ljupko said. ‘He fought around here during the Second World War at a time when he and the partisans were being hunted by the Germans. They always managed to escape, so he felt a special bond to this part of the country.’ Ljupko was not the first to recognise Tito’s close link to these hills. Fitzroy Maclean described in his war memoir how Tito appeared most at ease when living as a fugitive, dodging German patrols, in caves spread across Bosnia’s mountains.

We emerged from the embrace of these same mountains on the last day of our walk to Bugojno, the gravel track firming into a suburban tarmac road, easing between comfortable family homes with jungle gyms in the gardens and modest cars parked out front. Then it grew yet further and connected to the main highway running into town from the south, and for the first time since Obljaj we had a proper pavement to walk along. I had covered the fall of the town to Bosnian Muslim forces in the summer of 1993 and for the first time on the hike I had reached a place I recognised – terra that for me was cognita.

There was no doubting which Bosnian community was in power. Just as new Catholic churches were the hallmark of today’s Bosnian Croat authority over Glamoč and Kupres, so religious buildings in Bugojno told a story. In the town centre I walked by the seventeenth-century Sultan Ahmed Han II mosque, a building I had last seen as a wreck. My 1993 diary recorded that it had been struck by scores of artillery shells, and I had taken photographs of the gaping hole in the roof. All that was left of the minaret back then was a fibrous stump, the top section blown clean away by shelling from Bosnian Croat positions. Today the mosque is pristine, the main building restored to its pre-war condition, while the minaret has not just been rebuilt, but pumped up as if with steroids. The new column was roughly twice as tall as the original it replaced.

I found the supersized minaret unsightly. The traditional mosques of Bosnia, with their pincushion-domed roofs and needle-thin minarets, add so much to the landscape – a parcel of Europe where Muslims have worshipped for centuries. Rebecca West described them rapturously as ‘among the most pleasing architectural gestures ever made by urbanity’. The new versions felt excessive, unworthy of the fine bridges and buildings left in Bosnia by 400 years of Ottoman occupation.

After roughly a hundred miles of walking from Obljaj, Arnie and I searched out the old railway station where Princip and his father set off by train for Sarajevo in the summer of 1907. The Baedeker guide recorded the station here as the tip of a branch line on the outer fringe of the rail network built by the Austro-Hungarians. Primarily designed to haul timber felled in the region’s thick forests, the line also ran occasional passenger trains. According to the old timetable recorded by Baedeker, the train used to take about five hours to reach Sarajevo from here, with several fiddly connections to get on and off the special locomotives needed to climb a particularly high mountain pass.

Arnie and I were too late to catch a train – about forty years too late. The last one left Bugojno in the 1970s when the line became so uneconomic that it was scrapped. The tracks had long gone, but we found the original station building, doubling now as the main offices for a bus terminus built where the trains used to run. The old station’s paintwork was tatty, but at least someone bothered to tend the pot plants in their window boxes. With its tiled roof and three-storey symmetrical design, there was no mistaking its European origins. It would have looked perfectly at home next to a platform in the Tyrol.

Those early Austro-Hungarian railway surveyors had clearly known their business, for the road that today delivers you towards Sarajevo uses the exact same route as the original railway: down the valley of the Vrbas River, over the Komar pass into the Lašva River valley, finally joining the course of the Bosna River all the way to the capital. The slope at Komar was so steep that the train needed a special rack-and-pinion design to claw its way up the hillside. Ljupko, the bear-hunter from Kupres, had used the railway as a young man and told us that when it began to climb the pass most of the passengers would get off and walk, easily keeping up with the creaking locomotive.

Taking the bus would see us following the same route used by Princip, so I bought two tickets towards Sarajevo and sat down next to Arnie on a bench, happy at the thought that for the next part of the trip I would not have to lug my heavy pack. The summer sun was punishing and I was grateful for the shade from the bus-station canopy. When Fitzroy Maclean arrived here on a wartime locomotive ‘belching flames, smoke and sparks’, he described conditions that could not have been more different. ‘Under a cold, penetrating drizzle Bugojno station was bleak and cheerless,’ he wrote. As I contemplated the way history in Bosnia so often runs over the same ground, another small coincidence was offered up by the arrival of our bus. On its grille the maker’s name was spelled out in silver letters: Gräf & Stift. It was the same company that built the limousine in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was being driven when he was shot by Princip.

Rock band Franz Ferdinand performing in Bosnia

The author staying with Drago and Marija Taraba, Christmas 1993

The author visiting the couple nineteen years later

With the bus heading along the Vrbas valley, I sat back in my seat to rest, the window a screen on which a blissful summer scene scrolled past: river pools shaded by willows, recently mown pastures coned by hayricks, tanned children playing carefree in the dust. As Arnie gabbled away about never having had a hike to match the one we had just shared, I felt quietly relieved that we had made it safely on foot through some of Bosnia’s more mine-contaminated backwoods. The walk had given me a sense of how far Gavrilo Princip had come when the ‘weak boy’ left home for the first time, not in terms of mileage, but more in terms of breaking with the only life he had ever known. He had left behind the closed rural society of Serbian serfdom and would encounter for the first time other Bosnians – Muslims and Croats – with their identifiers: religious buildings, clothes, food, traditions. It must have been bewildering for him as a thirteen-year-old to shift horizons so radically, to break away from the confines of a social system static for so long – one that had, in common with much of Europe, for centuries been framed by the strictures of hierarchy, feudalism and empire. To find out how Princip responded I would need to head on to Sarajevo, where he went to school.

Sadly I would have to do that without Arnie whose time away from his newspaper job in London was soon up. ‘I am so sorry I cannot finish what we started,’ he said. ‘I have so many great memories to take from this trip. For a start, I had no idea this country was so stunning, so varied, so naturally rich, so incredibly beautiful and so bloody big. At times that walk could have killed me. But the best thing was the way the people we met could not have been more open, more friendly: the Princip family, the hotelier in Glamoč, the fishing mullahs. None of them gave a damn about my ethnicity. And yet we saw with our own eyes what the war has left behind: the oversized churches, the huge minarets, the land cut up by minefields, those ugly, ugly houses still burnt and not repaired.’