The Trigger (3 page)

My education took me to Oxford, where my study of political history taught me more about the First World War’s global reach. The small nation of Serbia would lose 15 per cent of its population in the First World War – compared to the roughly 2 per cent figure for Britain, where the wounds on the national psyche remain livid enough – making it apparent how the conflict had the power to redraw maps and realign history. Fighting spread to sub-Saharan Africa, as European officers led colonial conscripts into battles that ranged from the Indian Ocean coastline to others over on the Atlantic side of the continent. The Arabian Peninsula and the wider Middle East would be changed for ever as local clans rose against the decaying imperial authority of the ‘Sublime Porte’, the elegant soubriquet for the Ottoman Empire.

Washington would eventually be drawn in, changing fundamentally the twentieth-century balance of power and propelling America towards superpower status. Britain’s pre-eminent position before the First World War was never fully restored, a slow puncture that would eventually cost Britain its empire. At Gallipoli, the theatre of war that Rupert Brooke was heading for when he died, soldiers from the other side of the world would die in such numbers that the national consciences of Australia and New Zealand would be redefined.

University studies brought home for me how the impact of 1914–18 was felt beyond the battlefield. It was a war of the masses that would change for ever how the masses viewed themselves and, crucially, how those masses were to be governed. The aloofness of assumed imperial power, the inherited droit de seigneur that had held sway for so long, could not survive. The Romanov, Ottoman, German and Habsburg Empires were all swept away by the First World War. For decades Europe’s great dynasties had successfully fought off the rising tides of social democracy, nationalism and workers’ rights that bloomed in the nineteenth century through the writings of Karl Marx, William Morris, Max Weber and so many others. From 1848, the year of Europe’s failed revolutions, the ancien régime had prevailed because those demanding change, whether socially-minded democrats or revolutionary-minded anarchists, were outsiders. All this changed with the Great War, as insider turned on insider, empire against empire, bloc against bloc – a conflict so cataclysmic it would destroy the old order. It was out of this turbulent collapse that Bolshevism, socialism, fascism and other radical political currents took root.

I read about the origins of the First World War, a subject of such extensive academic focus over the years that Alan ‘A.J.P.’ Taylor, one of Britain’s sharpest historians, called it ‘a large-scale industry’. In the immediate aftermath of the fighting the victorious Allies laid the blame for the war solely on Germany, although later historians would develop a much wider causal kaleidoscope spreading responsibility across other combatant nations. For many researchers Luigi Albertini’s magisterial opus, The Origins of the War of 1914, provides the mother lode with its three hefty volumes of documents, correspondence and analysis. Sifting through more than 60,000 public papers from the build-up to the war, and interviewing as many of the protagonists as possible, consumed the last decades of Albertini’s life. After carefully polishing and editing his book, he would die in 1941 before completing the final chapter, on where he believed blame for the fighting ultimately lay. And ever since Albertini’s opus was published, archives in Vienna, Berlin, Istanbul and elsewhere have thrown up new material for experts dissecting the mutual suspicion between the Great Powers – Germany, France, Russia, Britain, Austria–Hungary – and the sequence of events that led to the collision on the battlefields of the Eastern and Western Fronts.

From all this analysis of the Great War’s origins has emerged a tragic picture of self-destruction, one that was wilful, ignorant and inexorable: wilful, in that world leaders chose to leverage up a local crisis into a world war; ignorant, in that politicians, diplomats and generals failed to grasp the consequences; inexorable, in that once the process of militarisation began, there was no dissuading the old-world regimes. Arguments of historical interpretation still rage and analysis can disagree over subplots, such as the extent to which Germany was finessed into recklessly supporting Vienna by manipulative Austrian diplomats, or by what folly Britain drew Turkey into the war. But the consensus ultimately shared by many is that the complex deterrent system of diplomatic alliances designed to balance rivalries between the Great Powers was flawed, incapable of dispersing the storm clouds massing figuratively over early-twentieth-century Europe.

My favourite, if slightly off-piste, inexorability theory was put forward by Alan Taylor, a don at my old Oxford college, Magdalen, long before I studied there. In War by TimeTable he argues convincingly that fixed railway schedules worsened the rush to war in 1914, especially for Germany. Railways were then the only feasible way to deploy large numbers of soldiers and materiel, but what was crucial, in Taylor’s view, was that timetable rigidity made it effectively impossible to stop the escalation. For one side to avoid being overwhelmed by an enemy whose troops had already entrained, it could not hold back the full deployment of its own soldiers. Timetable rigidity contributed to mass murder in the trenches.

But the crisis still needed a spark to detonate the explosive mix of old-world superiority, diplomatic miscalculation, strategic paranoia and hubristic military overconfidence. And, like generations of young students before and since, I had been taught that the First World War began after the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was shot in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip. Academics still debate the diplomatic-political multiplier that transformed a Balkan assassination into a casus belli for the Great Powers, but none dispute that it was the shooting in Sarajevo that led the world to war a century ago. The assassination is so settled in the historical narrative that the exact details 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 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 trying to stop men wearing fezzes from lunging at the prisoner. It fits so well the narrative of the desperate assassin that countless historians, reporters, broadcasters and film-makers have claimed that the subject of the photograph is Princip. It is not. The subject of the picture is actually an innocent bystander, a man called Ferdinand Behr, who was caught up in the sweep of arrests following the shooting.

After the war ended in Bosnia in 1995, I was appointed Defence Correspondent for the Telegraph and one of my regular duties was to cover Britain’s annual remembrance service, which is held each November at the Cenotaph on Whitehall in central London. I would take my place on a wooden media platform erected adjacent to the understated, yet potent stone memorial designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and watch as the capital’s principal artery of government would steadily fill on a wintry Sunday morning with members of the public, then with cadets, bandsmen, airmen, soldiers, sailors and, finally, veterans. Britain ‘does’ set-piece commemoration so very well, and each year I remember the immaculate timing and precision of a mass event that still managed to release an individual, private rush of solemnity.