Authors: Tim Butcher
It does not follow that the Serbian government knew about the assassination, still less approved of it. The hardline stance of the Black Hand group was not shared by a government that had shown from as far back as the annexation crisis of 1908 a reluctance to antagonise Austria–Hungary. Indeed, these disagreements would ultimately lead in 1917 to Apis being tried for treason by his own government, a crime that carried a death sentence. During the hearing he made extravagant and unproven claims about the central role of the Black Hand in the 1914 assassination, claiming his group had been responsible for the entire operation. While some historians have accepted Apis’s claim, I accept Dedijer’s analysis that it was greatly exaggerated by a man seeking to save himself from execution. It did not work. He died at the hands of a firing squad on 26 June 1917.
Decades later, further claims were made that Princip himself was a member of the Black Hand, although there is no evidence to substantiate this. The claims were recorded in the 1930s by the Italian historian Luigi Albertini, who dedicated the last years of his life to explaining the origins of the First World War, and have been used by those historians who conclude that the assassination was entirely the work of the Black Hand.
In my view, the group played a secondary, opportunist role in the assassination of 1914, after being approached through Ciganović by the three young Bosnians who had concocted the plan. Princip’s commitment to freeing all south Slavs meant that he did not have the same ultimate objectives as the Black Hand, which was more exclusively committed to Serbian interests. At his trial he gave a very pragmatic answer when asked if everyone involved in the assassination shared the same aims as himself. ‘Not exactly like myself,’ he said. ‘It was not necessary for all to be of the same opinions in the carrying out of his own ideas, nor was it necessary that every one employ the same means.’
It emerged after the First World War that word of a possible assassination attempt against the Archduke had leaked out in June and reached the Serbian government. It reacted immediately, sending orders for border guards to be on the lookout for young Bosnians trying to smuggle themselves into Bosnia. But by the time the order was given, it was too late. Princip, Grabež and Čabrinović were already on their way to Sarajevo, and with them they had all the gear they needed for their grand gesture: five Browning pistols, six grenades and a plan to take cyanide after the deed was done, so that they would not be taken alive.
They left Belgrade at the end of May 1914 on a river boat that took them all the way to Šabac, back then a busy port on the Sava River. They overnighted at one of the town’s cheap hotels, paid for from a cash float of 150 crowns provided by Ciganović, stuffing their assassins’ kit in a stove for safekeeping. The next day they were helped by Ciganović’s contacts to take a train further west to the spa town of Koviljača, which lies on the Serbian side of the Drina River frontier. Crossing the border was the most risky part of the journey and tensions were rising among the group. While in Koviljača they made a point of sending postcards to friends and relatives as a device to conceal their true intentions, with Princip writing a message to a cousin back in Belgrade that suggested he was on the way to a monastery to study. The quiet young man who had inscribed one of his books with the quote about the importance of keeping secrets grew increasingly tetchy with Čabrinović, whom he accused of risking the mission by talking loosely and bragging about becoming a hero in the postcards he sent.
Tensions got so bad among the three young men that Princip insisted the party split up. He would continue with Grabež, but Čabrinović was told to go on alone. They did not trust him with any of the grenades, giving him just one Browning pistol and telling him to make his own way over to Tuzla on the other side of the frontier, where they agreed a rendezvous. Shortly after they split up Čabrinović got into a panic and abandoned his gun, crossing into Bosnia without incident at the main border post in Zvornik and heading to Tuzla.
Meanwhile, Princip and Grabež double backed on their trail, heading a few miles north towards a reach of the Drina River well known to smugglers. It was a stretch where the river meanders shallow and slow through a series of eyots named after the largest island, Isakovica. On one of the islands was an illegal drinking den, a shebeen where Serbian-made plum brandy was sold cheaply to Bosnian peasants, who could reach the spot across a shallow ford. At the bar they met the first in a series of couriers, who led the pair splashing across the ford into Bosnia and on foot all the way to Tuzla, with the grenades strapped to their bodies, the four remaining pistols heavy in their pockets as they struggled through muddy fields and over forested hills.
Just as for the survivors from Srebrenica who would cross this same terrain on foot eight decades later, the going was hard for Princip and Grabež. At one point they asked for their load to be carried on a peasant’s cart, all the time warning their helpers that they must do everything possible to avoid the Austro-Hungarian border guards and gendarmes. The trial following the assassination heard that although Princip was the smaller of the two men, he was the most threatening, ordering all the couriers they had contact with to keep silent and warning them that they would be hunted down and killed if their mission was revealed. ‘If you betray it, you and your family will be destroyed,’ one of his guides remembered being told by Princip.
So filthy were they from their hike that, as they finally approached Tuzla, the pair stopped to wash the mud off their clothes in a stream, worried that it would raise suspicion once they entered the town. In 1995 I watched women driven out of Srebrenica also wash their filthy clothes in rivers near Tuzla. By the time Princip reached the city his trousers were so tatty that he bought himself a new pair, and he was soon recognised by locals who knew him from his time studying briefly in the town in 1910. They remarked that the timid, bookish boy had grown into a rather fearsome-looking young man with long hair and a very determined manner. After meeting up again with Čabrinović, the group decided it was too dangerous to carry the weapons any further, leaving them with a local man they trusted. He was told that the person who would come to collect the cache would identify himself in code by ostentatiously showing him a packet of Stefanija cigarettes. The three then set off for Sarajevo by train, sitting in the same carriage, but apart from each other so as not to arouse suspicion. Čabrinović, whose garrulousness had so worried his co-conspirators, started a conversation with a policeman who happened to be travelling on the same train and knew his father back in Sarajevo. The subject of the imminent imperial tour of Bosnia came up, and when Čabrinović asked when the Archduke was due to visit Sarajevo, the policeman told him the exact date: Sunday 28 June.
River boats no longer steam all the way to Šabac, so when I left Belgrade I did so on foot, taking a tram to the city’s main railway station just down the slope from the old Green Wreath Square and picking my way through a hole in the fence and across the train tracks until I reached the bank of the Sava River. From there I took my leave of the city along what began as a well-marked footpath, my hazel walking stick from Obljaj at my side and my rucksack snug on my back. For company I had the thought of Princip’s troika heading nervously upriver almost a hundred years before me.
The river was bridged by a number of impressive structures, and one by one I passed under them all: a box-girder railway bridge that was already in use back in 1914, followed by more modern concrete structures busy with road traffic. Down below on the river bank the scene was summery and serene, with old men shoaling in groups next to fishing rods for a long, hot, gossipy day of angling, while a bit further along a stretch of river bank had been landscaped into a lido where waiters were busy brushing the dew off tables and arranging plastic chairs. Out on the water a few energetic rowers sculled past me, while down on the beach early-bird sun worshippers doused themselves with tanning oil and took up starfish positions on towels spread out on the pale river-bank gravel. I bought an ice-cream and joked idly with a man running a rent-a-bike office about taking a bicycle all the way to Šabac.
As I walked, the loom of the city eased steadily, the buildings growing ever sparser until I found myself in open country, the noise of traffic diminishing so much that my journey’s soundtrack was nothing but the tip-tap of my walking stick and the breeze through the reeds on a river bank growing ever more wild and unkempt. After five or six miles I passed a shantytown of Roma Gypsies, tucked away – as so often in eastern Europe – on land of little use to anyone else. The footpath vanished and I found myself walking along roads used by weekenders to access modest wooden houses built on floats in the river, anchored next to the river bank. Most were unoccupied, but from time to time I would see a car parked beside one, children splashing around in the shallows while the parents pootled about cleaning barbecues, fiddling with windowboxes and enjoying their riverine retreat.
After an hour or so a truck stopped and the driver offered me a lift. ‘My name is Alexandre Dumas,’ he said proudly after I jumped up next to him. ‘My dad’s family came from France and they gave me the name of the great writer. Would you like some watermelon?’ It was late July and the fruit was in season, the back of the truck heavily laden with a cargo collected from a farm out on the flat plain that runs north from Belgrade. He handed me an old but very sharp knife, and would take no payment as I cut myself a generous segment from one of the fruit, the flesh perfectly firm and sweet, not yet granular from over-ripeness. He dropped me after only a few miles, but I was happy to be walking once more, biting into the fruit and leaning forward extravagantly so that the juice would not drench my clothes.
The hitch-hiking was bitty that day, with no lift longer than a few miles, but by late afternoon I made it into Šabac. My last lift came from a second-hand car dealer called Stefan Petrović, who had a very cheery attitude and drank lager from a can as he drove, singing along to the car stereo. When I mentioned Princip there was no recognition, even when I explained how his actions had led to the First World War, but he still had much to say about soldiering. ‘I am only twenty-six, so I was too young for the war in the 1990s,’ he said with uncamouflaged regret. ‘I would have fought. There’s good money in being a soldier. I only earn 180 euros a month, but in the French Foreign Legion you can earn five or six times that. I went all the way to France last year with some friends to try to join, but they failed me on the psychiatric tests.’
He dropped me in the centre of Šabac, spinning the wheels of his car as he shot off waving his beer can, and I checked into a hotel on the town’s main drag. It happened to be called the Green Wreath, the same as the hotel after which the square in Belgrade where Princip plotted the assassination was named. With a wide stone staircase spiralling up three floors, it must once have been a rather smart establishment, built in the proud, early days of Serbian statehood when Šabac was a significant transport hub. In 2012 it was a dump, the receptionist sleeping on a sagging sofa behind the counter and insisting on cash up front. Outside on the pedestrian thoroughfare I found various signs commemorating the town’s luminaries, such as a local nineteenth-century nobleman honoured as Lord Jevrem. The street named after him had a blue plaque recording that he was a modernist who ‘brought to Šabac many things which were seen for the first time in Serbia: a piano, a bed, a window glass, a carriage, a pharmacy’. There were no plaques for Princip and his fellow conspirators.
Before sunset I walked down to the Sava River. It runs wide and deep at Šabac, but there were none of the barges and steamboats that used to carry people and cargo here at the start of the twentieth century. Roads had taken all the traffic, so where the boats used to tie up there was now a lido overlooked by a lifeguard’s watchtower, the gravel rucked after a busy summer day of sun, and a boom demarcating where it was safe for swimming. A father on a mountain bike led home a daughter on a bicycle with stabilisers as I walked back in the twilight, the tops of the chimneys tufty with that most central European of sights, thatched stork nests. When I got back to my hotel room I braced a chair up against the door handle, as the lock did not work properly, and turned on the television, on which a rerun of Mućke, the wheeler-dealer English sitcom Only Fools and Horses, was being broadcast.
Rain the following morning made hitch-hiking difficult. Drivers don’t like to stop for travellers with soaking-wet bags, so I had to walk about five miles before my first lift. It dropped me close to the Drina River, where I went to explore the crossing point used by Princip and Trifko Grabež. In the National Archive in Sarajevo I had come across the original map put together by Austro-Hungarian police investigators following the assassination. Dated 27 July 1914 and hand-drawn on a piece of waxed paper, it charted in royal-blue ink the meandering course of the Drina River, each branch of the stream meticulously marked where it split to create a maze of islands around Isakovica. The path of the assassins was shown by a red dotted line that led from Serbia into Bosnia, heading over the hills in the direction of Tuzla.
I found the river still runs shallow around Isakovica, although the old ford has been replaced by a ferry manned by border guards – a small and rarely used frontier crossing point between modern-day Serbia and Bosnia. The Serbian side was deserted, but over on the Bosnian side I found a bar where I bought a coffee. The only other customer, a drunk nursing a beer, sat down at my table uninvited and began to blather. ‘Buy me a drink and I will tell you everything about my old friend Princip,’ he said. ‘I knew him really well, we were at school together.’
Storm clouds threatened but never broke as I hitch-hiked through the valleys of eastern Bosnia back towards Sarajevo, spending long hours walking, and waiting next to the road. I thought about the way anger from within this small mountainous part of Europe had impacted repeatedly on world history: the murderous fury felt by Princip towards the occupiers, and the resentment about past injustices that enabled nationalist extremism to flourish in the 1990s, along with the flowering of early jihadism.