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Summer Session Kansan
Friday, June 19, 1964
50 Years Ago, Two Shots Started a War and Changed the World
SARAJEVO, Yugoslavia — (UPI)
— It was in this city on a street corner beside Schiller's grocery, that a young fanatic named Gavrilo Princip fired the shots that started World War I.
Those two shots, fired 50 years ago (on June 28, 1914), killed archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Princess Sophie.
Today, this exotic Moslem city on the banks of the Miljacka River boasts one of the world's strangest memorials to Princip and the other six young men who helped him plot the assassination.
THE CRIME WAS plotted in Serbia. In a little more than a month, Austria and Serbia were at war. Their allies, well-armed and primed for war, chose up sides and World War I was on. By the time it was over, Europe was in ruins, the Communists had seized Russia and the seeds of World War II and the century's other ills were sown.
To Sarajevo, and to Yugoslavia,
Princip is a hero. While denying that
the assassination led directly to
World War I, the government
recognizes it as the fateful step toward
Yugoslav unity and independence.
THE SITE OF the assassination is now known as "Principa" and, across the street, the old stone Latin Bridge has been re-named Princip Bridge.
Schiller's grocery, once the shopping place of Sarajevo's wealthy, now is a museum dedicated to a crime. Each day crowds of school children troop through to gaze at the pictures of Princip and his comrades, to study dramatic drawings of the killing and to gasp at the assassin's tattered clothes.
OUTSIDE, TWO WIDELY-spaced footprints, embedded in the concrete sidewalk, show exactly where Princip stood when he fired. On the wall above, engraved in gold, are the words: "On this historic spot, Gavarillo Princip initiated freedom on St. Vitus' Day, June 28, 1914."
In 1914, Sarajevo was the capital of Bosnia, a province of Austro-Hungary. Belgrade was the capital of Serbia, an independent nation and the headquarters of nationalists who dreamed of a unified Yugoslavia.
WHEN THE NEWS reached Belgrade that Francis Ferdinand would go to Sarajevo June 28 to watch army maneuvers nearby, the idea of
the assassination was born in the mind of a Serbian army colonel named Dragutin Dimitrijevic, the secret chief of a terrorist organization dedicated to ousting Austria from Bosnia.
Dimitrijevic recruited three young Bosnian students in Belgrade, all 19 years old, nationalistic, thin and tubercular. One of them, Gavril Princip, the son of peasants, was a pale, serious young man with a thin black mustache and large, intense eyes.
AT 9 A.M., on June 28, the assasins took up pre-planned stations. Principi standing near the bridge that now bears his name, as Francis Ferdinand and Sophie boarded an open touring car for the ride along Appel Quay, beside the river, to the Sarajevo city hall.
As the car passed on the quay, one of the plotters, Nedjelko Cabrinovic, pulled a bomb from his pocket and lobbed it at the auto. His aim was accurate but Ferdinand's driver saw the bomb in the air and quickly sped up. The archduke put up his arms to shield his wife. The bomb struck his wrist and bounced into the street behind the car, where it exploded, injuring 12 persons.
"YOU HAVE WELCOMEd me with bombs," Francis Ferdinand snapped at the city hall after a flowery welcoming speech from the mayor.
Then came Princip's chance. On the motorcade's way back down the quay, Princip pulled out his gum, stepped forward and fired twice, quickly, hitting the archduke in the neck and his wife in the abdomen.
Within seconds, a crowd was upon him. Princip took some prepared poison but it was old and failed to do more than make the young assassin sick to his stomach. Bleeding and vomiting, he was led away by police.
AS THE SHOTS rang out, according to accounts, the archduke's driver quickly reversed and drove across the bridge. For a minute, onlookers believed Princip had missed. Then a spume of blood shot from Franz Ferdinand's mouth and Sophie cried, "For Heaven's sake! What happened to you?" They were her last words. She collapsed on the floor.
"Sophie dear! Sophie dear!" the archduke cried. "Don't die! Stay alive for our children!" Then he, too, sagged, and his plumed hat fell off.
"Is your imperial highness suffer
ing very badly?" an aide asked.
"IT IS NOTHING," the archduke replied. He is said to have repeated the words six or seven times. Then a rattle rose from his throat, and he lapsed into unconsciousness. Within 20 minutes both were dead.
There were anti-Serb riots in Sarajevo that night. After their arrests, Princip and Cabrinovic tried to take all the blame and shield their comrades. But one of their accomplices, arrested for routine questioning, panicked and spilled most of the story. With his confession, Serbian complicity became known. War was a month away. Princip and Cabrinovic died of tuberculosis in their cells. Dimitrijevic, the master-mind of the assassination, was hanged.
SARAJEVO HAS GROWN from a population of 80,000 persons in 1914 to nearly 200,000 today. But in other respects little has changed.
Beneath Princip bridge, the Miljacka trickles along as it did 50 years ago. And on the corner beside the museum, two boys stand in the dusk, bravely fitting their shoes into the two footprints carved there and pretending that they, too, could shoot a prince and help found a nation.
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