Princip normally drops out of the narrative at that point. Diplomatic notes fly back and forth, battleship squadrons manoeuvre and railways move millions of men and their munitions to the borders.
Too young to be sentenced to death, Princip sat out the rest of the war in an Austro-Hungarian prison before dying of tuberculosis. If histories mention him again, it is only to briefly report his interrogation by the Austrians.
So who was Princip? That's what war correspondent Tim Butcher asked himself when he found the war-damaged tomb and memorial to the young terrorist/freedom fighter being used as a makeshift toilet in the 1990s.
Butcher covered the Balkans crises of the 1990s, often in the firing line himself, so he naturally became receptive to the ghostly echoes from two world wars and the Cold War that still haunt these lands.
The Trigger is both history and travelogue. In order to get under the skin of this shadowy young Bosnian Serb, Butcher and a companion walked the route Princip took across the Balkans in the early 1910s from tiny, impoverished Obljaj in western Bosnia to the capital city of Serbia.
It is a good device. Along the way we learn as much about the stark, beautiful, sometimes unforgiving landscape as we do about politics in a region that Austria-Hungary had only recently seized from the Ottoman Empire.
Thus we see the world through Princip's eyes. Butcher does pull up a few documents (school reports) supposedly not seen by previous scholars, but we learn most from place and from people. There are three layers: the 1910s, the 1990s and the present. A surprisingly large amount of the land they walked through remains off limits because of the danger from landmines.
Much of this short yet detailed little book concerns itself with the strategies of remembering and forgetting that Bosnians use to accommodate their many pasts: Ottoman, Austrian and German WW2 occupation, Tito's Yugoslavia, the 1990s wars and ethnic cleansing and now a westernising world of soccer shirts and trainers.
I think Butcher is a little unsympathetic to the Austro-Hungarian annexation but there is much to think about in this book.
Google reveals that Princip's tomb has been cleaned up since Butcher first entered it in the 1990s. But for how long once the centennial souvenirs have been hocked off? One of Butcher's most ominous discoveries was that many people had forgotten Princip because his pan-Slavism was unfashionable in the ethnic- and religious-obsessed politics of the recent past.
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.
