The Appel Quay, the wide riverside boulevard in the centre of Sarajevo constructed by the Austro-Hungarians shortly after they occupied Bosnia, had been chosen by the plotters as the site for the assassination. Josip Stadler, the Catholic Archbishop of Sarajevo, would later say that the boulevard on that fateful Sunday had become a ‘regular avenue of assassins’. The crowds of onlookers were expected to be thickest here, providing good cover for the six attackers, and the Archduke’s party was due to process slowly along the boulevard – which was lined by buildings on one side and open to the river on the other – pausing at various official locations, such as the main post office and a military guardhouse, before arriving for a formal reception at the large, newly built town hall at the far, eastern end of the thoroughfare. The artist Hans Fronius was a schoolboy aged eleven at the time, but as an adult he could still remember the scene as the crowd’s excitement surged, imperial flags fluttered, cries of ‘Long Live the Archduke’ rang out and puffs of smoke emerged from cannons firing salutes in the old Ottoman fortresses overlooking Sarajevo city centre.
With military precision the convoy of cars carrying the royal party left the barracks next to Sarajevo’s main railway station at 10 a.m. sharp. It drove the short distance down to the Miljacka before heading slowly along the Appel Quay, the ripple of applause and cheers through the crowd on both sides of the road warning the attackers of their target’s imminent arrival. Mehmedbašić was the first of the assassination team to be passed by the Archduke’s car, but he did nothing, later saying that a gendarme appeared close by him in the crowd. He said he felt he would be spotted if he tried to take out his grenade. No such restrictions hindered Čabrinović, who was next along the ‘avenue of assassins’, standing on the river side of the boulevard a few hundred yards further up, opposite a girls’ school. As the vehicles approached he snapped the cap off his grenade and threw it at the third car in the convoy, an open-topped Gräf & Stift limousine carrying the Archduke and his wife, sitting next to each other on its bench seat upholstered with black leather. Although the grenade was well aimed, striking the folded canopy at the back of the car a few inches behind Franz Ferdinand, the timing was out. It fell harmlessly to the ground, giving the royal car enough time to drive clear, and only exploded under the next vehicle in the convoy, badly damaging its bodywork and injuring its occupants. Witnesses reported that as the grenade flew towards him, Franz Ferdinand raised his arm in reflex. More dramatic fictionalised accounts would later claim that he bravely caught the grenade and tossed it aside.
All along the route the sound of the blast was clearly audible, with many in the crowd unsure if the explosion was simply a part of the ceremonial salute, as Čabrinović jumped down the masonry wall into the Miljacka River ten feet below the level of the pavement and ran splashing through the shallows, pursued by gendarmes. Before he was grabbed he had time to gulp down his cyanide, but it failed to kill him, instead making him foam at the mouth and retch, giving his pursuers the opportunity to arrest him. Within a matter of minutes he was being bundled off to Sarajevo central police station, just as the wounded from the damaged vehicle were being tended. The scene was later captured by Fronius in a charcoal drawing that shows his father, the state doctor, standing in a landau carriage as it clatters along the Appel Quay carting some of the injured off to hospital.
The four remaining members of the assassination squad were at their pre-arranged positions among the crowd further up the route along the Appel Quay. They knew the blast had been caused by a grenade but, before they worked out that their target had been missed, the Archduke had driven safely past and had reached the steps of the town hall, where he was received by a delegation of city officials not yet fully in the picture about what had happened. The Mayor’s speech of welcome was cut short by the Archduke, who interrupted him sharply. ‘Mr Mayor, what is the good of your speeches?’ he boomed. ‘I come to Sarajevo on a friendly visit and someone throws a bomb at me. This is outrageous.’ Sophie was seen to lean towards her husband and whisper a few placatory words, at which he calmed down and allowed the formal proceedings to continue. The Mayor falteringly completed his words of welcome, allowing the Archduke to give his formal reply. Franz Ferdinand spoke from notes that had to be collected from his chamberlain, who had been travelling in the car damaged by the grenade. Dedijer recorded that the Archduke frowned as he was handed the speech written on a piece of paper now marked with fresh blood. He pressed on, concluding his remarks with two lines in Serbo-Croatian that he had rehearsed specially for the visit: ‘Please convey to the citizens of the beautiful capital city of Sarajevo my cordial greetings and assurances of my enduring grace and benevolence.’
The official party then disappeared up the stairs into the town hall, displaying what with hindsight appears to be remarkably careless sangfroid. In our modern age any leader whose life had just been jeopardised would be rushed away to safety, kept out of view until any remaining threat had passed. But assassination attempts were a routine enough fact of life for Europe’s monarchs and leaders at the start of the twentieth century, not least in Sarajevo, where Emperor Franz Joseph’s state visit of 1910 had been marked by a failed bid at assassination. ‘Today we shall get a few more little bullets,’ the Archduke said half-jokingly to his entourage, as various options were discussed about how to proceed, with nobody wanting to react in a way that could be perceived as panic. Sophie was led away to a formal cultural presentation by Bosnian Muslim women, and the Archduke kept to the official programme, shaking the hands of the various colonial and local delegates who had been assembled.
But as the party prepared to leave, one important change was made to the schedule. The royal couple had been due to drive a short distance back along the Appel Quay and then turn right into Franz Joseph Street to make a tour of the old city, before visiting a new museum. Among the Archduke’s official party the decision was taken to skip the city tour. Instead the convoy of limousines would continue all the way back along the Appel Quay and head to the main state hospital, so that the wounded from the morning’s grenade blast could be visited by the Archduke. All of those from the Archduke’s inner circle were agreed, although – as would become clear at the subsequent police investigation – nobody told the drivers.
The failure of the grenade blast to kill the Archduke appears to have broken the spirit of three of the remaining four armed conspirators still milling around the crowd that stretched along the Appel Quay. Grabež, Popović and Čubrilović had all sworn they would do everything possible to kill the Archduke, but they took no further part. Princip was the only one not to be totally disheartened, instead making his way to the corner where Franz Joseph Street begins at the Appel Quay, opposite the Latin Bridge. The advertised schedule said the Archduke was due to turn from the Appel Quay onto Franz Joseph Street, so perhaps here he would still have a chance to strike.
A prominent Austro-Hungarian colonial building then stood at the corner, the ground floor occupied by the Moritz Schiller café and delicatessen, adorned with signs and window stencils advertising wine, rum, tea, cigars and local culinary specialities on sale within. The German wording of its signs had made it a regular target for student activists from Mlada Bosna, who would deface signage they regarded as a symbol of occupation. On the day of the Archduke’s visit a huge cutout, twelve feet high, of a champagne-style bottle from the Hungarian winemaker Törley was attached to the façade of the café right on the corner. The shop was open for business that day, leading to fanciful accounts of Princip going inside to eat a last sandwich and take a last cup of coffee. They were a complete fiction, as the young man simply joined the crowd lining the pavement and waited.
He did not have to wait long, for at 10.45 a.m., roughly half an hour after arriving at the town hall, the official party was already making ready to leave. The Archduke took his place once more in the rear seat of the Gräf & Stift limousine on the left-hand side, his wife next to him on the right with General Oskar Potiorek, the colonia
l governor of Bosnia, in a jump-seat in front of him. The owner of the car, Count Franz Harrach, who had been one of the passengers sitting inside the car on the way to the town hall, gallantly took up a new position, this time standing on the running board next to the Archduke on the left-hand side – the one that would now be facing the river as they drove back along the Appel Quay. The grenade had been thrown from this side, so the count thought he might be able to use his body to shield the Archduke from any repeat attack.
Moments later the most astonishing photograph was taken of the royal party in the limousine. It captures the glare of a clear summer’s day in Sarajevo, a skyline of Ottoman domes and a minaret, the sun glinting off the peak of the driver’s cap, the black-eagle standard of the Archduke hanging limply next to the windscreen as the car drives slowly on its way. The crowd is thin on the riverside pavement, where a man raises his hat in salute and a child in a traditional Bosnian fez looks on in wonder. The crowd on the other side of the road is much thicker, cheering shoulder-to-shoulder, while above their heads it is possible to make out the shiny foil cap of the huge promotional bottle outside the Moritz Schiller café. Some of the onlookers are sheltering from the sun in the shade of a small tree, a woman in a white dress and summer hat standing closest to the kerb. She would have been within a few feet of Princip. The photograph was taken at the exact moment when the car began to turn right, the front wheels no longer straight, but creeping round so that the car could navigate the corner.
The driver’s decision to turn into Franz Joseph Street and not continue down the Appel Quay, as had been decided back at the town hall, was a stroke of assassin’s luck for Princip. When General Potiorek spotted what was happening he shouted at the driver, ordering him immediately to stop and reverse back out onto the Appel Quay. Instead of his target speeding past, Princip saw the Archduke slow right in front of him only a few feet away – the gallant count, so willing to protect the life of his liege, on the running board on the other side of the car. For the instant it took the driver to find reverse, the Archduke was a sitting duck. Princip took the Browning pistol in his hand, stepped forward from among the crowd on the pavement next to the entrance of the café and fired past Sophie, who was sitting on the side closest to him. His luck held, as the first shot he aimed at the Archduke hit home. He fired for a second time, hoping this time to hit the colonial governor, but in the melee his arm was knocked and the bullet passed through the side of the car and struck Sophie. Before he could fire for a third time, hands from the crowd knocked the weapon from his grasp and he was pushed to the ground, blows raining down on him, his hands scrabbling for the cyanide, which he stuffed into his mouth – the crowd jostling between those wanting to beat the attacker and others trying to defend him.
On board the car it was Count Harrach who first appreciated the seriousness of the situation. There were no marks immediately visible on the Archduke, as the first bullet had hit him on the high collar of his tunic where the uniform’s gilt trim was thickest, leaving a barely perceptible puncture. But the bullet had then ploughed into the Archduke’s neck, cutting his jugular vein. The fact that he was rapidly bleeding to death was concealed under his uniform. When blood began to trickle from the Archduke’s mouth, the count took out his handkerchief to dab it away. Sophie had been hit in the abdomen, remaining conscious long enough for Count Harrach to hear her last words. ‘For God’s sake! What has happened to you?’ she said to her husband, before slumping into the footwell, her head ending up resting on her husband’s lap. The Archduke was then heard to say, ‘Soferl, Soferl, don’t die. Live for my children’ as the count took him by the collar to keep him upright. ‘It is nothing,’ the Archduke assured the count before his eyes closed. He died seconds later.
Princip later spoke of the ‘mystical’ journey he had been on, a journey that ended in police custody around 11 a.m. on 28 June 1914. He would never again enjoy freedom, dying in an Austro-Hungarian jail emaciated by hunger, his bones eaten away by tuberculosis. Just as for Čabrinović, the cyanide had failed to make him a martyr, only scorching the lining of his mouth and making him nauseous. He was so badly beaten by gendarmes wielding sabres, and by onlookers loyal to the Habsburg Empire, that a witness reported seeing him late that evening with only his eyes and lips visible on a face otherwise swathed in bandages. The witness was Ferdinand Behr, the bystander who was photographed after being arrested outside the Moritz Schiller café. This is the famous picture that so many historians, journalists and archivists (Wikipedia among them) wrongly believed to show the actual assassin being led away. Behr reported that in this early stage of the police investigation Princip defiantly refused to cooperate with the police, hoping perhaps that his fellow conspirators might yet escape.
It was a vain hope. As an assassin Princip may have been lucky, but he was also amateur, leaving enough clues for the police to pick up all but one of his colleagues within a matter of days. When he had returned to Sarajevo from Belgrade he had registered his address on Oprkanj Street with the colonial authorities, a fact that he gave up to police under questioning less than an hour after the assassination. Officers rushed round to the house, where they arrested Ilić and found under his bed the bag used to store the weapons. With Čabrinović already in custody, the other attackers were soon all picked up, with the exception of Mehmedbašić, the only Bosnian Muslim member of the attack team. He managed to catch a train south towards Mostar before crossing the border safely into Montenegro, his role scarcely ever mentioned by Austrian police investigators. For political reasons they were anxious to emphasise the exclusively Serbian nature of the assassination plot, and it did not suit them to spend too much time chasing a non-Serbian lead. Their example would be followed by most historians analysing the assassination, with the exception of the thorough Italian author Luigi Albertini, who twenty years later tracked down Mehmedbašić shortly before he died.
After four days of solitary confinement Princip asked to see his fellow prisoners, who were being held at the military prison within the large colonial barracks built in New Sarajevo, the area developed by the Austro-Hungarians to the west of the old city. In the hours and days after the assassination the colonial authorities had deliberately stirred up a fury of anti-Serb feeling, with mobs of Austro-Hungarian loyalists being encouraged to ransack Serb businesses and property in Sarajevo and beyond. Hundreds of Bosnian Serbs who had nothing to do with the assassination plot were nevertheless arrested and maltreated. Later many of them would be summarily executed by the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Anxious to spare anyone not involved in the assassination, Princip told Grabež and Ilić, when allowed to see them briefly: ‘Confess everything, how we got the bombs, how we travelled and in what society we were, so that just people do not come to harm.’
After this meeting the investigation advanced quickly, as Princip gave details of the route he had used from the Drina River frontier to Sarajevo via Tuzla, and confirmed the names of the five other armed attackers who had been deployed along the Appel Quay, as well as that of Ilić in his supervisory role. His fellow prisoners were not as steadfast in their confessions; indeed, Ilić claimed he had a change of heart and tried to stop the assassination, an account too inconsistent to convince the authorities. The one regret Princip voiced repeatedly to the Austro-Hungarian prosecutors concerned the death of Sophie. He said he had never intended to kill her, apologising on several occasions. He told the court that the bullet that hit her had been intended for the colonial governor.
Responding to this flood of information, the police were soon able to round up the various Bosnian peasants who had helped the three men smuggle themselves and their weapons from Serbia through Tuzla, along with various associates in Sarajevo, mostly fellow supporters of Mlada Bosna who had agreed to conceal the weapons. Within a few weeks, a charge sheet had been drawn up indicting Princip and twenty-four other individuals. While the group was dominated by Bosnian Serbs, four of the indictees were Bosnian Croats – including the only woman
to be charged, Angela Sadilo, a Sarajevan housewife accused of helping to hide one of the pistols. Once more the Austro-Hungarian authorities sought to conceal the role played by non-Serbs, even changing the name of one of the Bosnian Croats so that in newspaper reports he appeared to be a Bosnian Serb.
The case against all twenty-five indictees – all of whom were Austro-Hungarian citizens, none from Serbia – was to be heard at a shared trial due to be held in October 1914 inside the military barracks in New Sarajevo. Although prosecutors were anxious to see those most involved in the assassination put to death, they faced a legal problem because the attackers who lined the Appel Quay were so young. The imperial criminal code allowed for a death sentence to be passed only on criminals aged at least twenty, making the five armed attackers under arrest not yet of an age to be executed. Prosecutors went to some length to convince the judges that the birth certificate of Princip in particular was wrong and he was old enough to be hanged. In the National Archive in Sarajevo I found, among the official papers connected with the investigation, a scribbled handwritten note making the twelve-day conversion for his date of birth between the old Julian calendar, which was commonly used among the Bosnian Serb Orthodox community, and the modern Gregorian calendar. It made no difference, for even after the conversion Princip’s age on the day of the assassination remained nineteen.