PROCITAJTE OVO DOBRO:
Young Bosnia was the outer layer of Narodna Odbrana ("National Defence"), a semi-official guerrilla group run by the Serbian government. When the Balkans War of 1912 broke out, the 16-year-old Princip volunteered to serve with Narodna Odbrana, with a view to undertaking clandestine missions against Turkey, Serbia's enemy.
However the emaciated Princip failed his terrorist training; dismissed as "too weak and small". For two years Princip, thin and frustrated, hung around the libraries and cafes of Belgrade. Then, in March 1914, fate indulged him. The Slav newspaper Srbobran printed details of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's summer trip to Sarajevo in Bosnia. An acquaintance sent the newspaper clipping to Princip thinking it might interest him.
It did. Princip decided that he, Gavrilo Princip, would travel to Sarajevo and assassinate the Archduke. He knew where to get guns. He was in touch with National Defence's terrorist hardcore, the innermost doll-within-the-doll: Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, "Union or Death". Posterity knows the organisation by another name: Black Hand.
The leader of Black Hand was Lieutenant-Colonel Dimitrijevitch, nicknamed Apis, Latin for bee, and Dimitrijevitch was indeed busy, busy. As well as running Black Hand, he was the head of Serbian army intelligence. Apis knew about regicide. He had murdered his king and queen when they displayed insufficient fervour for the expansion of Serbia. Black Hand initiates were taken into a gloomy, candlelit room and made to swear an oath: "By the blood of my ancestors...I will be ready to make any sacrifice for Serbia."
Apis took charge of the assassination plot and teamed Princip up with two other teenage radicals, Nedjelko Chabrinovitch and Tyrifko Grabezh.
They were provided with Browning pistols and grenades from the Serbian military armoury at Krajujevac, plus 150 dinars in cash.
Each received a final "gift" of a phial of potassium cyanide; they were to commit suicide after the killing. Taken to woods outside Belgrade, Princip was again given shooting practice. His marksmanship did not improve.
The plot to murder Archduke Franz Ferdinand was one of the worst kept secrets in history. It was the talk of Belgrade; even the Serbian prime minister knew of it and, fearing the assassination would unleash an unwinnable war with Austria, he warned Vienna of the plan to murder the Hapsburg scion. The Russian ambassador in Belgrade knew all about it and according to Professor John Rohl, the eminent biographer of Kaiser Wilhelm II, there are even "hints" of evidence that the Germans were aware of the coming crime in the Balkans.
Smuggled over the border into Bosnia by the Black Hand, Princip and his conspirator comrades bungled their first attempts on the Archduke's life on June 28. Then Princip's wish came true. The nonentity got his chance to be someone; to be a liberationist. The Archduke's open-top Graf & Stift car took a wrong turn and stopped in front of Schiller's delicatessen in Sarajevo, where Princip and his Browning pistol happened to be waiting.
After shooting Franz Ferdinand from less than 6ft, the moustachioed Princip aimed at General Oskar Potiorek, the military governor of Bosnia, in the front of the car. He missed. The bullet went into the abdomen of the Archduke's wife, the Duchess Sophie, sitting beside her husband. Princip was always a rotten shot.
To complete the whole monumental disaster the rebel's potassium cyanide failed to kill him; it just made him vomit.
Princip showed no remorse at his trial, only chilling candour. "By terror," he replied, when asked how his political dreams could be realised. Still 19 at the time of the killings Princip was below (by 15 days) the age limit for the death penalty under Hapsburg law. He received the maximum sentence for homicidal minors; 20 years in prison.
Held in the fortress of Theresienstadt in Bohemia, Princip perished long before the end of his sentence. He died on April 28, 1918, weighing a little over 6st, riven with grotesque tuberculosis of the bone.