Just Finished Reading: The Trigger – The Hunt for Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher (FP: 2014) [297pp] 

When the young Serbian assassin, Gavrilo Princip, stepped out of the crowd in Sarajevo in 1914, fired twice and killed the heir to the Austrian crown and his wife, what exactly was he trying to achieve? What did he expect to happen next? One thing he didn’t think would happen was that he’d live to see the end of that day – a cyanide capsule attested to that fact. What he had hoped was that he would live up to his heroes and strike back against the oppressors of his country and his people – the Serbs. He may well have expected Austria to go to war with Serbia over the attack, but Princip expected that this war would be short and that it would bring together the Balkan states to throw off Imperial domination. Did he think it might result in a larger war? Possibly. In the recent past, Russia had voiced both official and private support for its southern neighbour. But Russia was also an Empire and also a Monarchy. Could they really support the act of someone who struck at the heart of both? It was not an academic question. The lives of millions might rest on how that question was answered. 

But who exactly was Princip, where did he come from, and why did he think Franz Ferdinands death was worth his young life? These questions are what the author sought to find out – but not in a way I expected. The book's subtitle pointed me in the wrong direction. I had assumed, wrongly it turned out, that this book was about the Austrian, or indeed local police, hunt for the assassin. However, Princip was apprehended at the scene of the shooting and arrested immediately. The ‘hunt’ in question was for the history, the personality and the radicalisation of the assassin himself. But the book turned out to be much more than that. The author was a journalist during the Balkan/Yugoslav Wars in the 1990’s so knew the region and the people’s reasonably well. He had made life-long friends there and seen things that haunted him to the present. Part of the book was the author relating his experiences as he, and friend, visited Princip’s home village, talked to surviving family and then travelled in his footsteps (often literally) from his home to Sarajevo and that fateful meeting.  

Part history of the events and the conspiracy leading up to the assassination, part discussion of the 90’s conflict, part high-level history of the region, and part travelogue this was an intriguing mix and story threads that worked really well. It showed where Princip came from – both geographically and culturally – how he arrived at his destination – both physically and politically and how it impacted on the region both at the time and how echoes of that event still reverberate today. It was, in many ways, a very interesting (and sometimes haunting) narrative. Definitely recommended for a new look at one of the defining moments of modern times.