The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War Read online

  The Trigger

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

  Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit

  The Trigger

  Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War

  Tim Butcher

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2014 by Tim Butcher

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Chatto & Windus an imprint of Random House

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2325-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9188-5

  Jacket front photography: Gavrilo Princip © Topfoto;

  Background map: © the National Archive of Bosnia and Hercegovina;

  Bottom photograph: The Illustrated London News Picture Library, London,

  UK /The Bridgeman Art Library

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

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  For my greatest shapers

  Stanley and Lisette

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Note on Pronunciation

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1 Fresh Flotsam

  CHAPTER 2 A Troublesome Teenager

  CHAPTER 3 The Wild West

  CHAPTER 4 Over Tent Mountain

  CHAPTER 5 Fishing in a Minefield

  CHAPTER 6 Rocking Bosnia

  CHAPTER 7 The Fall of Gabriel

  CHAPTER 8 Fin-de-siècle Chat Rooms

  CHAPTER 9 A Mystical Journey

  CHAPTER 10 Arming the Trigger

  CHAPTER 11 An Assassin’s Luck

  CHAPTER 12 More Than One Shadow

  List of Illustrations

  Notes and Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

  The anglicised version of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian spelling has been used in The Trigger. Pronunciation largely follows that of English letters although with the following exceptions:

  c – is ts as in tsar. Hence the name Princip is pronounced Printsip

  j – is y as in yam. Hence the town Jajce is pronounced Yaitsay

  č – is ch as in scratch. Hence the town Glamoč is pronounced Glamotch

  ć – is a softer ch. Hence the name Filipović is pronounced Filipovich

  r – can be used as a rolled r vowel sound as in purr. Hence the Vrbas River is pronounced Vurrbas

  š – is sh as in shin. Hence the word for tent, šator, is pronounced shator

  dž – is a hard j as in gin. Hence the name Džile is pronounced Jillay

  dj – is a soft j as in jack. Hence the name Hadji is pronounced Hajee

  ž – is a yet softer j as in pleasure. Hence the name Draža is pronounced Drarjer

  The Trigger

  Gavrilo Princip’s war-damaged tomb

  PROLOGUE

  This story springs from many sources, but the most powerful one for me was a discovery I made at a street market in Sarajevo, back when the city was under siege in 1994. I was a young reporter sent by the Daily Telegraph to cover the Bosnian War, which had begun two years earlier in this land of mountain and myth. Shelling had often made it too dangerous for civilians to venture outside in their capital city, but during a lull in the firing I joined locals as they reclaimed the streets. One afternoon I walked into an open area busy with people reduced by the war to selling possessions laid out in piles across unswept pavements. Pickings were meagre: half-worn brake pads from cars that had not run in years, a set of taps unused because of no mains water. I took a photograph of an elderly man sitting under an umbrella, shaded from the July sun, as he sold cigarettes one by one.

  And then I noticed people occasionally slipping away from the market to visit a stone building on the edge of a nearby cemetery. I went to explore.

  It was about the size of an electricity substation, a modest structure with a box design, easy to overlook. It wore the livery of so many wartime buildings in Sarajevo: a cavity from what appeared to be an artillery strike, terracotta roof tiles rucked out of alignment, the door ripped from its hinges, its frame pockmarked by shrapnel. I followed the market-goers and, in the summer heat, my sense of smell told me from some distance what was going on. They were using it as a makeshift lavatory. My diary recorded it in malodorous detail:

  The graveyard was unkempt but I was not prepared for what I found . . . The floor was just a sea of turds. Amongst the mess were dozens of used sanitary towels, a bra and lots of rubbish. A tombstone lay smashed in two on the floor and the light hung wrecked from the ceiling which had a gaping hole in it.

  But what made me curious was that the building was clearly some sort of chapel. A cross was visible above the doorway. Why be so disrespectful of a religious site?

  I found the answer on a piece of black marble set into an external wall. It was a commemoration stone bearing the date 1914 and some Cyrillic text, including a list of names. At the top of the list, in the most prominent position, was one that jumped out at me: , Gavrilo Princip.

  When I went to Sarajevo for the first time as a reporter, a single thought kept coming to me: this was where the event took place that triggered the First World War, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip. As a schoolboy I remember struggling to pronounce the killer’s name, but as I grew older my understanding of the crisis he precipitated became clearer – millions of lives lost in a clash so colossal it reshaped the world. Yet the Bosnian War of the 1990s seemed far removed from the fighting of the Great War, a localised, ethnic conflict in the Balkans, a region synonymous in Western eyes with impenetrability, backwardness and violence. For much of the twentieth century Bosnia had been one of the component parts of Yugoslavia, but when its leaders in Sarajevo sought to create their own separate country they clashed with the Serbian authorities who dominated the Yugoslav nation and who opposed the break-up. Tens of thousands were to die in fighting that, if you took away the helicopters, wire-guided missiles and satellite navigation systems, seemed to belong to an earlier, more brutal age: deliberate attacks on civilians, torching of homes, systematic rape, genocide.

  Sarajevo was where many of the Bosnian War’s defining horrors took place. In early exchanges, forces commanded by Bosnian Serb hardliners had been able to secure only a few of Sarajevo’s peripheral suburbs, so they withdrew to the high ground that presses in on this cupped hand of a city and set about imposing one of the cruellest sieges in modern warfare. The lights went out, taps ran dry and supplies dwindled to a trickle, condemning 400,000
Sarajevans to survive on the collapsing skeleton of their home town. Their tormentors suffered no such supply problems and were able to dictate the nature and pace of their assault.

  With their soldiers on the frontlines unable to advance, Bosnian Serb commanders sought to wear down their enemy by pounding them with artillery dug in on the nearby hilltops. When they ran out of military targets they kept on firing, wantonly destroying religious buildings, assembly halls, hospitals, newspaper offices, libraries – anything that contributed, no matter how marginally, to Bosnia’s nascent sense of national identity. And when they ran out of those, they kept up their barrage, firing with deliberate cruelty – actions that were later to be successfully prosecuted as war crimes – into residential areas. With grim inevitability, many of Sarajevo’s bloodiest incidents took place as civilians were cut down by shells when they emerged from cover for essential supplies: queuing for bread, waiting at a standpipe for water, crowding market stalls whenever smugglers made it into the city.

  As a foreign correspondent, peacock-proud to be covering my first full conflict, I was kept busy by a city that seemed to bookend the bloodletting of the twentieth century. I was witness to a conflict that realigned the way the modern world fought. NATO would go to war in Bosnia, for the first time in its history, changing fundamentally the international community’s willingness to intervene. And the Bosnian War would spill further into the future, its battlefields a training ground for jihadists who would take part in the 9/11 attacks on America.

  Disturbed by what I was seeing, I read everything I could find about Bosnia’s background to try and understand the source of the conflict. History seemed to loom over Sarajevo from the same heights held by the Bosnian Serb gunners, as I learned of complex colonial and religious influences that had pulled the local Slav population in different directions through the ages. Lying where Europe’s south-eastern fringe comes up against influences from Asia Minor, Bosnia had a back-story dominated for hundreds of years by foreign occupation, first by the Ottoman Empire, then by Austria–Hungary (otherwise known as the Habsburg Empire). Although its people shared the same language and cultural roots, cleavages over the centuries had created three identifiable groups: Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. I read repeatedly how the era of foreign domination had been ended by the First World War when a new nation, Yugoslavia, emerged out of the fighting, one that allowed local Slavs to rule themselves for the first time in the modern era. In all my research the role of Gavrilo Princip appeared settled: the backwoodsman from the Bosnian hinterland who brought freedom to his people by sparking the war that finally swept away foreign control.

  So why were Sarajevans now desecrating the tomb of someone who fought for their freedom? Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb – the same ethnicity as the extremists attacking the city – but spite alone could not explain what I had found. There had to be more to it.

  CHAPTER 1

  Fresh Flotsam

  Uncle Alyn

  No 62 Squadron. Uncle Alyn stands fifth from the left

  In other wars more people have died, more nations been involved and the world brought closer to annihilation, but somehow the First World War retains a dread aura all of its own. The guns fell silent all those years ago, but like a refrain that stays with the audience long after the music stops, the First World War has a returning power. So monumental was the suffering, so far-reaching the influence on history that the war still generates reward not just for writers, academics and artists, but for people simply learning about themselves, their bloodlines, their place. The Great War’s power lies with the suspicion that its impact has yet to be fully understood.

  I was born in Britain half a century after the fighting ended, yet the First World War has always been thereabouts, a background presence shaping me and my setting, a founding sequence in my make-up. Often it was so faint it was difficult to discern: the whittling of one’s own self through the loss of a distant ancestor. Occasionally it spiked: in my teens sitting with my mother as she wept through the Festival of Remembrance televised each year from the Royal Albert Hall in London. But a war from a hundred years ago remains relevant enough to intrude on our todays through a sense that closure has perhaps yet to be reached. The moral clarity that framed the Second World War’s struggle against Nazi totalitarianism, or the Cold War’s friction between right and left, seems to evade the earlier conflict. The question, ‘Was it right to go to war in 1914?’ can be answered in many ways, through bullet points or lengthy treatises, but I wonder if any answer is totally convincing. This is what keeps the First World War so charged – the unease born of doubt as to whether the sacrifice was worthwhile. For me, this is what transforms so powerfully the words of Laurence Binyon, plain enough by themselves, but, when delivered on a raw November morning to a gathering of people wearing red paper poppies, they ache from what might have been: We Will Remember Them.

  In the small Northamptonshire village where I grew up, the First World War was remembered in glass. Hellidon was too small to have shops, so the community revolved, as it had for centuries, around the church of St John the Baptist, a modest but stolid place of worship in keeping with the village’s position at the middle of Middle England. Built of locally quarried ironstone, St John’s was chilly-damp in winter, yet on summer nights the butterscotch masonry bled warmth from the day’s baking in the sun. It was old enough to have known fighting; indeed, my childish imagination was fired by stories about the runnels that flute the stone arch in the portico. I was told they had been left by seventeenth-century noblemen sharpening their swords before battle in the Civil War.

  As children, my friends and I would dare each other to climb the bell-tower, and for years I earned pocket money mowing the grass in the graveyard. At the village carol service one year I fought my first trembling battle with stage fright when I was called on to read the Advent message from the Archangel Gabriel. A box had to be placed in the pulpit so that I could see out as I wrestled with nerves and difficult words. The next generation of Butchers would themselves pass through St John’s, with my firstborn niece being baptised there, while my own son would take snot-nosed delight in toddling up the lane to watch the bell-ringers at practice.

  And each of these modest moments of a family’s making were watched over by four figures immortalised in a stained-glass window that was set to catch the southern sun. Such windows are where biblical characters tend to be represented, but in the Hellidon village church a group of decidedly unbiblical-looking male faces have stared out since their unveiling in 1920. Against a setting of rich green foliage and red petals, daylight can give the figures an authentically holy glow. They wear the pure-silver armour of chivalrous medieval knights; indeed, one is helmeted, but the other three have the pasted-down, centre-parted hairstyles of early twentieth-century England. They are portraits of the menfolk of the village who gave their lives in the First World War: two brothers, William and James Hedges, Fred Wells and John Buchanan.

  It was this window that first brought me to think about the war, although my early grasp was childlike. Mostly I was interested in the sword that the helmeted figure leans on and in the stirringly heroic words of the memorial’s swirling epitaph: ‘The Noble Army of Martyrs Praise Thee.’ These were men from my village, from my side. They died for us in a foreign place, in a cause that simply must have been noble. Now, back to the sword.

  Mine was not a military family, but as I grew older it was impossible to avoid the martial osmosis that steadily gives structure to the imagery of 1914–18: troops, trenches, bayonets, barbed wire, cannon, craters, monuments, memorials. St John’s held a remembrance service each year, an event that was choreographed around the symbols of the Great War and had the power to transform some of our older neighbours. I knew them as keen gardeners or dog-walkers, but for one morning each year a medal ribbon on their breasts spoke of something much more thrilling – combat that, in some way too complex for my young mind to understand, was rooted in the First
World War.

  The conflict would crop up more and more in my reading as the stories of Biggles landed on my bookshelves and history teachers began to fill in my understanding, one that was initially framed in terms simplistic enough for a schoolboy to grasp: Us against Them, Good versus Evil. I was taught about a clash between Britain and Germany, one fought mostly from fortified holes in the ground separated by the ominously named ‘no-man’s-land’, a killing zone so dangerous that men would use periscopes to look out over it. Afternoons were spent playing with friends as we built earthworks of our own, dens concealed in hedgerows, underground hideouts where we too could be heroes. When my science teacher showed us how to construct a home-made periscope, it was immediately deployed on our imaginary battlefield.

  At the age of twelve, I went to Rugby, a school whose alumni, they never tired of telling us, included Rupert Brooke, among the most celebrated of war poets. The school was so proud of this particular son that his great work, ‘The Soldier’, was read to us on every possible public occasion. It summed up perfectly any adolescent framing of the war:

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is forever England. There shall be

  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.

  The lines captured the proud early idealism stirred by the war and soon made Brooke a favourite of the Establishment. He was writing in the first months of the war, when patriotism had about it a purity yet to be corrupted by jingoism, and in his verse there was no sense of questioning the war and the way it was conducted. He died less than a year into the conflict, in April 1915, aboard a hospital ship en route to Gallipoli, and although ‘The Soldier’ had only just been published, Winston Churchill, in his last days as First Lord of the Admiralty, put his name to a fulsome tribute published in The Times: