Clear shot ignited disaster
Gavrilo Princip couldn't believe his eyes. The car carrying the royal couple had stopped right in front of him. Drawing his pistol he fired two shots at point-blank range.
Earlier that morning, June 28, 1914, Princip and other members of the Young Bosnia assassination squad had staked out the route along which the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie, would travel through Sarajevo on their state visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Armed with pistols and bombs, the first two assassins failed to act but the third threw his bomb and wrecked one of the cars in the motorcade, injuring occupants and onlookers.
The royal couple proceeded to the town hall to endure a speech of welcome from the mortified mayor while the archduke stood beside him, with only Sophie's calming words in his ear forestalling a tirade of indignation. His own speech was brought to him wet with the blood of a wounded officer but he delivered a tactful address.
Afterwards, the couple changed the day's program to visit the injured in hospital. Confusion among the drivers followed and the royal car took a wrong turn, coincidentally stopping right in front of Princip, who seized his chance. Moments later the royal duo were dying, Sophie falling forward into her husband's lap, with him beseeching her to "live, Sophie, for the children", before fading into oblivion, muttering: "It's nothing, it's nothing . . ."
It was not nothing. It was the spark that ignited explosive political, nationalist, economic and cultural forces that had been building for decades, unleashing a catastrophe that redirected the history of the world, with profound consequences that live with us still.
With these assassinations, the fate of two people determined the fate of nations, as sinister forces conspired to manipulate history.
The assassins were sponsored by the Black Hand, a terrorist group controlled by Serbian military intelligence, which wanted to provoke a war between Serbia and Austria- Hungary that would enable them to forge a new South Slav State, with the backing of their giant ally, Russia.
Meanwhile, in Vienna, the political and military elite was happy to go to war to destroy Serbia, while elements in the royal court were not perturbed if the anti-war Franz Ferdinand was eliminated.
The Austrian militarists were fortified by the "blank cheque" of support they'd been given by their key ally, the unpredictable Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose cabinet had formulated a grandiose plan to use war to create Mitteleuropa, a huge pan-German empire in central and eastern Europe.
Nearby, France watched and waited, fearful of German military might but determined to recover its precious provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost to Germany in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.
They were committed to the "cult of the offensive" and determined to overwhelm the Germans with wild aggression. Moreover, in an unlikely arrangement, Republican France had an alliance with autocratic Russia that required each to come to the other's assistance if they were attacked by Germany.
This further fed the German phobia of encirclement and led the General Staff to plan for a war on two fronts that would necessitate an invasion of neutral Belgium as the German army raced to destroy France before swinging around to confront the Russians in the east.
Further afield, Britain was committed to Belgium's neutrality and determined to prevent German domination of continental Europe and the vital ports on the other side of the Channel. Reluctantly, it had abandoned its policy of "splendid isolation" and entered into defensive agreements with France and Russia.
As the crisis escalated, the government vainly hoped a traditional conference of the Great Powers would resolve the issue. However, as the royal couple lay in state in an uncaring Vienna, the two great systems of military alliances were moving remorselessly into confrontation.
On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war and invaded Serbia after the Serbs rejected a draconian ultimatum designed to be unacceptable. Russia reacted as expected and Germany followed suit. Huge armies mobilised as complex military plans were implemented across the continent and thousands of trains, trucks and horse-drawn wagons moved millions of men and munitions into place. Within days, Germany invaded Belgium and France, Russia invaded Germany, and Britain committed itself and its empire to war. An unstoppable series of events engulfed Europe in the greatest war the world had ever seen.
Ultimate responsibility for causing the war remains controversial, mainly because the post-war German government systematically destroyed and falsified the archival record, leading a generation of historians to conclude that the war was a tragic mistake.
This illusion was dispelled 50 years ago when the German historian, Fritz Fischer, published Grab for World Power, making use of recovered archival material to reveal Germany's plans for conquest.
More recently, historians have blamed Austria-Hungary, or Russia, and even Britain, but the consensus remains that Germany had primary responsibility for the war as it pursued a desire for global supremacy that was only finally extinguished 30 years later with the destruction of Hitler's Third Reich.
· Dr Mervyn F. Bendle retired recently as Senior Lecturer in History and Communications at James Cook University.
