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

I wasn’t especially interested in the subject matter of this book to begin with; I read it because I had been impressed by one of Tim Butcher’s earlier books, Blood River, an exciting and well-written account of a long and dangerous journey through Central Africa. Like Blood River, The Trigger is a mixture of history, travelogue and journalism – a format Butcher does very well. It is just as good as Blood River, and I ended up being very interested in its subject indeed.The outline of the book is thus: In the early 1990s Butcher is a young correspondent in the Balkans, covering the conflict for Britain’s Telegraph newspaper. In Sarajevo he finds people using a small building as a toilet, and is bemused to find that it is the mausoleum of Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the city led to the First World War. Butcher moves on but does not forget this odd sight, and in 2012 he resolves to walk across Bosnia and Serbia in Princip’s footsteps. Butcher wants to see if the journey to see if doing so would illuminate the chain of events that had led not only to that war but to the one he covered 80 years later.In 1907 the 13-year-old Princip walked most of the way from his home in Western Bosnia to Sarajevo to get an education. Later, as a radicalised, political young adult, he went to Serbia and there hatched the plot to kill the Archduke; then, armed, he walked back. It is these journeys Butcher wants to recreate. He starts by enlisting Arnie, his former fixer from Bosnia, as a companion. Arnie, a Bosnian Muslim, is now living in London but, after some thought, he agrees. Meanwhile Butcher tries to track down Princip’s birthplace, Obljaj. This is hard, as it is an obscure hamlet deep in what Bosnians call the vukojebina (literally, “where the wolves f**k”). He eventually finds it on an old map in the bowels of the Royal Geographical Society. He and Arnie make for Obljaj.It’s when they get there that this narrative, a little slow to start, really takes off. The Princip home is a ruin but, quite unexpectedly, they find the Princip clan still living next door. No-one can remember Gavrilo, who died in 1918. But at least one man remembers his parents in their old age, and the folk-memories of Princip are strong. The next day Butcher and Arnie start a long walk to Sarajevo. The memories of the Princips, and Butcher’s own diligent research in Sarajevo, uncover a great deal new about the assassin. His killing of the Archduke is part of history but the man himself, locked up at 19, dead at 23, has always been a footnote. Butcher brings him very alive. He also conjures up a vivid picture of Sarajevo as Princip would have found it in 1907, and it reminds me very much of Aleppo, where I lived for several years in the 1990s.Moreover Butcher finds that Princip’s story does provide keys to the region’s history, and to the conflict of the 1990s. One or two themes emerge strongly from the book. In Butcher’s view, Austria-Hungary, which had only occupied Bosnia in 1878, was a colonial power there, extracting resources – chiefly timber – and giving a little back, but not much. Princip’s fanaticism was rooted in a hatred of what he saw as an oppressive colonial regime that has kept his people miserably poor. (He was himself the seventh of nine children; the previous six had all died in infancy.) Moreover the people Princip saw as his were all the South Slavs, not just Serbs. He was not a Serbian nationalist as such (and in Butcher’s view, Serbia did not support the assassination). Princip was an anti-colonial freedom fighter.But perhaps the most interesting perspective in this book is Arnie’s. At the time people outside Yugoslavia blamed the 1990s war on ancient primitive hatreds, rather as they spoke of Northern Ireland when I was growing up, and see Syria now. Arnie doesn’t buy it. “Those people who said, ‘These people have always hated each other’ were just being lazy,” he tells Butcher. “In my own life I saw people from different communities work together, live together, get married even. There was nothing inevitable about what happened in the 1990s. It was just that a few – the extremists, the elite, the greedy – saw nationalism as a way to grab what they wanted.”Like Blood River, this is a thoughtful, well-written book, an absorbing read but also full of insights. Butcher’s knack of combining several roles – the historian, the travel writer and the journalist – serves him well. I look forward to seeing where he does it next. Meanwhile The Trigger is excellent, and could well be my non-fiction read of the year.

A century ago a non-descript teenager pulled a gun out of his pocket, stepped out of a crowd, and fired two shots into an automobile, killing a man and his wife. He was quickly arrested and put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment (at 19 he was slightly too young to receive the death penalty), and then died himself less than four years later from tuberculosis contracted in prison. A non-entity unworthy of further attention? No, because that teenager's name was Gavrilo Princip and the people he killed in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 were Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, and the course of the twentieth century was irreversibly altered by his act. Those shots led to World War I breaking out a month later, to revolutions in Russia and other countries, to the rise of Communism and Fascism and then World War II, the Cold War, countless other hot wars, and eventually to the chaotic world we inhabit in 2014.Tim Butcher is the ideal chronicler of this search to learn more about Gavrilo Princip, because he was heavily involved in one of the recent after-effects of Princip's shots: he was an embedded reporter during the fighting that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, when Serbs, Croats, and Muslims struggled for conquest and survival in Bosnia, Princip's home territory. Thus this book is really three parallel journeys: Princip's own life story being one, then the tortured history of Bosnia as the second, and then finally Butcher's own memories of the terrible things he saw in the 1990s and his revisitation of them over twenty years later as the third.Of the three Princip's own is the briefest, since his life was both short and obscure for the greater part of it. Butcher did an incredible job of tracking down living relations, old homes, the few photos ever taken of him, and even ancient school reports for Princip. Butcher followed Princip's literal trail, travelling the same roads and paths the future assassin took as he left his home village for Sarajevo, then Belgrade, and then back to Sarajevo for that fatal rendezvous with the Archduke. Princip's trail led through areas which Butcher already knew well from his experience covering the war, and at times the book almost becomes a macabre travelogue in which we are led from minefields to massacre sites to bombing ruins. On a more positive note, we also learn a lot about human resilience, because nearly everywhere Butcher went in pursuit of Princip we see rebuilt churches and mosques, reviving towns and cities, and a populace still scarred by conflict but determined to survive and prosper.Peopling the pages of The Trigger are many colorful characters, including not just Princip and his fellow assassins like Trifko Grabez, Nedjelko Cabrinovic, Danilo Ilic, and Mehmet Mehmetbasic (plus a few others here and there) but also of the extraordinary people of today's Bosnia, many of whom,such as Mile and Arnie, went to great trouble and some peril to assist Butcher on his quest. This is also a story of many foreigners, including Franz Ferdinand and Sophie as well as the colorful diplomat/spy Sir Fitzroy Maclean, whose activities affected Bosnia.I thoroughly enjoyed The Trigger and came away from it with a deeper understanding not just of the events of June 28, 1914 but also of many other dark times in the torturous tale of twentieth century Bosnia.

When I did history at high school, our textbook referred to the Sarajevo assassin merely as Princip. I had to check in the library to find his first name.Later, I would work in Sarajevo, and stood on the bridge where he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Yet I knew almost nothing about this simple man who made the 20th century so much more complex than what had gone before.Tim Butcher's book is easy to read, and he has not sat in a library but walked the hills of Bosnia, doing more first-hand research than you'd find in the average PhD.Gavrilo Princip died young, but in his time was affected by poverty and unemployment just as we see today in Africa and Central America. He grew resentful and thrashed out in a way that would echo more than a century later.As a journalist, when I encounter misery or hardship in a community, the greatest pain seems to come when people feel no one is listening, and those in power don't care. That's what makes for revolution.The Trigger and the amazing tale of Gavrilo Princip holds a warning.If you read only one book in 2022, make it this one.PS: A good companion to the book would be the DVD 37 Days, about events leading up to WWl.www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00JDATWUW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_image_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Tim Butcher is the author of several books including the excellent 'Blood River'. He is a former journalist, historian and explorer. He is based in Cape Town. His latest book is about a man, an assassin, who provided the excuse for Austria and Germany to embroil mankind in a terrible world war. The author says in order to write this book he had to wade through 'a century of muddle and misinformation'.Butcher shows how Princip, who was born on 13 July 1894, was an intelligent and focused South Slav who willingly gave his llife for the cause. He was born to a family that experienced extreme poverty. Revelations about Princip's education and motivation are remarkable and novel. A bright scholar, he began to absent himself from school on numerous occasions. As a result his grades plumeted.The book is also an absorbing travelogue about the Balkans which the author knows very well. It has also a number of pertinent things to say about the recent Bosnian conflct and the appalling behaviour of Serbia. It is an easy book to read that clarifies very complex ethnic and political issues in a region racked by nationalism and related religious issiues.We are currently being swamped by books on the Great War; this is one of the very few that should not be missed because it is based on new research instead of being yet another rehash of half-truths and myth. It is pleasing that Butcher does not, unlike three recent books, raise the old outdated question about whether the assassination caused the Great War. In the 24 years prior to 1914 there had been 11 assassinations of Kings, Presidents and the like in Europe and America, none of them led to war. The 1914 assassination would have caused no more than a ripple of sympathy if Austria-Hungary and Germany had not turned it to their advantage. Anyone who doubts this should read the obituaries printed in every major European and USA paper.The author's tells us how he discovered Princip's tomb during the siege of Sarajevo, a tomb that was being desecrated by Sarajevans. It is an extraordinary story, as is his account of how he came to be fascinated as a child by the 1914-18 war.In some 12 chapters the author analyses, for example, Princip's troublesome upbringing, his education which was of crucial importance, the reasons why he joined the cause, the annexation crisis, his bravery, the trial and the way his actions have been distorted in many other accounts by historians.Of major interest is how the author shows that much written about the assassination is a lie. Errors abound in numerous accounts. He documents these in detail.By using primary sources e.g. the police reports, psychiatric notes and court transcripts, Butcher explains, for example, that Princip's schooling resulted in him losing his way at an early age, and what motivated him as a very young man to engage in the assassination of the Archduke on 28 June 1914.Unfortunately, revolts in the Balkans in the 1990s led to the destruction of many original documents concerning Princip. Nevertheless, Butcher has been able to marshal impressive evidence to demonstrate that many of the written accounts of the actual assassination are pure fiction. It is clear, for example, that Sophie's death was a pure accident. Butcher, as have others, also scotches the view that Princip was acting solely for Serbia, his story has been twisted by Austria Hungary and Germany in order to justify the former's attack on Serbia. In brief, the author believes the war came about as the result of deliberate lies, by Austria-Hungary in particular. He adds that by the 1990's Princip had become in the Balkans:'a scapegoat for all seasons'.Butcher has a great deal of sympathy for Princip seeing him as a freedom fighter fighting to free his land from tyranny. His reasons are balanced and convincing. He rightly criticises accounts that state Princip's nationality, in truth he swas a Bosnian. His argument that the assassination had no support from the Serbian government, and that Austro-Hungary used it as an excuse, a fig leaf, to attack Serbia, is irrefutable in the light of currently available evidence. The assassination was used in the same way that Tony Blair and Bush used WMD to justify the invasion of Iraq. Both were based on lies and resulted in tragedy and scores of dead and maimed. Austria's action, backed by Germany, changed the map of Europe.The gross lies of Blair, continuing to this day, are changing the map of the Middle East.At his trial, Princip insisted that his motives were fuelled by a hatred of the Austrian colonial occupiers of his country, and that he wanted to liberate all south Slavs. He was too young to be given the death sentence (he avoided it by a few days only) so instead he was sentenced to 20 years in a military jail, permanently shackled with 22lb leg irons. 3 of the other conspirators were hanged, two were pardoned.The author reminds us also of the significance of the number plate on the Archduke's Graf and Stift car, it read: A11118! I know of only one other account that has mentioned this astonishing fact. It is also pleasing to note that Tim is aware that the Archduke's car did have a reverse gear-it can be seen today! So many accounts make the basic error of stating there was no reverse gear. Clearly, the authors have never been to Sarajevo.Princip died in prison his bones eaten away by tuberculosis. He also lost an arm during his time in jail.The notes, photographs, maps and bibliography are excellent.I am pleased to see the sources include Vladimir Dedijer's book 'The Road To Sarajevo'. It is an outstanding book, as is Rudolf Zisler's: 'How I Came To Defend Princip and Others', published in 1937.Not to be missed.

Subtitled, “The Hunt for Gavrilo Princip; The Assassin who Brought the World to War,” this is part biography, part history and part travel book. Indeed, it is written by Tim Butcher, who is probably best known for his travel writing and whose interest in Gavrilo Princip was first aroused when he was a young reporter in Serajevo during the Bosnian War in the 1990’s. He recalls how he witnessed locals using a stone building as a makeshift lavatory, only to discover they were desecrating a memorial to Princip’s assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Why, he wondered, were the people of Serajevo so dismissive of a man who fought for their freedom?Many years later, the author decided to follow the trail from Princip’s home in a countryside now still dangerous from mines left over from the war, to the end of his life. During this book the author asks why WWI is still so important and looks at the impact on Princip’s actions on the history of the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats in the region. He questions whether the assassination was the spark that ignited the conflict and, on his journey, looks at the complicated history of the region as well as that of Princip’s himself.This is a very interesting read; for many different reasons. I was fascinated by the story of Gavrilo Princip, which was at the heart of this book. A young boy – still a teenager – who left a countryside where life still followed an almost medieval pattern. A boy who had academic ambitions; who travelled to the city to study and who dropped out in 1911. In fact, three of the dropouts that year would become revolutionaries; the education system a breeding ground for radicalism. The story of this young man is still relevant today. This teenager who fought for the cause of ridding his country of Austo-Hungarian rule and who fired the trigger which assassinated both the Archduke and his wife. The formative years of his young man’s education has significance, as the author highlights that Princip had, “the rage of the oppressed,” which is sadly still all too relevant in our world.Princip considered his attack on the Archduke a grand gesture – a “noble act.” I was struck by the fact I had read this story from a completely different viewpoint in, “The Assassination of the Archduke,” by Greg King. As such, it was really interesting to see the story from the side of the assassin himself and I recommend this book for anybody interested in both WWI and in the history of a country which has seen so much conflict and yet retains such diverse sense of identities. A very moving book in parts, which follows the story of the author and the people he met in the 1990’s as well as events so long ago, At times I found the meandering pace of the book a little slow, but generally, this was a very interesting read.

Combine a profoundly epoch-shattering assassination with a travelogue through modern Serbia/Bosnia from a veteran war reporter and you have one of those "how many hours sleep will I get if I just keep going" kind of books.He meets up with Princips' descendants (still in the same village), finds his initials carved on a rock and walks in the footsteps of this misfit from cradle to grave. Mix in memories of that later savage Balkan war and the book just hooks you in.The author is even-handed and non-judgemental and examines Princip's warped legacy.Having read "The Assassination of the Archduke" by King & Woolmans, this gave the human story from the other end of the pistol.This act of madness ruined the lives of all concerned and nearly destroyed Europe twice over.Princip was only the opening act. We all know the main feature.100 years on it is only right to go back to that fragile time when the future of the world lay in the pocket of an embittered peasant..

The author combines two pieces of tragedy. The killing of an Archduke in1914 and the Balkan war of the later 20th century, relating their consequences and hostilities almost to the point where one feels a degree of desperation. Well written, punchy and enthralling.