Free The Trigger by Tim Butcher Page B

lie today,’ Mile said, pointing over a black iron fence.
    Some history books tell you that Princip’s father married late and was a lot older than his mother. Their shared headstone suggested otherwise. It recorded them being born in the same year, 1860, which would have made them teenagers when the rebellion of 1875 disrupted their rural lives. While Petar went up into the hills to fight, Marija headed west as a refugee to the area around Knin, a town just across the frontier inside Austro-Hungarian territory, where Miss Irby focused most of her aid effort. The headstone recorded both their baptised and familiar names, so I was able to read that Marija (Nana) died in 1945, five years after Petar (Pepo). That meant that Princip’s mother would have experienced at first hand one of the long-term after-effects of the assassination committed by her son: the Second World War. It brought another round of disruption to life in Obljaj.
    ‘The Germans and Italians occupied this area, and in the fighting Gavro’s house was totally destroyed,’ Mile said. ‘Poor Nana had to flee along with the others for a while. By the time she died she had suffered so much because of the actions of her son and was drinking a lot. They say it was the drink that killed her in the end.’
    We were now out in a recently mown hayfield, with clear sight of the red tiled roofs of Obljaj that run along the hinge between the valley floor and the rocky hillock behind. Take away the power lines and replace the stone tiles with shingles, and the view had not changed since Princip’s time. Mile stood still for a moment and started to speak. ‘The thing that still amazes me about Gavro is how a child from this small place and from that closed time could change the world.’ Down on the river bank I could see a boy sitting patiently and watching his fishing line drift in the slow-moving current.
    As we walked back into Obljaj I thought about how static life had been over the centuries for a family such as the Princips. They had been chained to this upland valley, not in the sense of being anchored and given stability, but more in the sense of being trapped, hocked, unable to escape its demands. We, in the twenty-first century, so often romanticise the idyll of pre-urban, agricultural simplicity, but the existence led by the Princips, as for peasants across Europe down the centuries, was far from idyllic. Theirs was a living defined by a crushing yearly battle, trying to husband enough crops and livestock to survive the deprivations of winter and the demands of feudal obligation. As Serbs, theirs was an identity most strongly preserved by the annual cycle of devotions enshrined by their Orthodox Church and by stories told around the fire about the medieval heroes of a long-gone Serbian state. Little wonder those tales were worked up into legends of mythological dimension – the chivalrous deeds of Serbian nobles fighting for good against the evil of occupation.
    Gavrilo Princip was born in the summer of 1894, a busy time for a peasant family living off the land in Herzegovina. Marija had spent the day in the fields bundling hay by hand and milking the family cow, when her labour pains came. She had only just made it back into the house when the baby arrived. Family lore has her mother-in-law biting through the umbilical cord. It was 13 July, a day sacred in the Orthodox calendar for the Archangel Gabriel, and although Marija wanted to name the newborn Špiro, in honour of her late brother, the parish priest insisted the child be named for the saint. Gavrilo is the name Gabriel in Serbian. The baptism was carried out swiftly. Nobody could be confident that the new baby would not suffer the same fate as many of his siblings.
    ‘He was born just up there,’ Nikola told me after we had returned to the house. Miljkan was too immobile to comfortably leave the verandah, but at seventy-seven years of age his younger brother was still sprightly enough to lead me