♪ ♪
[male narrator] All right, the stage is set.
Now let's put the players in their places.
The curtain opens on the back of a rundown cafe in Belgrade.
A young man comes in carrying a package
and takes a seat at a table with a handful of other young men huddled around.
They still to hush as he opens the package.
Inside is a single piece of paper, a newspaper clipping.
The one who brought the package bends over to stare at the page.
One of the other young men slide a candle across the table so he can better see.
Before him, circled in red, is the headline and it reads,
“Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Visit Sarajevo.”
Now we skip ahead a few weeks, where outside the palace
a resplendently dressed man and woman
are getting in an open-top car, a hundred years ago this year.
He is dressed in bright, blazing blue.
His chest is full of medals.
On his head, a grand horse-hair cap.
She is wearing a flowing, white dress and laughing.
He helps her into the car.
This is Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria,
next in line for succession to the throne,
accompanied by his wife Sophie.
They've come to Sarajevo to watch military maneuvers.
But really, that's an excuse.
It's their anniversary.
They've come to get away from the stifling courts of Austria,
where the Archduke’s marriage to Sophie
will never be accepted due to her low birth.
She was, after all, only a countess.
But things have been really tense in this part of the empire.
The Serbian agitators have been acting with increased boldness
to demand a Serbia free and independent from Austrian rule.
And this day of all days falls on the anniversary
of one of the greatest battles in Serbian history:
The Battle of Kosovo.
It’s one of the great rallying points of the Serbian people,
a point of national pride.
To Serbian nationalists, this is one of their proudest days.
And for them, for the Archduke of Austria,
the symbol of their oppression, the embodiment foreign rule
to come here on that date was the greatest insult.
Now, perhaps the Archduke had chosen that day to show solidarity,
to ease tensions, to make the people of Serbia understand
that he cared about their traditions.
Maybe he simply didn't know that the day had any special importance,
and he was just there to get away.
But whatever the reason, he was ill-informed.
For on any other day, the events that are about to play out
may not have happened.
On any other day, this might have turned out simply to be your average parade,
an event which wouldn't even go down as a historical footnote
in a long and prosperous rule.
But something had to happen on this day.
It was two symbolic, too important, too grand of a story.
And so the first domino is placed in the mad and improbable events
of this 28th day of June, 1914.
So here now in the sleek black car,
the royal couple begins to process down the streets of Sarajevo,
flanked by five other cars filled with officials and guards.
It's a parade.
The streets are lined with onlookers.
The route has been published.
The world knows exactly where the Archduke is gonna be.
And those young men from that cafe in Belgrade are there in that crowd.
They are nationalists.
They’re Patriots.
They’re assassins and terrorists.
They call themselves Young Serbia
and are part of the much more ominously named Black Hand--
and they are angry.
Angry in the way that only young men can be,
and when I say young,
I mean that barely any of them had reached the age of twenty.
They had in them an anger born of ideals.
Or they had ideals to rationalize their anger.
A boldness born of a cause,
or a cause to justify the brash kind of risk-taking that truly borders madness.
But however you view them,
here they were hidden in the crowd,
intent on killing the Archduke.
One by one, the Archduke’s car passes his would-be assassins.
Nothing happens.
No attempt on his life.
Two of his assassins ended up succumbing to fear
and couldn't go through with the deed.
One felt pity for his wife sitting in the car
and just couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger.
Another one had an equipment malfunction.
And so one by one,
Ferdinand passed them none the wiser,
smiling and waving to the crowd,
smiling and waving in an open-top car so the world could better see.
But at last, on the Cuprija Bridge,
an assassin finally steps forward and throws a bomb at the Archduke’s car.
Seconds before it lands,
Ferdinand sees it and dives behind the door of the car
as the bomb passes over him and bounces into the street behind.
An explosion rips through the ground,
mangling the car following them
and leaving twenty people wounded and bleeding on the street.
The assassin leaps over the side of the bridge to make his escape,
but in the type of amateurish planning
that would be comical if the circumstances weren't so grave,
he fails to realize that the river below is only four inches deep,
and he hurts his leg in the fall.
In one last act of comic/tragic bravado,
the assassin swallows the cyanide pill he's been carrying,
a final “You'll never take me alive!” gesture.
But alas, these young high school assassins
had bought their suicide pills on the cheap,
and this one was way past its shelf life.
So the young man just sits quietly vomiting into the river
while the police stroll down to take him very much alive.
The motorcade races back the way it came,
sirens screaming, and the city begins to lock down.
Another of the young men,
a 19-year-old named Gavrilo Princip,
watches the cars go by, heart sinking.
“So it's done,” he thinks to himself.
“It’s off.
"The Archduke is alive.
The assassination has failed.”
He is pretty bummed out.
His hopes to be immortalized in the halls of Serbian heroes are dashed.
All his dreams of glory just shattered.
Overall, it's been a pretty lousy day.
So he goes off to pout, thinking,
“Maybe a snack will make me feel better.”
This one young man's comfort snack may seem like a small thing,
but it's on the small things that history often turns.
Back at City Hall, the Archduke and the mayor are having words.
The mayor proposes that the Archduke and Duchess should continue on their trip,
but the Archduke thunders back something like
“Are you crazy?
You’d have us visit museums while bombs explode on your street?”
And then, in a gesture of gallantry that you don't often see anymore,
he proposes instead that they immediately visit the hospital
where the wounded were taken after the attack.
So they don't hide him in a bunker or spirit him out of the country
with a small army of guards like we would do today.
Instead, they all pile out to the motorcade
and start off towards the hospital.
But nobody remembers to tell Franz Ferdinand’s driver,
and I should mention that this is the Archduke’s personal chauffeur.
This fellow came along with the Archduke for the trip,
but he’s Austrian through and through.
This guy does not know his way around Sarajevo.
And so, as they're making their way through the city,
the Archduke’s driver makes a wrong turn onto Franz Joseph Street,
a street named for the Archduke’s father.
Meanwhile, our failed assassin Gavrilo Princip,
is sitting outside a deli eating his consolation snack
and starting to feel maybe a little better.
And maybe this will be his only chance, he thinks.
Maybe someday he'll have another shot at greatness.
I mean, it was a really bad day, but who knows,
it could still turn out okay.
They'd have to go into hiding for a while but--
Holy *beep* Is that the Archduke?
Yes, right there in front of him, in the same open-top car
was the Archduke and his wife.
The driver had taken a random wrong turn onto the street
where Gavrilo Princip was having a sandwich,
and their car had just stalled out trying to back up.
Three strides away.
Gavrilo can hear the Archduke and his wife talking from the car.
No words, just actions.
He stands up, he pulls out his pistol,
and he fires two shots that changed the world.
The Archduke looks over,
barely noticing the gendarmes wrestling the young man by the car to ground.
His only sight is for his wife,
lying quietly on the floor of the car.
He reaches out with a hand, weak and heavy.
Something's wrong with his neck.
He can't quite think straight.
He sees her and he utters one last wish:
“Sophie, Sophie.
"Don't die.
Live for our children.”
A man leans over him and asks if he is badly hurt.
And he thinks he says,
“It's nothing.
It's nothing.”
He repeats the phrase, each time a little more quietly,
and neither of them live through the hour.
And so our first act is done.
A martyr to prince and princess, or the death oppressors.
An act of terror or a heroic strike for freedom.
An act that relied on a thousand coincidences,
on a poorly chosen date, on a change of plans,
on a misinformed driver,
and on a sad young man having a sandwich.
But no matter how you look at it,
it was an act that began the greatest war in history
and brought to an end the world that all of these actors knew.
This war would change the world.
Join us next time and find out how the world responds to this event.
♪ ♪
Captions Provided by:
The University of Georgia Disability Resource Center
114 Clark Howell Hall Athens, Georgia 30602
706-542-8719 Voice 706-542-8778 TTY