The Sleepwalkers (12 page)

Nedeljko Čabrinović

This loitering at the grave of a suicide is interesting and suggestive because it speaks to that fascination with the figure of the suicide assassin that was so central to the Kosovo myth, and more broadly to the self-awareness of the pan-Serbian milieu, whose journals, diaries and correspondence are shot through with tropes of sacrifice. Even the attack itself was supposed to deliver an encoded reference to Žerajić's earlier act, for Princip had originally planned to take up his post exactly where Žerajić had stood, on the Emperor Bridge: ‘I wanted to shoot from the same spot as the deceased Žerajić.'
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For all of the assassins, Belgrade was the crucible that radicalized their politics and aligned them with the cause of Serb unification. In a telling passage of the court protocol, Čabrinović recalled how in 1912, when he had become too ill to continue working in Serbia and decided to return home, he had gone to the Belgrade office of the Narodna Odbrana, where he had been told that a Bosnian Serb could always get money for the journey back to Sarajevo. He was met at the office by a certain Major Vasić, secretary of the local association of the NO, who gave him money and patriotic texts, confiscated his book of Maupassant short stories on the ground that these were unworthy of a young Serb patriot, and urged him always to be ‘a good Serb'.
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Meetings of this kind were crucial to the formation of these young men, whose relations with male figures of authority had been so strained. Within the nationalist networks, there were older men prepared not just to help them with money and advice, but also to show them affection and respect, to provide them with a sense – so conspicuously lacking in their experience hitherto – that their lives were meaningful, that they belonged to an historical moment, that they were part of a great and flourishing enterprise.

This grooming by older men of younger men for induction into the networks was a crucial element in the success of the irredentist movement. When he returned from Belgrade to Sarajevo, Čabrinović found it impossible to fit back into his old socialist milieu; sensing that his outlook on the world had changed, the party comrades denounced him as a Serbian agitator and spy and expelled him from the party. By the time he returned to Belgrade in 1913, Čabrinović was no longer a revolutionary leftist, but an ‘anarchist with nationalism mixed in'.
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Princip passed through this energized environment as well: having left Sarajevo in May 1912 in order to complete his secondary education in Belgrade, he too crossed the path of the indefatigable Major Vasić. When the First Balkan War broke out, Vasić helped him make his way to the Turkish border to sign up as a volunteer fighter, but the local commander – who happened, incidentally, to be Voja Tankosić – turned him down at the border on the grounds that he was ‘too weak and small'.

At least as important as the contact with activists like Vasić, or with the written propaganda of the Narodna Odbrana was the coffee-house social milieu that provided a sense of belonging for young Bosnian Serbs hanging out in Belgrade. Čabrinović frequented the Acorn Garland, the Green Garland and the Little Goldfish, where, he later recalled, he heard ‘all manner of talk' and mixed with ‘students, typesetters' and ‘partisans', but especially with Bosnian Serbs. The young men ate, smoked and talked of politics or debated the contents of newspaper reports.
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It was in the Acorn Garland and the Green Garland that Čabrinović and Princip first considered the possibility of assassinating the heir to the Austrian throne; the senior Black Hand operative who provided the young men with Browning pistols and boxes of ammunition, was likewise ‘a popular figure on the Belgrade coffee-house circuit'.
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The prevalent political mood in these places was ultra-nationalist and anti-Austrian. There is a revealing passage in the court transcript in which the judge asked Princip where Grabež had acquired his ultra-nationalist political views. Princip replied artlessly: ‘After he [Grabež] came to Belgrade, he too took up the same principles.' Seizing on the implication, the judge pressed further: ‘So coming to Belgrade is enough, in other words, to ensure that someone will be instilled with the same ideas as yourself?'
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But Princip, seeing that he was being drawn out of cover, refused to comment further.

Once planning for the assassination began in earnest, care was taken to ensure that there was no ostensible link between the assassins' cell and the authorities in Belgrade. The assassins' handler was a man called Milan Ciganović, a Bosnian Serb and Black Hand member who had fought with the partisans against the Bulgarians under Tankosić and was now an employee of the Serbian state railways. Ciganović reported to Tankosić, who in turn reported to Apis. All orders were passed by word of mouth.

Milan Ciganović

Training for the assassination took place in the Serbian capital. Princip had already received instruction in shooting at the Partisan Academy and was the best shot of the three. On 27 May they were provided with the weapons they would use. Four revolvers and six small bombs, weighing less than two and a half pounds each, from the Serbian State Arsenal at Kragujevac. They were also issued with poison in the form of small flasks of cyanide swaddled in cotton. Their instructions were to shoot themselves as soon as the assassination had been carried out or, failing that, to take their lives by swallowing cyanide. Here was a further precaution against an indiscretion or a forced confession that might incriminate Belgrade. Moreover it suited the boys, who were exalted at the idea of throwing away their lives and saw their deed as an act of martyrdom.

The three assassins entered Bosnia with the help of the Black Hand network and its connections in the Serbian customs service. Čabrinović crossed at the border post in Mali Zvornik on 30 May with the assistance of agents from the Black Hand's ‘underground railway' – schoolteachers, a border guard, the secretary to a town mayor and so on – and made his way to Tuzla, where he waited for his friends to show up. Princip and Grabež were guided by Serbian border officials to the crossing point at Lješnica and shown on 31 May to a wooded island on the river Drina that ran at that point between Serbian and Bosnian territory. This hiding place, much used by smugglers, concealed them from the notice of the Austrian border police. After nightfall on the following day they were led into Austrian territory by a part-time smuggler working in the service of the underground railway.

Although they took great care to avoid being seen by Austrian police or officials, the three assassins were extremely indiscreet in their dealings with fellow Serbs. Princip and Grabež, for example, were taken by a schoolteacher working for the underground railway to the home of a Bosnian Serb farmer by the name of Mitar Kerović. Having drunk too many glasses of plum brandy en route, the teacher tried to impress the peasants: ‘Do you know who these people are? They're going to Sarajevo to throw bombs and kill the Archduke who is going to come there.'
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Succumbing to boyish bravado (they had crossed the Drina now and were on their native soil) Princip joined in, brandishing his revolver and showing his hosts how the bombs were operated. For this folly, the Kerović family – illiterate, apolitical individuals with only a very dim grasp of what the boys were up to – would pay a terrible price. Nedjo Kerović, who gave the boys a lift to Tuzla in his cart, was later found guilty of treason and being an accessory to murder and sentenced to death (commuted to twenty years in prison). His father, Mitar, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Their testimony at the trial of the assassins in October 1914 provided some of the rare moments of bleak humour in the proceedings. Asked his age by the presiding judge, Nedjo Kerović, himself the father of five children, replied that he didn't rightly know, they should ask his father. When Kerović senior was asked how much he had had to drink on the night when the boys arrived, he replied: ‘When I drink, I don't keep count; I just drink as much as I can.'
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The boys were joined in Sarajevo by another four-man cell, recruited by the Bosnian Serb and Black Hand member Danilo Ilić. At twenty-three years of age, Ilić was the oldest of them all. He had been trained as a schoolteacher on an Austrian government scholarship, but had resigned after falling ill. He was a member of Young Bosnia and a personal friend of Gačinović , the troubadour of Žerajić. Like the others, Ilić had been to Belgrade in 1913, where he had passed through the usual coffee shops, been recruited to the Black Hand and had won the confidence of Apis, before returning in March 1914 to Sarajevo, where he worked as a proof-reader and editor of a local paper.

Ilić's first recruit for the assassination brigade was the revolutionary leftist Muslim carpenter Muhamed Mehmedbašić, a native of Herzegovina. The two men knew each other well. In January 1914, they had met in France with Voja Tankosić to plan an attempt on the life of Potiorek. The plan failed. On his way home in the train, Mehmedbašić had panicked at the sight of uniformed policemen and flushed his phial of poison down the toilet (the dagger he was supposed to dip in it was tossed from a window). The other two Sarajevan recruits were Cvijetko Popović, an academically brilliant eighteen-year-old high-school student, and Vaso Čubrilović, brother of the young schoolteacher who had led the boys to the house of the Kerović family. At seventeen years of age, Čubrilović, another schoolroom rebel, was the youngest of the crew. He had never met Ilić before the cell was put together and the two local boys did not meet Princip, Mehmedbašić, Čabrinović and Grabež until after the assassination.
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Ilić's choice of collaborators – a man with a proven record of ineptitude in carrying out high-risk assignments and two completely inexperienced schoolboys – seems bizarre at first glance, but there was method in the madness. The real purpose of the Sarajevan second cell was to cover the tracks of the conspiracy. In this connection, Mehmedbašić was an inspired choice, because he was a willing, if incompetent, assassin, and thus useful backup for the Belgrade cell, but not a Serb. As Black Hand members, Ilić and Princip could be depended upon (in theory) to take their own lives, or at least remain silent after the event. The Sarajevo boys would be unable to testify, for the simple reason that they knew nothing about the larger background to the plot. The impression would thus emerge that this was a purely local undertaking, with no links to Belgrade.

How much did Nikola Pašić know of the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand, and what steps did he take to prevent it? It is virtually certain that Pašić was informed of the plan in some detail. There are several indications of this, but the most eloquent testimony is that of Ljuba Jovanović, minister of education in the Pašić government. Jovanović recalled (in a memoir fragment published in 1924 but probably written much earlier) that Pašić had told the Serbian cabinet ‘at the end of May or the beginning of June' that ‘there were people who were preparing to go to Sarajevo to kill Franz Ferdinand'. The entire cabinet, including Pašić, agreed that the prime minister should issue instructions to the frontier authorities along the Drina to prevent a crossing.
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Other documents and scraps of testimony, compounded by Pašić's own strange and obfuscating behaviour after 1918, further reinforce the case for Pašić's foreknowledge of the plot.
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But
how
did he know? His informant was probably – though this supposition rests on indirect evidence – none other than the Serbian Railways employee and Black Hand agent Milan Ciganović, who was, it would appear, a personal agent of the prime minister himself, charged with keeping an eye on the activities of the secret society. If this was so, then Pašić possessed detailed and timely knowledge, not only of the plot, but of the persons and organization behind it.
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The three Sarajevo-bound assassins who entered Bosnia at the end of May left virtually no trace in the Serbian official records. In any case they were not the only ones moving weapons illegally across the border in the summer of 1914. Reports from the Serbian border authorities during the first half of June reveal a dense web of covert cross-border activity. On 4 June, the district chief of Podrinje at Sabac alerted the minister of the interior, Protić, to a plan by officers working with the border control ‘to transfer a certain quantity of bombs and weapons using some of our people in Bosnia'. The district chief had considered impounding the weapons, but as these were in a suitcase that was already on the Bosnian side of the border, he feared that an attempt to retrieve it might incriminate or expose the operations of the frontier forces. Further enquiries revealed that the agent who was supposed to take charge of the weapons on the Bosnian side was none other than Rade Malobabić.
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