nothing. For nothing, all the training, the planning, the efforts, the hardship of the last four weeks.
Exactly a month ago, on May 28, he had left Belgrade with his two cohorts, Graben and Cabrinovic. Sarajevo lay a little more than a hundred miles away, but it had taken the three youths eight days to cover the distance. Through part of the journey within Serbia they trudged across forest and bush to avoid police checking out transients. Princip didn't mind. He was the youngest, smallest, frailest of the trio. He was also the commander of the mission. With the Black Hand in Belgrade he had mapped out a route, tortuous but safe, called the 'Apis Tunnel.'
The Tunnel worked. At the town of Sabac, the first station of their trip, Princip found a Serbian Army Captain playing the right exotic card game at the right coffee-house terrace (that of the Cafe Amerika) at the right time of day. The captain, a Black Hand agent, excused himself 'to go for a walk with my nephew.' When Princip rejoined his mission-mates half an hour later, he carried in his pocket papers identifying the group as 'customs officers' with Princip as 'the sergeant in charge.'
They were now ready to cross the border into Austria. And just then Princip found himself badly beset by a problem he thought he had eliminated at the outset.
While still in Belgrade he had made his partners take a vow as solemn as their Black Hand oath: to exercise utmost caution and discretion; to avoid all social contacts save those required by common courtesy; to leave politics out of all conversations with outsiders; and, of course, to tell no one the truth of where they were ultimately going or why. The rule applied to all encounters, be they Austrian, Croat or Serb, no matter how friendly. Even a Serb might be an undercover minion of the Serb Prime Minister who was Apis's foe. 'What your enemy should not know, you must not tell your friend.'
Grabel, a juvenile delinquent until his politicization by Princip, honored this pledge. The unpleasant surprise was Cabrinovic. Cabrinovic had been an activist even before he'd met Princip. He'd seemed cool and dedicated during target practice in Belgrade. That changed when they embarked on the awesome adventure itself; when they'd marched up the gangplank of the steamer with weaponry and cyanide under their coats, committed to slaughter or suicide or both.
At that point Cabrinovic had begun to be nervously garrulous. It was as if he wanted to save his life by 'accidentally' giving away the mission. While still on the ship he struck up a prolonged conversation-with a gendarme, of all people. Luckily an impassive, incurious gendarme.
Princip admonished him afterwards, to little effect. In a town close to the Austrian border, Cabrinovic ran into an acquaintance, a fellow volunteer for Serbia in the Balkan War of the previous year. With him, Cabrinovic's talk became so unnaturally animated that his coat fell open to reveal the bombs. Princip dragged him away just in time.
More folly at Koviljaca, a spa near their entry spot into Habsburg terrain. Here Princip decided that they should act like ordinary tourists, engaged in tourist activities like buying postcards. Princip addressed his own card to a cousin in Belgrade, with the message that he was on his way to a monastery where he would prepare himself for high school finals. But Cabrinovic? He wrote to friends in Sarajevo and Trieste, inside the Austrian Empire where mail was likely to be monitored at the border. Worse yet, Cabrinovic scribbled on one such chancy card the Serb nationalist saying 'A good man and a horse will always find a way to break through.'
That was too much for Princip, who always reviewed his crew's correspondence. He tore up the card, took Cabrinovic to a toilet stall in a cafe where he confiscated Cabrinovic's bombs and pistol. He informed Cabrinovic that he must make the rest of the journey alone; alone, he was less likely to endanger his companions or the task they must fulfill. He was to enter Austria separately, at one of the alternate crossing points designated by the Black Hand. If all went well, they would reunite in Sarajevo.
***
And reunite they did at the Bosnian capital on June 4, with Cabrinovic arriving, obediently, by a different path. Princip had chastised him into prudence, at least for a while. But at Sarajevo Princip met trouble from another source. It was also unexpected: Ilia.
Ilia, the fourth of the quartet of conspirators, had been among Princip's earliest companions in the cause, while Princip had lived in Sarajevo. Ilic had remained there with the Black Hand's knowledge and encouragement. His job: to scout security measures taken in the city, along with other details of the Archduke's coming. Ilk had served as the Sarajevo pillar of the developing plot. Princip found the pillar turning into putty.
Ilic's first words were that he had recruited three more youths 'as auxiliaries' in the planned assassination.
'You've tripled the chances of betrayal!' Princip said.
Ilic protested. These three, he said, were all proven idealists. In fact, they would be valuable as part of the core of a new party that might be formed and whose formation might perhaps be a better tactic than the planned action-
Better than the action against the Archduke? Princip couldn't believe his ears.
Well, he had been thinking about it, Ilia said. Better in the sense that-that killing the Archduke at this point might perhaps turn people against the Black Hand, but perhaps if a political party were started first, why, it would give the cause a more legitimate base, make it more widely popular, and then, perhaps, there would be very strong popular support for a radical act later, so that's why he, Ilia, had founded a legal political weekly just three weeks ago, it was called Zvono ('The Bell') and it would help create a more revolutionary climate with the ideas of Friedrich Engels, Bakunin, Trotsky buttressing the Serb cause-
'No,' Princip said.
The anxiety that had spilled crudely out of Cabrinovic was now pouring, more intellectualized, out of Ilia. Nothing but anxiety lay behind all this stuttering.
Princip's small hand came down hard on Ilic's shoulder. No, he told Ilia. There was no 'perhaps.' There was no 'better tactic.' There was only the deed it was their duty to do. They had not come together in Sarajevo as Socialists or journalists or intellectual politicians. They were warriors for Serb freedom. They had sworn to act. Now they must prepare to perform the action.
Princip's words did not cure Ilia of dread. But Princip's unblinking blue eyes and unrelenting low voice subdued Ilk's resistance. For the next three weeks Ilia kept nursing his misgivings obliquely in the pages of Zvono. In the June 15 issue he discussed 'Seven Who Were Hanged,' a story by the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev, praising it as 'a significant contribution to the argument against capital punishment.' Ilia printed Andreyev's own comment that'… it is my intention with this tale to point out the horror and impermissibility of capital punishment. The death penalty confuses the conscience of even resolute men…'
But even as Ilic's essay impugned capital punishment, he himself helped Princip trigger the death sentence to be visited on the Habsburg heir apparent.
Ilk arranged for Princip's lodging at his mother's house. Ilia retrieved the conspirators' arsenal. Princip, ever vigilant, had avoided the risk of entering Sarajevo armed; the bombs and pistols had been deposited with a 'safe' cinema proprietor in Tuzla, a town close to Sarajevo. Ilk, who knew the pattern of local police surveillance, brought the weapons into the city. On the day he published his brief against capital punishment, Ilia obediently placed the instruments of execution under Princip's bed.
Together Princip and Ilia combed Sarajevo newspapers for the Archduke's specific whereabouts during his forthcoming visit. The big Jesuit-controlled daily Hrvatski Dnevnik spoke the loyalist sympathies of Catholic Bosnia (as opposed to the much more Belgrade-minded Greek Orthodox element). Hrvatski Dnevnik looked forward to the Archduke with headlines like HAIL, OUR HOPE! but with no information interesting to people who wanted to get that hope into their gunsights. The German-language Die Bosnische Post was more helpful. In Princip's band only Ilia fully had mastered the oppressors' tongue, and on June 18 he found in Die Bosnische Post the Archduke's exact itinerary through the city. He mapped it out for Princip long before it appeared on posters calling on the populace to line their Crown Prince's path with cheers.
Every day before the Archduke's arrival, fear and doubt flickered through Ilk. Every day he helped Princip inch closer to the thing he feared and doubted. After a while Princip ran out of the money handed him by the Black Hand in Belgrade. Ilk gave him 'a loan' of twenty kronen. When that ran out, Princip ordered Ilia to procure gainful employment for himself and Cabrinovic. Ilk found Princip office work at a welfare society. He got Cabrinovic a job at a printing plant.
Ilk also acted as navigator, evading police patrols, when the band visited Graben who lived with a girl friend in the village of Pale, 15 miles southeast of Sarajevo. As the band strolled through Pale's remote meadows, Princip
