On this day 100 years ago, Gavrilo Princip narrowly escaped the death penalty and was sentenced instead to 20 years' imprisonment for shooting dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, four months earlier in the city of Sarajevo.
The prosecution had argued in vain that his birth certificate was mistaken, making him 20 and therefore eligible to hang.
The impact of Princip's crime was greater than he could have envisaged in his wilder dreams. It propelled international powers, by domino effect starting with the empire's declaration of war on Serbia, into the First World War and profoundly influenced events throughout the remainder of the young century.
My first, impertinent thought about Trigger, a superb book from my friend and former colleague Tim Butcher, was that some men will do anything to get away from the wife and kids for a while. In his case, it is grossly unfair; his wife, Jane, also a friend and former colleague, is a treasure and I'll take her word for it that they've produced great children.
But off Tim went all the same to retrace the steps taken by Princip from the wretchedly poor village of his birth, Obljaj, on the first of the journeys that would inject and refine his Serb nationalism and ultimately turn him into an assassin.
As his previous books - including Blood River: a Journey to Africa's Broken Heart - have shown, Tim is an enthusiastic practitioner of derring-do, restlessly robust, adventurous and inquisitive, the last man you would ever imagine settling for pipe and slippers.
The trek he made was a gruelling one, with bears and minefields among the obvious hazards. His book makes it sound no less a challenge than that suggests, but draws the reader into its spirit of endurance and discovery. Somehow along the way, he even managed to blag a way backstage to interview the lead singer of the rock group that adopted Franz Ferdinand as its name.
The journey would have been a lot harder to make, and less fruitful, had Tim not been able to enlist Arnie Hecimovic, a Bosnian he had first known as a scrawny youth trying his hand at fixing and translating for foreign journalists during the Balkan conflict but who had become picture editor at The Guardian.
Even for a man to whom the hills and valleys were so familiar, Tim must have been a difficult walking companion for whom creature comforts at overnight stops rarely seem more than a distraction from the task in hand.
But with what I expect was invaluable help from Arnie, he introduces us to a procession of fascinating characters met along the way, from descendants of Princip's own family to two Bosnian Muslim imams fishing for trout in a mountain stream.
He unearths hidden, neglected or previously undocumented images and information, reflects on the far-reaching effect Princip's actions had in the decades that followed the assassination and war and mixes travel writing, investigative reporting and historical analysis with a richness of language I simply do not recall from his days as The Daily Telegraph's defence correspondent. What constraints he must have felt back in those days.
In the event, Princip's escape from the gallows was hardly a passport to survival. He was kept, deliberately so, in such miserable conditions of cold and malnutrition, a once-avid scholar denied reading material, that his sentence was not so far short of one of death after all. He died from TB three-and-a-half-year into his sentence.
This momentous year for world war commemoration has unleashed a torrent of publications and films about the two great conflicts of the last century. Many others are as powerful in their own ways as Tim Butcher's important work. But anyone limiting their reading time to a single book could do worse than select Trigger.
* Trigger, published by Chatto and Windus, can be bought at the usual knockdown prices at Salut!'s Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/070118793X/salusund-21
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