Turning Point

The Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand might well have escaped assassination in Sarajevo in 1914, and the First World War might not have broken out then - if chauffeur had been told of a change in plan. At the beginning of the archduke’s visit to the capital of Bosnia, then under Austrian rule, a bomb was thrown at his car. But it fell on the road and injured the occupants of the car behind. Panicked by the failure, six other would-be assassins - all members of the bomb-throwers group - left their posts along the route. Later, after an official reception at the city hall, the archduke announced that he wanted to go to the hospital to visit the injured men. Nobody passed on the message to the chauffeurs, though, so the leading car turned to follow the route originally planned to a museum - and Franz Ferdinand’s driver followed suit. Realizing the mistake, the governor of Bosnia, who was riding with the archduke, told the chauffeur to turn around. The driver stopped and began to reverse, precisely opposite the spot where one of the last conspirators, Gavrilo Princip, was standing on the pavement. With his target only a few metres away in an almost motionless open car, Princip could hardly miss. He shot both the archduke and his wife, and was about to shoot himself when he was seized by bystanders. Because Princip was only 19 he escaped the death penalty, but he survived only 4 years before dying in 1918 of tuberculosis in an Austrian prison.