Patriots & Princip

Serbians, what are Serbians? Assassins!

Wilhelm II (1914)

Every child in Serbia (now Jugoslavia) knows that Ferdinand Gavrillo Princip is the name of the young man from the province of Bosnia who, on June 28, 1914, assassinated the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, and thus kindled the World War. Last week an heroic statue in honor of the late Princip was carted into ominous Serajevo. Patriots made ready for the formal unveiling next week. Excited little girls wove wreaths and little boys practiced piping songs to honor the Great Assassin.

Everything depends, of course, upon the point of view. Soon after his crime young Princip, whom the Austrian Imperial Prosecutor grimly called "too young to hang," was locked up under a sentence of "solitary confinement in a darkened cell for life." As was intended, he withered in the damp dark, died of consumption.

When the War started by Princip shattered Imperial Austria, his province of Bosnia with its capital Serajevo entered the new kingdom of "Greater Serbia" or Jugoslavia, and the Great Assassin seemed from the point of view of his people a pure hero. They tore out a wall tablet erected in mourning for the assassinated Archduke, replaced it with a laudatory tablet to Princip, surmounting his name with laurel wreaths. Protests from abroad caused the Jugoslavian Government to order the Princip tablet covered with a thin layer of plaster, the official position being that it has been obliterated, while the populace consider that the Government is pretty slick. But the new heroic statue would seem to be definitive, a proclamation to the world in marble that the end can justify the means, that the most dastardly of crimes can become a spotless deed.

Belief that Serbian assassins are still quickest on the trigger was fortified, last week, by the conduct of Mme. Darinka Radojevitch, socially prominent and temperamental wife of a leading Belgrade builder.

Sued for divorce by her husband, she began her defense by horsewhipping him on the courthouse steps. In court, Builder Radojevitch seated himself tenderly in the witness chair and proceeded to give damaging testimony to the effect that his wife had been in voluntary and culpable connection with a number of handsome Hungarian officers during the War. Other witnesses stood ready to corroborate. Her black eyes flashing, Mme. Radojevitch pulled from her reticule an automatic pistol, fired wildly in all directions. When the smoke cleared away her husband lay dying on the floor, his chief witness was gravely wounded, the presiding justice and clerk of the court were hiding under their desks.

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