Sarajevo's Archconspirator

Irrepressible Sarajevo was at it again last week, paying public homage to another hero of the assassination which put Sarajevo on the map and started the World War.

Sturdy peasants mounted guard all night over a simple coffin which had arrived by truck. Officially the Government of dictatorial King Alexander frowns on Sarajevo's bland assassinophilia, but His Majesty's police know better than to try 'to thwart such resolute citizens. After the all-night vigil, peasants put the coffin on a cart, decked it with flowers. On either side of the road brawny youths and robust girls of Sarajevo's so-called "athletic associations" mounted vigorous guard. Slowly the cart creaked to Sarajevo's cemetery and there proud gravediggers buried the bones of the archconspirator who instigated Student Gavrilo Princip to assassinate Austria's Crown Prince, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Who was this archconspirator? Outside the grim circle of his admirers, his name is scarcely known, but Sarajevo has waited and schemed 17 years for a chance to bury Vladimir Gachinovich.

"He was a pure intellectual, how pure!" cried Sarajevo's discreet public mourner, an adept at praising heroes of the assassination in terms to which the police can take no exception. Though he himself killed no man, Vladimir Gachinovich, son of an Orthodox priest, was said in Serbian police reports of 1913 to "hold half the revolutionary youth of Bosnia in his hands." Sarajevo was then the capital of Bosnia and still treasured in the town are copies of the celebrated pamphlet, The Death of a Hero, by Vladimir Gachinovich, glorifying the assassination in 1910 of the Governor of Bosnia.

"That pamphlet made our Vladimir," his admirers in Sarajevo solemnly declare. "It fired the heart of every brave man amongst us against the tyrant Franz Josef and his heir."

In 1914 Archconspirator Gachinovich had been obliged to flee to Switzerland, but Bosnian rebels went to confer with him and at these conferences the details of Franz Ferdinand's assassination were worked out. Student Princip, the actual assassin, was designated by Vladimir Gachinovich as his trustiest and most intimate friend. Too intellectual to risk being present when the shots that started the War were fired, Vladimir Gachinovich also did not feel called upon to enlist or fight, stayed on quietly at Lausanne where he peacefully died in 1917.

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