June 28, 1914

Seven young men waited along the Appel Quay that morning with bombs and pistols supplied from Belgrade. The car was open and the route had been printed in the newspapers.

The first two did nothing as the motorcade passed. The third threw a bomb; it bounced off the folded roof and went off under the car behind, wounding a score of people. The Archduke went on to the town hall and lost his temper with the mayor, who had begun reading a speech of welcome: I come here as your guest and your people greet me with bombs.

He then decided to go to the hospital to see the wounded officers. Nobody told the lead driver the route had changed. At the corner of Franz Josef Street the first car turned right, the Archduke's followed, and General Potiorek shouted that it was the wrong way. The driver stopped to reverse.

Gavrilo Princip, nineteen years old, had given up and gone to a food shop on that corner. He was standing five feet away when the car stopped in front of him. He fired twice.

Sophie was hit in the abdomen and Franz Ferdinand in the neck. She died in the car; he died minutes later at the Governor's residence. His last words, to her, were that she must live for the children. He was fifty, she was forty-six, and it was four days short of their fourteenth anniversary.

Austria-Hungary sent an ultimatum to Serbia on the twenty-third of July. Serbia accepted all of it but one clause. Austria declared war on the twenty-eighth, Russia mobilised, Germany declared war on Russia and then on France, and Britain came in when the German army entered Belgium.

Something between fifteen and twenty-two million people were killed in the four years that followed. The three orphaned children were sent to relatives; the two boys were later held in Dachau.

Princip was nineteen - too young to hang under Austrian law. He died of tuberculosis in prison in April 1918, seven months before the empire did.