![]() This legend, not found in the history books but preserved as an oral tradition among Austria’s huntsmen, records that, in 1913, the heavily-armed Archduke had shot a rare white stag, and that it was widely believed of any hunter who killed such an animal “that he or a member of his family shall die within a year.” There is nothing inherently implausible in this legend – or at least not in the idea that Franz Ferdinand might have mown down a rare animal without thinking twice about it. įran Ferdinand as hunter, with the day’s bagĪccording to yet another story, moreover, Franz Ferdinand had every reason to suppose that he was bound to die. ![]() In the account of one relative, he had told told some friends the month before his death that “I know I shall soon be murdered.” A third source has the doomed man “extremely depressed and full of forebodings” a few days before the assassination took place. One of them, according to an imperial aide, was the fortune teller who had, with spooky prescience, apparently told the Archduke that “he would one day let loose a world war.” That story has an after-the-fact tang for me (who, before July 1914, spoke in terms of a “world war”? A European war, perhaps.) Yet it seems pretty well established that Franz Ferdinand himself had premonitions of an early end. The assassination proved so momentous that it is not surprising that there were plenty of people ready to say, afterwards, that they had seen it coming. There was nothing any doctor could have done to save either of them. Sophie was hit in the stomach, and her husband in the neck, the bullet severing his jugular vein. ![]() It is absolutely astonishing that both rounds proved almost immediately fatal. I even turned my head as I shot.” Even allowing for the point-blank range, it is pretty striking, given these circumstances, that the killer fired just two bullets, and yet one struck Franz Ferdinand’s wife, Sophie – who was sitting alongside him – while the other hit the heir to the throne. According to his own later testimony, Princip confessed: “Where I aimed I do not know,” adding that he had raised his gun “against the automobile without aiming. Instead, he was forced to resort to his pistol, but failed to actually aim it. Princip (seen in the photo at the head of this entry being manhandled away just after the shooting) was so hemmed in by the crowd that he was unable to pull out and prime the bomb he was carrying. For the Archduke to be presented, as a stationary target, to the one man in a crowd of thousands still determined to kill him was a remarkable example of sheer bad luck, but, even then, the odds still favoured Franz Ferdinand’s survival. It was chauffeur Leopold Lojka’s unfamiliarity with the new route that led him to take a wrong turning and, confused, pull to a halt just six feet from Princip himself. It was Franz Ferdinand’s impulsive decision, later in the day, to visit the wounded in hospital – a decision none of his assassins could possibly have predicted – that took him directly past the spot where Gavrilo Princip, the man who actually killed him, had decided pretty much at random to position himself. That bomb injured several members of the Imperial entourage, and these men were taken to hospital. ![]() The appalling combination of implausible circumstance that resulted in assassination is one Franz Ferdinand had survived an earlier attempt to kill him on the fateful day, emerging unscathed from the explosion of a bomb that bounced off the folded hood of the his convertible and exploded under a car following behind him in his motorcade. Seen from the Fortean perspective, however, the events of that day in Sarajevo have interesting aspects that often go unremarked. To say that all this is well-known is a bit of an understatement.
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