The two pistol shots that started the World War were fired on St. Vitus Day. When that day came round last week harassed King Alexander of Jugoslavia had harder work than ever to keep his subjects from celebrating with high glee the double murder that freed so many of them from Imperial Austria.
On the 20th anniversary of the Sarajevo murders the World Press was full of solemn editorials but in Sarajevo survivors of the plot took their ease in the snug cafe of Papa Semiz on King Peter's Street.
Three youths prepared for the crime at one of Papa Semiz' beer-stained tables. Being minors, they could not receive the death sentence, but all three were cast into damp Austrian dungeons where they died in a few years of consumption. Papa Semiz, however, has lived on and so have some of the three youths' accomplices, notably Victor Rupchich, a newspaper editor who was back in the cafe at the fatal hour last week for a glass of scorching slivovitz.
"I remember it all as if it happened yesterday," said Papa Semiz. "It was there in that corner, just against the window, that Gavrilo Princip sat just 20 years ago while he waited for my clock to strike the hour.
"He sat there quite alone over his coffee. The streets were crowded outside. Cheers told us of the coming of Franz Ferdinand. Princip got up calmly and paid his bill and walked out. Fifteen minutes later people rushed in and told me that Princip had stood calmly against the barber shop on the corner and fired two shots."
"I stood with Princip!" cut in Editor Rupchich proudly. "The first shot killed the Archduke and the second killed his wife Sophie as she flung herself over him. Then I remember that Count Harrock of Austria rushed upon my poor friend Princip and split his shoulder to the bone with one blow of a sabre. Horrible!"
While the slivovitz circulated last week Papa Semiz philosophized. "That was the beginning and the end of the War for us in Sarajevo. No more shots were fired here. Men were conscripted to fight for the Austrians and they came home to find themselves Jugoslavs. So much the better! I never thought that that young student Princip sipping his coffee in my café would throw Kings and Emperors and Sultans off their thrones and upset the World by two pistol shots."
Over the barber shop, on the wall against which Student Princip leaned, his fellow townsmen of Sarajevo have erected a handsome plaque: "ON THIS HISTORIC SPOT GAVRILO PRINCIP HERALDED THE ADVENT OF LIBERTY ON ST. VITUS DAY, JUNE 28TH 1914." In the cemetery outside the town is a tablet to "THE HEROES OF ST. VITUS DAY," Shooter Princip, Nedielko Cabrinovic, whose clumsily thrown bomb glanced harmlessly off Archduke Franz Ferdinand's shoulder earlier in the day, and Trifko Grabez who helped Princip and Cabrinovic get their weapons from Serbia.
Quietly, 80 miles south of Sarajevo, live Hero Princip's honored parents, simple peasants. Though proud of him and unremitting in their prayers for the safety of his soul, they are proud too of his brother, the Hon. Jovan Princip, today a Member of the Jugoslav Chamber of Deputies.
While all was well with the Princips on St. Vitus Day the World burgeoned ominously last week with events far from peaceful: