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One fatal shot hit the archduke in the jugular vein, the other struck the archduchess in the abdomen. From the archduke's throat a thin stream of blood spurted onto the face of an aide. "For God's sake, what has happened to you?" the archduchess cried out to her stricken husband. "Then she sank down from her seat," the aide recalled. "His Royal Highness said, 'Soferl, Soferl! Don't die. Live for my children.' " The aide grasped the slumping archduke by the collar and asked if he were in great pain. The dying archduke said, "It is nothing," then repeated that six or seven times until the words turned into "a convulsive rattle."
Princip swallowed his cyanide pill, but it did him little harm. Neither did the authorities who convicted him of murder but could not execute him because he was a minor. Sentenced to 20 years, he died of tuberculosis in prison in 1918. By then, the war that started with a punitive Austrian attack on Serbia had bled all of Europe white. But Princip's deed did finally achieve its purpose. In the redrawing of maps that followed the war, the Austro-Hungarian empire dissolved into fragments; both Serbia and Bosnia were included in the new state of Yugoslavia.
That did not end the fighting, of course. When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Sarajevo and its mountains became a center of fierce resistance. Both German and Allied bombers raided the city. Nearly 15% of its inhabitants died in the war. The Slavs remember such things proudly. That is why Princip, who is regarded by most of the world as a fanatic, is commemorated here by the two footprints near the river.
