When Gavrilo Princip fired his pistol at point blank range into the bodies of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek, Duchess Von Hohenberg, few would have countenanced that twenty million would die in a global conflict that would begin just 30 days later.

A beautiful June day had already been marred by an attempt on the Archduke’s life, a bomb had been thrown at the royal car only for the driver to accelerate and the ten second fuse creating an explosion under the following car.

The Archduke, never the most even tempered of people, was enraged when the mayor of Sarajevo (the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina which had been annexed by the Austrians in 1908) had rather foolishly said that he hoped the royal couple were enjoying their warm welcome. On leaving the town hall reception the Archduke insisted on visiting his injured comrades in the hospital and it was a confusion in the route to be taken after that visit that led the royal couple’s car to come to a standstill in front of Princip, who had been part of the terrorist gang responsible for the earlier failed bombing.

Princip took his chance and walked up to the open top car leaned in and fired, mortally wounding the royal couple with the Archduke’s final tender words to his wife imploring her to ‘live for the children’.

Princip and five conspirators – armed with pistols and rudimentary hand grenades by the Serbian secret service – had lined the route when the royal couple progressed from Sarajevo station at 10am with the intention of caring out an assassination. At several moments the conspirators had lost their nerve or in the case of the car bombing failed in their objective. Princip had all but given up on his mission when he found himself almost face to face with the royal couple.

On firing his pistol Princip was arrested as were other members of the group. He was to spend nearly four years in prison eventually succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of 24. But far more importantly the assassination of the Archduke was seized upon by hawks in Vienna as a means to settle accounts with their noisy neighbour Serbia but in so doing a series of alliances were triggered across the content that would lead the continent to its first multi-power war in nearly a century.

As a result, the tragic day in Sarajevo has also had a deep resonance for all interested in WW1. It is the moment when the old world of empires and monarchs was to disappear to be replaced first by the horrors of industrial warfare but then later the political collapse of a continent and that we still feel the ripples from today.

Sophie’s Great War Tours offer bespoke, personal tours of all the major theatres of WW1, with a particular focus on the WW1 trenches today. One thing we really pride ourselves on at SGWT is putting your bespoke tour experience into both a personal and wider context.