The dropout who drew first blood in 1914

The Trigger — Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher (Chatto, £18.99)

In the depths of the siege of Sarajevo in 1994, Tim Butcher, a young reporter for the Telegraph, became intrigued by the hive of activity round a rundown brick building just off the main drag. Because it was just out of the line of sight of the Serb snipers, it had become a fetid public latrine. Closer inspection revealed it to be the tomb and last resting place of Gavrilo Princip and his co-conspirators in the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914.

He was bitten by curiosity about how and why Gavrilo and his friends came to be dumped here and forgotten, neither heroes nor villains to most of their fellow countrymen — though the killing of the Archduke was to lead to the destruction of nearly a quarter of the Serb population, and millions more besides, over the next four years. Princip himself was to die at the end of the Great War of tuberculosis in the imperial Austrian jail at Theresienstadt, infamous later as a holding centre for prisoners destined for the Nazi extermination camps.

In his search for Princip, Tim Butcher has produced the most imaginative and singular book on the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War to date. It is a lot more than a study of Princip and his role as the trigger — hence the title — of global war. It is a piece of expeditionary journalism, an investigation in time, place and spirit, of the highest order.

The investigations and reflections are framed by a physical journey from Princip’s birthplace in remote west Herzegovina to Sarajevo, where he went to school, and Belgrade, where he was armed. For much of the way he walks the same route Gavrilo and his father took to go to school in Sarajevo. In doing so he weaves in his own experiences as a reporter in Bosnia in the fratricidal 1990s.

In Obljaj, Butcher discovers a graffiti inscription by Gavrilo, dated 1909, on one of his last summer trips home. In the village he encounters Princip relations, now too poor to offer the guest the traditional, and normally obligatory, hospitality of coffee.

Along the way he recalls the fighting of the 1990s with his translator of that time, Arnie. In Zenica he came across a gang of Gulf Arabs determined to bring extreme Islamism to Bosnia. Their leaders had direct links to Osama bin Laden, and though few could have known it at the time, were to be instrumental in the 9/11 conspiracy.

Further east he is reunited with Dzile Omerovic, who led a column of Bosnian Muslims fleeing over the mountains from the UN enclave of Srebrenica after it was overrun by Ratko Mladic’s Serbs in July 1995. Within days the Serbs had massacred thousands of Muslim males. Passing that way some time later, Butcher found himself driving into a woodland carpeted with human bones.

The pivot of the story, and its mystery, rests on Princip. Turning up his school reports, later burned in Sarajevo’s riots in 2012, Butcher discovers the classic clever but disaffected outsider — the associative maladaptive personality in counter-terrorism jargon — the dropout bent on drastic and dastardly deeds: a human bomb.

He was not a mainstream Serb nationalist, like the membership of the notorious Black Hand secret society. In yearning to release all South Slavs from the Austro-Hungarian yoke he was a prototype Yugoslav in essence, hence the disdain of the ethnic nationalists, Serb and Croat, then and now.

This is expeditionary journalism at its best — a historical inquest radiated through the mind and experience of an outstanding reporter. The subjective eye, and the use of the perpendicular pronoun, have none of the overblown self-indulgence of today’s television pontificators and heavy metal military historians. Tim Butcher, along with James Fergusson, Anthony Loyd and Alec Russell, is the best of the kind I have worked alongside. They all show that there is still life and good writing in real reporting, whatever the gloomsters may say.

Go to eveningstandard.ca/booksdirect to buy this book for £15.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p