Borijove Jevtic, a serbian terrorist, describes how the plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand was hatched:
A tiny clipping from a newspaper mailed without comment from a secret band of terrorists in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, to their comrades in Belgrade, was the torch which set the world afire with war in 1914. That bit of paper wrecked old proud empires. It gave birth to new, free nations.
I was one of the members of the terrorist band in Belgrde which received it and, in those days, I and my companions were regarded as desperate criminals. A price was on our heads. Today my little band is seen in a different light, as pioneer patriots. It is recognized that our secret plans hatched in an obscure café in the capital of old Serbia, have led to the independence of the new Yugoslavia, the united nation set free from Austrian domination.
The little clipping was from The Srobobran, a Croatian journal of limited circulation, and consisted of a short telegram from Vienna. This telegram declared that the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand would visit Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, on 28 June, to direct army manoeuvres in the neighbouring mountains.
It reached our meeting place, the café called Zeatna Moruana, one night the latter part of April 1914...At a small table in a very humble café, beneath a flickering gas jet we sat and read it. There was no advice or admonition sent with it. Only four letters and two numerals were sufficient to make us unanimous, without discussion, as to what we should do about it. They were contained in the fateful date, 28 June.
How dared Franz Ferdinand, not only the representative of the oppressor but in his own person an arrogant tyrant, enter Sarajevo on that day? Such an entry was a studied insult.
The date of 28 June is engraved deeply in the heart of every Serb, so that the day has a name of its own. It is called Vidovdan. It is the day on which the old Serbian kingdom was conquered by the Turks at the battle of Amselfelde in 1389. It is also the day on which in the Second Balkan War the Serbian arms took glorious revenge on the Turk for his old victory and for the years of enslavement.
That was no day for Franz Ferdinand, the new oppressor, to venture to the very doors of Serbia for a display of the force of arms which kept us beneath his heel.
Our decision was taken almost immediately. Death to the tyrant!
Excerpt from We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century by Robert Fox