Before Bruno realized it, the time had arrived. Today was the 28th of June, 1914… A day that would instantly be recognizable to an educated individual, one that would forever live on in infamy. Both in this life, and of course, Bruno’s past life.
Gavrilo Princip was a name that a student of history should also instantly recognize. Not even twenty years old on this day, he was thus considered a minor within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its boundaries.
He, along with five other students, had over the course of the last year or so been plotting the assassination of the Habsburg dynasty’s heir apparent. They had been trained, armed, and given the resources necessary to conduct this attack by hidden elements of the Serbian Government.
In the previous timeline, the man in charge of the group known as the “Black Hand” was the leader of Serbian Intelligence, but Heidi had already dispatched the man to hell in years prior. No doubt, this was because of Bruno’s actions in this new timeline, which had splintered off from the original as a result of the butterfly effect.
Even so, the sisters of fate were hard at work mending the rift between the two timelines, and as a result, an unlikely figure stepped forward to fulfill the role Apis had played in supporting these would-be assassins, whose common goal was the liberation and unification of a
Yugoslav state.
To put it simply, a member of the Serbian Royal Family had seized the initiative to strike back at the Habsburgs, whom he wrongly believed were responsible for the death of Apis and several other key Serbian government and military assets throughout the years.
However, things were not going according to how Young Bosnia and the Black Hand had initially planned. The original intention was to bomb the Archduke’s motorcade, but due to a series of mishaps, the perpetrators had utterly failed to do so.
Worse yet, this had alerted the authorities to what they were trying to do. A less determined man would have called off any further attacks, choosing instead to regroup and reorganize for another attempt.
But fate demanded Franz Ferdinand’s death. Because of this, Gavrilo Princip immediately planned to intercept the car carrying the Austrian Archduke as he tried desperately to return to the safety of his lodgings.
Just as in the previous timeline, the driver of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car took a wrong turn—a wrong turn that directly led to precisely where Gavrilo Princip was standing at the moment they hit the brakes and came to a stop.
At first, the young student gazed in awe, almost as if the heavens were supporting him from behind the scenes. He then fumbled into his pocket, pulling out the FN Model 1910 semi- automatic pistol chambered in .380 ACP that the Black Hand had given him to accomplish the sinister deed.
He already knew the gun was loaded and immediately fired off two shots at the motorcade. The first struck the Austrian Archduke in the jugular vein, a death sentence in nearly any era, as one had a limited window of opportunity to be successfully treated for such a fatal wound. And while Gavrilo Princip had tried his best to shoot the current governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a man by the name of Oskar Potiorek, he utterly failed to hit his mark, instead fatally shooting Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, who was Franz Ferdinand’s wife.
In his final moments, a man would reveal who he truly was if given the opportunity to do so. Despite knowing that his death was near, the Archduke of Austria made not the slightest attempt to call for aid for himself.
Rather, his sole concern in that moment was for the well-being of his wife and the mother of his children, as he shouted out his final words, pleading with her to live on for the sake of their offspring.
“Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!”
Gavrilo Princip, realizing he did not have time to get off another shot and hit the man he had tried to kill, pointed his handgun at his own head and was about to pull the trigger.
But fate had other plans in store for the assassin who had just committed the most heinous sin in human history-an act of murder that would compel millions of men to kill each other over the course of the next four years. And with its conclusion, the death of Western Civilization. No, Gavrilo Princip was prevented from taking his own life after he cowardly ambushed and shot the heir apparent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as his innocent wife. He was immediately seized by the authorities, or at least those who were not desperately trying to stave off death’s attempts to reap the souls of their monarchs.
But unfortunately, both the Archduke and his wife would be pronounced dead not long after, orphaning their three children and causing an international incident so severe it would kick off one of the deadliest wars in human history.
The next day, Bruno read about the deaths of the Archduke of Austria and his wife. He didn’t even finish his breakfast, nor his coffee. Instead, he placed the newspaper down on the table and walked off with a rather ominous statement, one that only Heidi would understand among those who were present to witness it.
“And so it begins…”
Heidi did not make a move to stop Bruno; instead, she looked down at the paper he had been reading moments before and saw the headlines. It had finally come, what Bruno had been warning her about for years, what his entire life’s goal revolved around.
Within a month’s time, Bruno would be shipped off to lead men into battle in the Great War. Heidi could not help but wipe a tear from her eye, hoping her young children did not witness it, as she silently thought to herself a litany of prayers to protect her husband and ensure that he emerged victorious.
Not only for his own sake or that of their family, but for all of Germany… Because she was all too aware, after Bruno’s confession, of how the world would end up should the German Reich
lose this war.