poilu, but his turn will come, when will he die, will he fall in a few months on the Chemin des Dames, cut in half by a machine gun, decapitated by barbed wire or disintegrated by a mine in his trench, will he cry as he holds his warm smelly guts in his hands, will he call for his mother, will he look like a ghost for his arm sticking up somewhere in the mud, you’re in the ground, in the first lines that are made of dirt churned up by bombs, barely shored up, you reach the 329th infantry commanded by an officer you’ve never seen before, there’s X, there’s Y, they all know it’s best to leave the man on leave to his silence, they’re all muddy covered in lice starving it’s been seventy-two hours since you saw them unconsciously you look for the missing ones you see the missing ones then you say nothing, the lieutenant makes a curt sign with his head you set down your kit you look for a position you clutch your Lebel sitting as if in a train you’re back and a part of you most of you has remained behind, back there where you savor the end of the world, the pistol shot of Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo marks the beginning of the race to horror, on June 28, 1914, Gavrilo nineteen years of age thin and tubercular weapon in hand cyanide in his pocket pieces together the destroyed world three empires and rushes me without knowing it into this train ninety years later, near Parma judging from the suburban lights, Gavrilo the Bosnian Serb believed in the Great Serbia that I did my share to undo, the little activist was lucky, like Jaurès’s assassin on the Rue Montmartre he was in a café, the plans failed, the bomb that was supposed to make an end to Franz Ferdinand didn’t explode beneath the right car, the archduke is still alive, for his misfortune Gavrilo Princip is beloved of Hera, the clever goddess will blind the Austrian chauffeur and the motorcade will come up to Princip, up to his café, Moritz Schiller’s café at the corner of the street facing the tiny bridge it’s a fine day he just has to go out leave his cup half empty take the capsule of poison in his left hand the weapon in his right and shoot, did he have time to observe the Habsburg’s surprised mustaches, the quivering lips of the beautiful Sophie his wife killed instantly, did he glimpse the millions of dead who gushed forth along with the Austro-Hungarian blood, was he happy with his shot, did the son of Leto guide his shots, was he proud of his four cartridges, did he hesitate, did he think it’s nice out today I’m in a café I’ll set off the massacre some other day, probably he didn’t have time to reflect, he went out, and according to the police reports he fired from five feet away, eye to eye — Gavrilo Princip would die in turn in Theresienstadt, in the prison of the Czech city where the Reich would install a model ghetto in 1941, thus paying absurd homage to the man who indirectly allowed its advent, piling death on death, a ghetto for artists, for intellectuals, one of the worst concentration camps, it superimposed farce on horror, Gavrilo in his cell in the Theresienstadt castle died in 1918 without having seen the birth of the Kingdom of the Southern Slavs for which he had indirectly fought, and the cyanide capsule served no purpose, he died slowly from tuberculosis, which is why he had been recruited to begin with: a band of tubercular terrorists, condemned men doomed to die soon, that’s the ideal thing, you feel much less remorse sending them to the slaughterhouse — the first time I went to Sarajevo I passed by the former Moritz Schiller café on the corner by the bridge, on the side of the embankment there’s a proud plaque, what does it mean today, what did it mean then, at the height of the siege, along the river where every now and then Serbian or Bosnian mortar shells landed, to remind the international community that times were hard they didn’t hesitate for long to shoot at each other, like the recruits of 1917, just as the waiter on the Place de Clichy gone to the Chemin des Dames would shoot himself in the foot to escape the slaughter, the Muslim army probably shot itself in the foot once or twice, in the agony of the city where Gavrilo Princip, coughing, spitting blood, had killed the brother of the emperor, a bomb looks like a bomb, it has no owners once it’s thrown, the self-mutilations were countless during the war of 1914, some in the hand, others in the fat of the belly, and I understand those Bosnian artillerymen, exasperated by international indifference, who probably used the tactics of the exhausted poilu, hoping that the American planes circling around them would end up putting the Serbian batteries out of commission and I imagine, just as the young soldier points his Lebel at his shoe and pulls the trigger, that they must have hesitated for a long time before shooting at their own men, or not, maybe like Gavrilo Princip at nineteen they were determined, hardened by the certainty of death that was the ambiance of Sarajevo during the last war — the battalion of tubercular Serbs of the Black Hand presaged the number of desperate, suicidal, sacrificed ones that are the army of shades of the century, or of all of history, maybe there was something foundational in Princip’s 32-caliber, was it really him who pulled the trigger, he was already dying, condemned, a ghost, a plaything in the hands of the wrathful gods, one instant of glory is given to Diomedes son of Tydeus, to the Ajaxes, to Koca Seyit Çabuk the artilleryman in the Dardanelles, Gavrilo had his moment of glory before going to rot in Theresienstadt, with his own hand he sets loose the thunder of war, the Terezín prison where he lumbers and suffocates will survive him, and will see many other condemned men, Jews, Czech communists, enemies of all kinds shot or hanged in a back courtyard by Gestapo agents, cousins of the SS who just across, on the other side of the river, were running one of the most terrifying ghettos, holding almost 50,000 detainees, Jews from Prague, from Germany, from Austria and elsewhere, in the complex geography of deportation a ghetto where you died in music, where you created, where you could reflect at leisure on your epitaph, inscribed in brown clouds in the sky over Auschwitz, most often, the great space of the sky after the filth and pain of concentration, Terezín model for the good conscience of the entire world, look how well-penned our animals are, how healthy and well-groomed our livestock is, and the Red Cross won’t find anything to say to this sturdy model whose pictures, duly stamped “