Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip spent the morning of June 28, 1914, contemplating death — his own, not an archduke's. The tuberculosis eating his lungs gave him perhaps two years to live, and his first assassination attempt had failed so spectacularly that he'd retreated to Moritz Schiller's delicatessen for what he assumed would be his final meal. He had swallowed a cyanide capsule after firing at Franz Ferdinand's motorcade, but the poison was expired. Instead of dying dramatically for Greater Serbia, he'd merely vomited on his shoes.

Princip wasn't supposed to be the triggerman at all. The Black Hand, the Serbian nationalist organization behind the plot, had assigned him as backup to the backup. At barely five feet tall and weighing ninety pounds soaking wet, he looked more like a consumptive poet than a revolutionary. His fellow conspirators nicknamed him "the runt." But when Franz Ferdinand's driver took a wrong turn down Franz Joseph Street — directly past Schiller's — Princip found himself five feet from the most powerful man in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The irony would have amused him. Princip had spent three years preparing for martyrdom, practicing his marksmanship in Belgrade's coffee houses by shooting at playing cards. He'd written passionate manifestos about dying for Serbian independence, convinced he'd never see twenty. Yet when the moment came, it wasn't ideology that steadied his hand — it was the bitter certainty that he had nothing left to lose.

After the shooting, Princip tried to turn his gun on himself, but the crowd overwhelmed him before he could pull the trigger. His third suicide attempt had failed too. He would die in prison four years later, just as the tuberculosis had promised, never knowing that his two bullets had killed twenty million people.