Reports from correspondents of the news agency Reuters in Sarajevo and Vienna detailed the circumstances surrounding the assassination and described an earlier attempt shortly before Princip fired the shots that killed the archduke and his wife. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/APÄ«ut the Guardian did devote the bulk of its main news page, illustrated by a small map and family tree of the Austrian royal house, to the shooting. Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian-Serb nationalist who assassinated archduke. The Sleepwalkers, historian Christopher Clark's seminal work on how Europe went to war in 1914, reflects the mixture of complacency and rhetoric Europe indulged in. The Manchester Guardian, then edited by the legendary CP Scott, was far from alone in playing down the significance of the death of the archduke, shot by the young radical Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo. Franz Ferdinand was described as "a simple and amiable man, but very passionate and, in anger, uncalculable". The archduke, the editorial noted, was "a great gardener", adding that "in England, under other conditions of life, he would have been an ideal country squire". "It is a difficult and at present an ungracious task to speculate on what influence the crime of yesterday may have on Austrian politics." "What its motives may have been we do not know, nor do they greatly matter," it advised its readers. The newspaper's editorial of 29 June 1914, the day after the assassination, dwelt on the archduke's personality and on the narrow implications it might have for the internal politics of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But it is hardly surprising that the Guardian did not predict the unimaginable horror to come.
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