It was a shocking crime. Today one can imagine the media impact. All sympathy would be with the victims, all enmity levelled against the assassin and his backers. But, that summer in Britain, it was hardly noticed, partly because Ulster was threatening civil war, and partly because the focus quickly fell on Germany's sinister intentions. The imaginative lacuna remains. The murders in Sarajevo appear still as a picturesque incident, all but unconnected from what followed. Little attention is paid to the wider conflict's Balkan origins. The First World War thus seems a kind of dry run for the Second, with a similar cast of villains, heroes and story lines. But, as Christopher Clark demonstrates in his superb and authoritative account, The Sleepwalkers (Allen Lane, £10.99), this is misleading.

Germany did want an early war with Russia — though not necessarily in 1914 — because the generals thought war was inevitable, and the longer it was postponed, the more disadvantageous would be the odds. But it was Russia that mobilised first. Russian interest was firmly focused on the Balkans. France, too, was player not simply victim. Unreconciled to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, convinced that another round with Germany was required, French leaders reckoned that Germany could only be beaten if Russia were brought in. They understood that a Balkan inception was most likely to do it. Serbia's actions towards Austria at this juncture reflected confidence that French financial and Russian political support were forthcoming.

Austria was, formally at least, the initiator. Its focus was on the Balkans too. The war party in Vienna had determined to crush Serbia for good. It seemed the only alternative to losing Bosnia and with it influence in south-east Europe.

So, all things considered, Sarajevo is not a bad place to consider what the Great War was about. But don't expect the regularly rewritten local accounts to tell you. Where Moritz Schiller's delicatessen once sold its sausage, the modest Museum of Sarajevo now stands. The building's name has changed over the intervening years, as have its fortunes. It used to be devoted to the short, sad life of Princip. Now it houses a little-visited exhibition, Sarajevo 1878-1918. Just outside on the wall is a plaque. It reads: "From this place on June 28 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Heir to the Austro-Hungarian Throne Franz Ferdinand and his Wife Sofia." The plaque is new. So is the subdued tone, the exhausted outcome of much polemic.

The first (royal) Yugoslavia, felt it had to commemorate the event. But it couldn't find the safest option. The longer it waited, the more difficult it became. Finally, when in 1930 a memorial was erected, it was to loud international protests at the glorification of political murder. The authorities sought to portray the monument as a private initiative. Terrorism was again too close to home. Two years before, in the Belgrade parliament, the leading Croatian politicians had been gunned down by a Serb nationalist. The disorder was used by King Alexander to establish a dictatorship. But Alexander himself was assassinated, along with the French foreign minister, on a visit to Marseille in 1934, at the behest of the fascist, expatriate Croat Ustaša movement.

In April 1941, the Germans crushed Yugoslavia and entered Sarajevo. The Princip memorial was now removed. The plaque was presented to the Austrian-born Führer as a 52nd birthday present. But with the arrival of Tito's partisans in 1945 Princip was a hero once more — as a proto-Communist revolutionary. A fresh plaque was erected. The inscription was still in Cyrillic script, to emphasise the assassin's Serbian credentials. It now read: "From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip with his shooting expressed the people's protest against tyranny and the centuries-long aspiration of our peoples for freedom". ("Peoples" was a subtle nod in the direction of the non-Serbs in socialist Yugoslavia.) Beneath the plaque was set a pair of concrete footprints, representing Princip's. Tourists liked to be photographed there. It was all a bit of a joke.

But then things became serious again. In the early Nineties, the Bosnian Serbs began shelling Sarajevo from the hills. During a four-year siege, 10,000 Bosnian soldiers and civilians died. New plaques to the fallen were erected. In the pockmarked streets "Sarajevo roses" (red resin poured into shell scars) indicate where people were killed. Nobody needed to have the historic connections pointed out. The Gavrilo Princip museum was shut. The concrete footprints were removed. Eventually, today's anodyne replacement plaque appeared.