In the residence a doctor tore open the Archduke's collar to reach his smashed jugular. The gold collar had turned scarlet. Inside the collar seven amulets against seven evils became visible, all wrought of silver and gold. They, too, were dripping scarlet. By the time the church clocks of Sarajevo struck 11 A.M. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had both stopped breathing, she less than ten minutes before him. They died as they had lived, in unison.
History's will was done.
0073
THAT SUNDAY VIENNA'S SKIES WERE AS BRIGHT AND JOVIAL AS SARAJEVO'S. So were those of nearby Baden, a cozy Biedermeier spa where, on a bench under an oak tree, the writer Stefan Zweig was reading a biography of Tolstoy. Shortly after half past two in the afternoon, something made him look up from the page. Something had stopped happening. It took him a moment to realize just what: a few hundred feet away, in the band shell of the Spa Park, the musicians had broken off in the middle of a waltz.
At Aspern Airfield on Vienna's southern edge, a young summer-happy crowd under straw hats and flowered bonnets craned necks at an aeronautical display. At half past two the smartly kepi'd brass band launched into "The Airmen's March." They never finished it.
In Vienna itself all green spaces were teeming vivaciously. Everybody was outdoors, celebrating Peter and Paul, a favorite Saint Day of the town. The poor basked and munched bacon rind on the "free" park benches. The less poor sliced cervelat on more comfortable chairs costing one heller each. The rich nibbled chocolate cake served prettily doilied on cafe terraces. All enjoyed the jasmine-scented air, the violins undulating in pergolas. Sometime before 3 P.M., policemen seemed to shoot out of the ground to whisper into the ears of orchestra conductors everywhere. Everywhere bows dropped away from strings. Flutes fell silent. The music stopped.
Never since the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf twenty-five years earlier had so much music stopped so suddenly in Vienna.
There was a difference, though. Back in 1889, Rudolf had been Austria's gracious and graceful young promise. His death had anguished the Empire, seeming to sever it from its future. Now, in 1914, Vienna was startled but not stricken. Franz Ferdinand's arctic image had thawed a bit lately, yet for most citizens he evoked neither hope nor youth nor grace. His public face was lined too grimly, his mustaches were too much like fixed bayonets. He augured oppression at home, abrasiveness abroad.
"If that Archduke had lived to sit on the throne," Freud said the day after the assassination to his patient the Wolf Man, "war with Russia would have been inevitable." The truth was precisely the reverse. Yet most Viennese shared Freud's breezy misjudgment and his mistaken relief. This included the realm's highest councillors, who knew the Archduke well. They absorbed his death rather briskly. Many had been of fended by his un-Austrian, unmannerly directness, by his uncouth insights. The journal of Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold confides that during the first cabinet meeting after the outrage". one noted, yes, consternation and indignation but also a certain easing of mood."
One noted it in Franz Joseph, too, at his Alpine villa in Bad Ischl. The All-Highest summer holiday had started earlier than usual in order to elude an encounter with Franz Ferdinand. By going on vacation the Emperor avoided official business like the Archduke's personal report on the Bosnian maneuvers. No more danger of that now. Franz Joseph promptly returned to his capital to deal with the enormity that freed him from all further vexations by his nephew.
"Certainly Papa was shocked," his daughter the Archduchess Valerie records in her diary, "but I found him amazingly fresh. When I said that Karl [The Archduke Karl, Franz Ferdinand's nephew, just become the new Crown Prince] would acquit himself well, Papa said 'For me it is a great worry less.'"
Throughout the Empire headlines screamed from front pages framed in black. But to his adjutant, the Emperor was candid about his composure. "God will not be mocked," he said. "A higher power has put back the order I couldn't maintain." Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand had disordered the hierarchy by inflating his wife's place in it. Now she had lost her life, and soon she would lose her inflated place.
At first, however, the Duchess's status seemed unchanged by her slaying. Cannons from the great fortress of Sarajevo had boomed to greet the live Crown Prince and his wife at their entry into the city on the morning of June 28. The cannons boomed again, twenty-one times, on the evening of June 29, to bid farewell to their embalmed remains. Though the funeral train puffed through the Bosnian night without halting, army regiments stood at attention at every station it passed. The train rolled on to the Adriatic coast where the foremost dreadnought of the Imperial fleet was waiting, the Viribus Unitis, on which the breathing Archduke has sailed toward Sarajevo just five days earlier. Now marines in dress uniforms sheltered the two caskets under a baldachin on the quarter deck and draped them with flags and flowers. Early on June 30, the huge man-of-war began to stream northward at a speed solemnly slow, under a hot sun, under black pennants and a flag at half-mast, followed by other battleships, cruisers, destroyers, civilian yachts, motorboats, fishing boats, even ferries, all with flags half-mast and flying black ensigns. This giant, wave-borne cortege moved close to the shore, where more cannons rumbled their mourning from the hills and priests stood in full vestments on the beaches, swung thuribles censing the corpses, and called out blessings for the souls of the faithful departed.
On the evening of July 1, the dolorous armada steamed into the harbor waters of Trieste. More cannons boomed, more regiments presented arms and lowered colors as the caskets were transferred from the black-garlanded ship to a blackgarlanded special train. Twenty-four hours later, on the night of July 2, it came to a halt in Vienna's South Terminal.
Here the responsibilities of the military ended. Here began the jurisdiction of Prince Montenuovo, First Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty, foe of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for life and beyond.
***
Neither Franz Joseph nor any member of the dynasty met the funeral train. There was just one exception. Only the new Crown Prince, the Archduke Karl, escorted his predecessor through the dark and empty streets.
Next morning the dead couple lay in state at the Palace Chapel from 8 A.M. to noon. Not one second longer. Some 50,000 people converged from every district of the town onto the Inner City. It was not so much affection that drew them as awe and curiosity. Most were turned away because of the absurd briefness of the viewing period. Those who managed to pass the chapel portals found something curious indeed.
The two coffins stood side by side, but their closeness only emphasized their inequality. Franz Ferdinand's was larger, much more ornate, and placed twenty inches higher than Sophie's. His bore the many insignia of his rank-the Archducal crown, the General's plumed helmet, the admiral's hat, his ceremonial sword, and all his principal decorations including the Order of the Golden Fleece. Her coffin was bare except for a pair of white gloves and a black fan. These were the emblems of a lady-in-waiting.
She had been a lady-in-waiting before her marriage. Her subsequent elevations to Princess and then to Duchess were now cancelled. Only a little over 100 hours earlier Franz Ferdinand had committed for her sake yet another disorderliness against the privileges of genealogy. He had carried her parasol before the honor guard at Sarajevo in order to lift her to his level before the world. Now his caparisoned coffin was used to push her down again, to exhibit her inferiority by contrast. The First Lord Chamberlain and the Serb schoolboy assassin, working in tandem, had put the woman back in her place.
There were many wreaths that morning, sent to the chapel from great notables like the American President Wilson down to humble folk like the Shoemakers' Guild of Lower Austria. There was no wreath from the Emperor or any other Habsburg.
At the stroke of noon the public was turned away. At 4 P.M. Franz Joseph appeared, accompanied by Archdukes and Archduchesses but not by any of Franz Ferdinand's children. Their mother was a morganatic corpse. They were morganatic orphans, hence not members of the Highest Family. No foreign dignitarie
s attended. Every monarch and president in Europe had wired his intention to come. By return cable the First Lord Chamberlain had advised them to "kindly have your ambassador act as representative to avoid straining His Majesty's delicate health with the demands of protocol." (The King and Queen of Rumania were politely stopped at the border.)
So the ambassadors came-and departed again almost immediately together with the Emperor. Vienna's Cardinal Piffl ran through the funeral services in less than fifteen minutes. At 4:15 P.M. the bodies were locked away. They had been brought to the chapel in the dark of the previous night. They were not taken out again until the new night was very dark again.
Vienna of the schone Leiche, of the corpse beautiful, where paupers scrimped and schemed to be buried like princes, now had a prince reduced to an impoverished and furtive funeral. None of the nobility had been invited to pay their final respects to the Heir Apparent or to accompany him on his last journey through the streets of the capital. But as the remains of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were rolled out of the chapel, a band of aristocrats pushed past the police. Led by the Archduke Karl and by Count Chotek, Sophie's brother, they made less lonely the scant procession behind the coffins moving to the West Terminal.
Near midnight a car coupled to a milk train took the dead sixty miles west along the Danube to the small town of Poch- larn. There only a delegation of local veterans saluted, in old uniforms wetted down by a sudden squall.
Two plain black hearses of the Vienna Municipal Undertaking Service transported the coffins onto a ferry. In midstream a thunderbolt frightened the horses into a panic that almost pitched the caskets into the Danube.
At 1 A.M. on July 4, the hearses gained the other shore. A few minutes later they stopped before the castle of Artstetten,[4] Franz Ferdinand's family manor. In its crypt the pair found the peace that now began to drain away from the world outside.
29
The next day all of Vienna was abuzz with that midnight in Artstetten. Some deplored its meanness. No one saw it as overture to vast, lethal chaos. On the contrary. The court considered that funeral a fitting end to dissonance. It recovered a harmony disturbed by the slain Crown Prince himself.
His very testament assaulted tradition. For centuries Habsburgs had been buried beneath the nave of Vienna's Capuchin Church. Franz Ferdinand, however, had anticipated that his Sophie would not be allowed to enter eternity among them. Since they would exclude her, he would exclude himself. His Last Will defied the custom of the house he had come so close to heading: He was to lie not with his kinsmen but with Sophie in the vault he had had built for them both in Artstetten.
As a result-in Palace eyes-their remains were inevitably subject to the consequences of his wilfulness. Since Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had died together, his final journey must share not only the destination but the limits of hers. Their funeral must not take on the grandeur his would have shown had he married suitably. The aberration he had visited on Habsburg while alive must not be ratified by their state funeral after his death. No: The ceremonies of his death must atone for the irregularity of his life. And the fact that a teenage zealot had killed him made not a scintilla of difference. The madness of a schoolboy must not change dynastic principle. That principle must override assassin and assassinated. In sum, the funeral was essential to Franz Joseph's "restoration of order."
Of course another source of disorder remained: Serbia. It was more dangerous than the man it had killed. Sarajevo proved that Serbia had been eating away far too long at the Empire's security, dignity, tranquillity. The First Lord Chamberlain's etiquette had disciplined the late Archduke. Next, Serbia must be punished. And for that purpose etiquette was not enough.
Within twenty-four hours of the murder, the Belgrade government wired condolences to Vienna, vowing that Serbia would". certainly, most loyally do everything to prove that it would not tolerate within its borders the fostering of any agitation… calculated to disturb our already delicate relations with Austria-Hungary." These sentiments came too late. They were not enough.
Belgrade's Prime Minister made a further gesture of appeasement that at the same time rebuked the ideology of Colonel Apis's Black Hand. The Prime Minister ordered all places of entertainment closed in Belgrade on the day of Franz Ferdinand's funeral. He also cancelled the rest of the weeklong celebrations of St. Vitus, the Saint's Day so sacred to the Serb national soul. It was not enough.
Throughout Bosnia, Habsburg-loyal Croats and Muslims smashed shops and inns and hotels owned by Serbs. In Bosnian schools, Serb students were beaten up. In Vienna, mobs kept attacking the Serb Embassy, barely stayed by police. It was not enough.
Not after Sarajevo. Not when Princip's initial interrogations established the fact that he had done the deed after a stay at Belgrade, probably with Belgrade's help. None of it was enough.
Order in Franz Joseph's sense could be restored only by a decisive act of the Habsburg government against Serbia. But an act of what kind? Of what force? Franz Joseph instructed his ministers to submit options.
At a cabinet meeting hastily called on June 29, four days before the funeral, Foreign Minister von Berchtold showed himself still guided by the pacifism of the late Crown Prince. He proposed relatively temperate demands: that Serbia dismiss its Minister of Police, jail all suspected terrorists, and dissolve extremist groups.
Prime Minister Tisza of Hungary sided with Berchtold for reasons of his own. Tisza could not be very furious with the Serbs for removing his worst enemy, the Crown Prince; nor did Tisza relish a war in which a victorious Austria would swallow Serbia, thereby increasing the Empire's Slav population and reducing the Magyars to an even smaller minority. Still, nei ther Berchtold (whose main resource in a debate was a small, fine flourish of his cigarette-holder) nor the Calvinist Tisza (who kept quoting I Kings 2:33 on the dangers of bloody vengeance) were a match for General Conrad. For now Conrad's anti-Serb wrath was triumphant. His one tamer, the Crown Prince, lay dead. And the Crown Prince's very death by a Serb documented that Conrad had been right all along. There was a deadly snake hissing at Austria's heels, he now said; it would not do to slap at this serpent. Its skull must be crushed.
Conrad's argument would have overridden all others, had it not been for the German envoy in Vienna, Count von Tschirsky. Von Tschirsky acted in the spirit of his monarch's prudence vis-a-vis the Serbs, the prudence so laboriously inspired in the Kaiser by the late Crown Prince. On June 30, two days after Sarajevo, the German ambassador called on the Austrian Foreign Minister to warn". with great emphasis and seriousness against hasty measures in settling accounts with Serbia."
Berchtold made the most of these cautions when he went to his Emperor. Austria, he argued, could not afford to define its stance against Serbia without Berlin's backing. After all, Russia was Serbia's protector; Austria needed the weight of the German army-the world's most powerful-as counterpoise to the Tsar's endless regiments. Only Germany's full support would keep St. Petersburg from meddling. But, as the German ambassador had just shown, only a temperate Austria would earn such support.
The Emperor agreed: Conrad was not to do any Serb skullcrushing, at least not yet. Any decision of the kind must be made shoulder to shoulder with Berlin. Franz Joseph himself would elicit Kaiser Wilhelm's sympathies in a handwritten letter.
Of course Berchtold wanted the sympathies to be low-key rather than inflammatory. He knew that the Kaiser had lost a boon companion at Sarajevo-but that going to war over this loss would mean cancelling the Kaiser's delightful summer cruise to Scandinavia. Berchtold knew that the Kaiser was much better at attitudinizing gorgeously than at thinking cogently or feeling deeply. Being a bit like the Kaiser himself, Berchtold knew that His Majesty's emotions were unsteady, unsure, manipulable. In addressing such a man, Franz Joseph's letter must manipulate accurately.
Berchtold saw to it that in writing the Kaiser, Franz Joseph modulated his phrases a shade closer to restraint than to firmness. Franz Joseph's letter spoke of "the terrible ev
ents at Sarajevo" and of the need to "neutralize Serbia as a political power factor"; it did not, however, mention military action nor did it preclude purely diplomatic means.
The letter was a discreet invitation to answer circumspectly. All-Highest circumspection from Berlin would reinforce similar circumspection in Vienna; it would work toward an honorable peace rather than an onerous war; it would improve the chances for the Kaiser's Scandinavian cruise and, for Franz Joseph, the prospect of a cloudless sojourn at Bad Ischl.
Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold schemed well. His own chef du cabinet, Count Alexander Hoyos, outschemed him. Hoyos performed no echoing deeds before or after July 1914. But during that one month his intrigues were historic.
Berchtold had chosen Hoyos as his chief assistant because, as an aristocrat, he habitually preferred mode over matter. To the Foreign Minister, Hoyos's politics-as rabidly anti-Serb as General Conrad's-signified less than the Hoyos cachet: Originally of Spanish origin, the Hoyos clan had long been prominent in the inner sanctum of the Court. Indeed the name Hoyos runs scarlet through the final Habsburg decades. In 1889 Count Josef von Hoyos had been invited to Crown Prince Rudolf's hunting lodge at Mayerling on the morning of Rudolf's suicide; he had brought the news to Vienna. Twenty-five years later his young cousin Alexander Hoyos also became a messenger after an Archducal death. The later Hoyos, however, did more than report calamity. He sped it on its way.
Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 Page 23