Potiorek’s April war game would prefigure his August invasion of Serbia. Life would imitate art—a big gap opening between the Austro-Hungarian Fifth Army, operating at the confluence of the lower Drina and the Sava, and the Habsburg Sixth Army, crossing the Drina further south, permitting the Serbs to beat the two armies in detail. Yet the game’s portents were all wasted on Conrad, whose reflections on the winter 1913 war game explain his bizarre decisions in August 1914. With all the difficulties Serbia presented, including bad roads, supply difficulties, and an entrenched enemy, Conrad’s recommendations were foolhardy: “Lacking supplies, communications and a good overview, our only recourse will be a brisk, brave attack.”7 This underestimation of modern firepower had always been a characteristic of Conrad’s general staff. His plans for war with Serbia in 1908 had taken a swipe at “timid” Japanese conduct in the Russo-Japanese War and suggested—on no evidence other than Conrad’s feistiness—that “a more energetic command, a quicker start to operations, and a faster campaign would have minimized casualties.”8
As the Serbian assassins began to assemble in Sarajevo, turbulence rocked Belgrade. Weary of mediating the struggle between Pasic and the generals for the right to direct foreign policy and administer the newly annexed lands in Macedonia and Albania, seventy-year-old King Peter resigned most of his functions and named twenty-five-year-old Crown Prince Alexander his regent in June 1914.9 This did nothing to appease Serbian nationalists, who were enraged by the Austrian archduke’s impending visit to Bosnia. As an exponent of “Great Croatia”—a Roman Catholic superstate embracing Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, and as much of Serbia as possible—Franz Ferdinand would be putting his stamp on the very provinces the Serbs claimed as their own. The date of the archduke’s visit had also been spectacularly ill chosen, June 28, St. Vitus’s Day: the anniversary of Serbia’s fourteenth-century defeat in Kosovo and subjugation by the Ottoman Turks, and Serbia’s bittersweet national holiday ever since. Franz Ferdinand could not have chosen a more provocative display of his contempt for Serbia or for the cautious methods of his uncle the emperor. “Don’t let the archduke shine too much,” Franz Joseph’s adjutant had written Potiorek before the visit. “We don’t want people forgetting about the emperor.”10 But the archduke was about to shine as never before.
The archduke—attended by Conrad and Potiorek—observed the exercise of the XV (Dubrovnik) and XVI (Sarajevo) Corps in the mountains southwest of Sarajevo on June 26–27, and then joined his wife, the Archduchess Sophie, for a tour of Sarajevo on the twenty-eighth. The full-scale Austro-Hungarian maneuvers would be held, as always, in September, and would simulate a Russian invasion of Galicia; this Balkan exercise was merely intended as a show of force and a warning to Serbia. The visit to Sarajevo would be brief, with stops at an army barracks, the town hall, a new museum, a carpet factory, and lunch with Potiorek, all intended to flourish the Habsburg flag and assert Austrian rights to a province claimed by Serbia. The archducal party would be on a train out of Bosnia by nightfall.11
Archduke Franz Ferdinand had ordered a special exercise with two corps in Bosnia in June 1914 to intimidate the Serbs. Here the archduke studies a map held for him by General Oskar Potiorek, a corps commander and military governor of Bosnia. It was the archduke’s last full day on earth. He’d be shot in the streets of Sarajevo the next day.
Credit: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien
The archduke rose on June 28 in the Hotel Bosna in Ilidze, a spa located in a cool leafy glade outside Sarajevo. He dressed in the gala uniform of a cavalry general (blue tunic, black pants, and bicorn hat with green feathers), attended chapel in a hotel room that had been sanctified for his visit (at a cost of forty thousand crowns), and then clambered into the backseat of a waiting automobile. The open sports car was third in a line of six vehicles. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie nodded and smiled at the crowds lining the route into Sarajevo, while Potiorek, hunkered in the jump seat facing them, pointed out the principal sights. The seven Serbian assassins were strung out at intervals along the route. The first fired his Browning pistol at a range of thirty feet and missed. Franz Ferdinand turned and watched as Austrian police tackled the would-be assassin and shielded him from the blows and kicks of the crowd. With a keen sense of the emperor’s hostility and unfailing instinct to do the wrong thing, the archduke cracked: “Hang him as quickly as possible, or Vienna will give him a medal!”12 The second assassin threw a hand grenade, but the archduke’s driver accelerated under it and it exploded beneath the next car, lightly wounding Potiorek’s adjutant, Lieutenant-Colonel Erich von Merizzi.
The archduke was seething when he drew up at his first stop, the great pseudo-Moorish town hall finished in 1894. Finding the mayor of Sarajevo and his councilors arrayed in two rows, with Muslims in fezzes and baggy trousers on one side, Christians in tail coats and top hats on the other, the archduke brutally interrupted the mayor’s obsequious greeting: “Mr. Mayor, what’s the use of your speeches? I come to Sarajevo on a friendly visit and someone throws a bomb at me? This is outrageous!” Inside the town hall, the archduke calmed down. “Mark my words,” he joked to his entourage, “the [assassin] will probably be decorated with the Order of Merit, in the good old Austrian style, instead of being ‘rendered harmless.’”13
General Potiorek, who had insisted on organizing all security arrangements for the visit, was deeply embarrassed. Hoping for a better finish to the day than the start, he assured Franz Ferdinand that the archduke could safely complete his tour of the city as scheduled. Franz Ferdinand was willing but insisted on a change of route so that he could be taken to visit the lightly wounded Merizzi in the hospital. The archduke never having been in combat, this was the closest he had come to succoring a wounded comrade on the battlefield, and he now recklessly insisted on observing the formality. Potiorek agreed but neglected to communicate the change of plan to the mayor of Sarajevo and his driver, who were now leading the motorcade away from city hall on the original route. The archduke’s driver dumbly followed the mayor into a turn onto Franz Joseph Street, only to be pulled up short by Potiorek, who barked at him to stop, back up, and continue straight along the quay toward the army hospital.
Cars were still enough of a rarity in 1914 that these were on loan from the Austrian Automobile Club, and the drivers were balky.14 As the archduke’s driver struggled to back out and turn with both sides of the road crowded with spectators, Franz Ferdinand drawled to Potiorek that “as far as assassins are concerned, one must really put one’s life in God’s hands.” With the car stalled and trying to straighten out, the archduke and duchess sitting stiffly in the back, Gavrilo Princip—one of the three Bosnian students the Black Hand had recruited in Belgrade—stepped through the crowd and fired two shots at point-blank range: the first cut the archduke’s carotid artery, the second bored into Sophie’s gut. They both died in minutes.
When the bodies of Franz Ferdinand and his wife were laid out at the old Ottoman Konak—Potiorek’s walled residence nearby—the archduke was found to be wearing seven amulets around his neck, each designed to ward off a different brand of evil. Sophie had a gold chain around her lifeless neck, with a scapular containing holy relics intended to guard her against illness or accident. These were the modern Habsburgs, who were supposed to save the Balkans from backwardness and superstition. Karl Kraus, the Viennese satirist, found more black humor in the woefully managed and tragically terminated visit: “The gunning down of the Heir Apparent to the Throne on the corner of Franz Joseph and Rudolf Streets symbolizes what it means to be an Austrian.”15
Princip was immediately identified as a Bosnian Serb, and everyone in the archduke’s entourage took for granted that the assassin was an agent of the Serbian government, which had been protesting Austria’s occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina for years. Potiorek, whose own inattention to detail had facilitated the assassination, now pushed for war “with everything he had,” as a colleague put it, “to wash his slate clean.”16 Conrad
, who learned of the assassination only when changing trains in Zagreb on his return from the Bosnian exercise, advocated the usual remedy: “Krieg, Krieg, Krieg,” as Berchtold summarized, “war, war, war.” In meetings with the emperor and cabinet, Conrad demanded “decisive action.”17 War Minister Alexander Krobatin leaned hard on Franz Joseph’s adjutant to secure “an immediate declaration of war” from the emperor.18 Most of the senior Austrian generals joined the vengeful chorus against the Serbian “assassin state” or Meuchelmörderstaat, and its “death dealers” or Mordbuben. “Give me just one corps and a division of reservists and I’ll get the job done,” General Michael Appel sputtered from his office in Sarajevo.19
In Zagreb, Croatian nationalists pondered genocide. “We are infested with Serb creatures; as of today let it be our goal to destroy them,” the newspaper Hrvatska growled. “Srbe o vrbe,” meaning “String Serbs up from the willow trees,” became a popular catchphrase.20 Austria-Hungary’s legation in Belgrade—affronted by “the low level of mourning here, where people in the streets and cafés mock our misfortune”—hit the same note: “Serbia must learn to fear again. . . . We must use this opportunity to deliver an annihilating blow, without regard for any other considerations, in order to win a few more decades for the peaceful development of the monarchy and to punish this insult to the crown of the empire.”21
Meeting with the Crown of the Empire himself at Schönbrunn on June 30, Berchtold was struck most by old Emperor Franz Joseph’s sadness. Sad less for the archduke than the monarchy’s predicament, the emperor teared up as he heard his options. Franz Joseph had shied from war since the debacle of 1866, but even he realized now that war, or at the very least the real threat of it, could not be averted. Princip’s blow to the Habsburgs was too brutal and insulting. Still, the Hungarian veto on Austrian decisions was so well entrenched that Franz Joseph and Berchtold agreed that no decisions could be taken until Hungarian prime minister István Tisza arrived to state Budapest’s views.
The meeting with Tisza later that day conformed to expectations. Tisza was against war with Serbia, and for nothing more than a scolding diplomatic campaign against Belgrade. He worried that any conflict with Serbia would trigger Russian intervention, and the Russians lay just across the border from Hungary. Having spent years in government shortchanging the Austro-Hungarian army, Tisza also had a better sense than most of the monarchy’s military weakness.22
Hungary’s craven position was a blow to Germany, which had long sought a pretext for a decisive showdown with Serbia. German chief of the general staff Moltke, who had pulled Conrad back from the brink of war in February 1913 with the argument that the German and Austrian peoples would not go to war over a minor issue like the borders of Albania, glimpsed opportunity in Austria’s tragedy. The German and Austro-Hungarian peoples would fight to avenge the cold-blooded murder of the heir to the Habsburg throne. This was just the “slogan” that was needed to whip up the German and Austro-Hungarian masses.23 But German hopes that the Austrians would seize the moral high ground, promptly crush Serbia, and then shift all forces to the east withered in the hot summer air—and not just because of Tisza’s intransigence.
In Sarajevo, six of the seven assassins had been arrested and interrogated. One called himself “a Serbian hero,” but the picture of Serbian government complicity in the assassination plot was muddy at best. Milan Ciganovic, a government employee who stored bomb-making materials in the closet of his Belgrade apartment, had connected the assassins with their military trainer, Major Vojin Tankosic, as well as Apis and the Narodna Odbrana. But these Serbian officials were rogues acting on their own, not agents of the government, an important distinction that the Austrians (and Germans) plowed over.24 From Sarajevo, Potiorek warned that Bosnia-Herzegovina would become ungovernable if Vienna didn’t strike back harshly against the Bosnian Serbs and their state sponsors. Conrad’s informants in Bosnia told him much the same thing: the job of governance had to be taken away from the “Polish diplomats and court counselors” running the show in Vienna and given to the army. “It is time to sweep this place clean with an iron broom . . . at least 60 percent of the Serbs here are enemies of the state,” he was told.25 Even the peaceable Berchtold was coming around, on June 30 calling for “a final and fundamental reckoning with Belgrade.”26 The same day, the kaiser in Berlin exhorted the Austrians to war: “Now or never!”27
The emperor had hoped to huddle with Kaiser Wilhelm II when he came to Vienna on July 3 for the archduke’s funeral, but the kaiser, fearing Austrian security arrangements as much as Serbian assassins, decided to remain safely in Berlin, where he read a letter from Franz Joseph asserting that the archduke’s murder was the work of Serbian and Russian pan-Slavists. This conclusion allowed Germany to turn up the heat on its weak-kneed ally. Meeting with Berchtold’s chief of staff, Count Alexander Hoyos, on July 1, the German journalist and envoy Viktor Naumann told Hoyos that now was the time to ask for unstinting German support “to annihilate Serbia.” Naumann had been enlisted as an intermediary by the German government, and he brought this unambiguous message to Vienna in the first days of July: “The sooner Austria-Hungary goes to war the better; yesterday was better than today and today is better than tomorrow.”28 Berchtold, “allured by the glamour and force of the military men and fascinated by the rattle and glitter of their terrible machines” (as Churchill put it), avidly agreed, telling the German foreign secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, that Berlin and Vienna needed “to rip apart the cords that our enemies are weaving into a net around us.”29 Berchtold would not be disappointed; the German kaiser was shocked by the assassination of a fellow royal (who was also a close friend) and was expected to write a blank check of support for Austrian action on that basis alone.
Four days after his meeting with Naumann, Hoyos arrived in Berlin as Berchtold’s special envoy. He met first with Undersecretary Arthur Zimmermann at the German Foreign Office, where he outlined Vienna’s goals: Serbia would be partitioned by Austria and its Balkan neighbors and essentially “wiped off the map.” The assassination would be used “to fabricate a pretext for settling accounts with Serbia.”30
It wasn’t Serbia’s extinction that Germany needed, however—merely its weakening as an Austrian gadfly and a Russian ally. At Potsdam, where the kaiser was preparing to depart the next day for his annual North Sea cruise, Austrian ambassador Count Ladislaus Szögyeni peddled a softer line than Hoyos and Berchtold, promising not to wipe the Karageorgevic realm off the map, but merely to “eliminate Serbia as a power-political factor in the Balkans.”31 This declaration was enough to secure the notorious blank check from the kaiser. Vienna was free to attack Serbia, and Germany would support Austria-Hungary even if Russia intervened “and let loose the great war.”32
Meeting in Vienna’s Westbahnhof on July 3, to see Franz Ferdinand’s casket off to its final resting place in Artstetten, Conrad and Auffenberg held a whispered conference. Conrad averred that this time Serbia would have to be punished. Auffenberg agreed but pointed out that an invasion of Serbia would almost certainly expand into a wider war. Perhaps, Conrad said, but not necessarily. Auffenberg reminded him that the Austro-Hungarian artillery remained as deficient as ever, the army’s glaring weak spot in any “struggle for life and death.” The Habsburg army had just 96 guns per corps, while the Russians had 108, the French 120, and the Germans 144. The Austro-Hungarian guns were older too, of inferior range, accuracy, and caliber.33 Conrad limply agreed: “I’m aware of that, but I’m in no position to fix that now.”34
Conrad could not fix the artillery problem for all of the usual reasons, but also because he had planned a vacation in South Tyrol with his mistress, which, incredibly, he now took. The chief would be gone from Vienna for three entire weeks, from July 7 to 22, returning briefly on July 19 for a ministerial council meeting, but then hurrying back to Frau von Reininghaus at her chalet in Innichen (San Candido) for four more days. The German military attaché in Vienna—who did not take vacation—coul
d get no precise information from Conrad’s slumbering office as to what exactly the Austro-Hungarian army planned to do: what forces would entrain for Serbia, and what units to Galicia.35 With Conrad gone, everyone else decided to take leave as well. Krobatin went off to a country house, and even the all-important chief of the general staff’s Railway Bureau, Colonel Johann Straub, went on vacation, all the way south to the vineyards and beaches of Dalmatia. Seven of the army’s sixteen corps furloughed their peasant troops to help take in the summer harvest; they would not return to their units until July 25. No wonder Conrad’s general staff would find itself flummoxed by “technical difficulties” in August; no one had rectified them in July.
A Mad Catastrophe Page 13