The Archduke signalled to the chauffeur. His car slowed to a stop. It stood surrounded by the thousands of roses Franz Ferdinand had conjured from the earth. Their perfume came down on the Kaiser together with the light-blue stare of Franz Ferdinand’s eyes. In sight and smell the Kaiser now bore the full brunt of the Archduke’s passion. A daunting experience for a poseur like Wilhelm, able to use an empire as prop for his poses but unable—in contrast to Franz Ferdinand—to command a vision or a cogent policy all his own.
Well, the Kaiser said. Well, he was glad to receive such a . . . such a candid briefing on the difficulty. Yes, the Hungarians did seem to be a bit of a problem, especially when it came to Rumania, which Budapest must not alienate. Yes, he would instruct von Tschirsky (his ambassador to Austria-Hungary) accordingly. He would direct von Tschirsky to tell Tisza, “Sir, be mindful of Rumania!”
As to Serbia, the Kaiser made a less specific commitment, yet couldn’t help but voice sympathy with the views the Archduke had so dramatically presented. On the whole Franz Ferdinand’s automobile diplomacy at Konopiste appeared to work much better than all his luncheon pleading at Miramare earlier in the spring.
Socially, Wilhelm’s visit proved even more auspicious. It ended on Saturday, June 13, with nine courses of a farewell dinner. Franz Ferdinand’s Sophie walked into Konopiste Castle’s dining hall to sit down at the Kaiser’s right. On her head shimmered a tiara of evening feathers. This time the royal connotations came into their own.
At half past eight in the evening the archducal family bade their guest good-bye. Franz Ferdinand accompanied Wilhelm to the train station in a car gliding at slow, stately speed. The military band that had serenaded the diners followed behind with a medley of the Kaiser’s favorite marches. As the escutcheoned locomotive of Wilhelm’s private train got up steam, he promised to return in the fall; most roses would be gone by then, but the woodcock shooting would be wonderful. Franz Ferdinand applauded the idea, adding that Wilhelm’s stay should be coordinated with the hunting visit of the English King, also planned for autumn. “Capital!” roared the Kaiser. Franz Ferdinand smiled: Let German Emperor and British monarch stand side by side, blasting away at game, thereby muzzling the cannons of their armies.
Two days later, at 7 A.M. Monday, June 15, five hundred gendarmes marched by a side entrance into the Konopiste estate. It was the first day of the Archduke’s final week at Konopiste, the week before he left on the first leg of his trip to Sarajevo.
The gendarmes distributed themselves according to a prearranged pattern. Soon they were so scattered on the enormous terrain as to be barely noticeable. Yet they could intervene fast when needed.
No need arose. At 9 A.M. the great gates swung open. For the first time ever the public streamed in. Many were peasants in boots and black Sunday suits who had trudged to the castle from neighboring villages. Many were burghers with watch-chained waistcoats, who had arrived by rail or bus or private car. All of them shuffled through this exalted wonderland, hushed, awed, quiet.
They gawked at the endless flamboyance of the roses, at the infinite varieties of their hue from gold to scarlet to white to black, at a horizon brimming with aromas and blossoms. They shook heads over stone vases two stories tall from which cactus flowered or holly sprouted. They admired the obelisks, the marble amoretti, satyrs, and Greek gods, the baroque fountains casting up pillars of water.
The men had removed their hats, as if in church. The women looked for petals dropped to the gravel. Young girls would slip them into their bodices; matrons would press them between pages of Bibles brought for that purpose. Amidst the crowds passing the castle itself, voices were raised here and there.
Long live the Archduke!
Their shouts sounded frail against the massive seventeenth-century turrets. No answer came. Kaiser Wilhelm would have mounted a parapet and strutted in his spurs. Franz Joseph would have appeared and performed his kindly little wave. Not Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He showed himself only during a brief ride down the main path. After that he did not emerge from behind the stone walls.
Though unseen, he saw. He watched from behind a window, holding his Sophie’s hand. It is not impossible that he smiled.
On Saturday, June 20, the couple went to Chlumetz, Franz Ferdinand’s other, more intimate Bohemian castle. Here they spent a cozy family weekend with their brood, bowling, playing checkers, roaming the woods. And here, on the early morning of Wednesday, June 24, they said good-bye to their daughter and their two sons until a reunion planned for a week later. Then the Archduke and his Duchess began their journey to Sarajevo.
24
THEY TRAVELED TOGETHER ONLY UNTIL VIENNA. THERE SOPHIE TOOK THE express going east to Budapest. Their destination lay south, yet this somewhat indirect path was the only one available by train: rail connections from the Austrian part of the Empire to Bosnia had been constructed as detours via Budapest, at Hungarian insistence. The Archduke refused to let Magyar impudence dictate his route. He’d rather complicate it his own way—by sea. At the same time, being an ever considerate husband, he did not want to subject his Sophie to the extra strain of his complication. For himself, of course, thumbing his nose at Budapest would be well worth the discomfort. It would help him keep his cheer.
That he kept it so well seems remarkable in view of his temper and how it was tested throughout the trip. When he went on alone from Vienna to Trieste, the electric lights of his salon car went out. The Archduke grinned. “How interesting” he said, as footmen scurried to light candles. “Don’t we look like a crypt?”
After such a small calamity came a long laboriousness in the summer heat. At Trieste harbor he was piped aboard the Austrian dreadnought Viribus Unitis, which carried him down the humid Illyrian coastline to the mouth of the Narenta river, where he was transferred to the yacht Dalmat, which in turn sailed upstream to the Hercegovian town of Metkovic, where the archducal party entrained once more, this time heading for Bad Ilidze, a spa just outside the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.
On the steamy, rainy afternoon of June 25, Franz Ferdinand reached Ilidze at the end of almost forty hours of ceaseless traveling. He bounded out of his rail car and past the honor guard, remarkably unfatigued.
So far the trip had been refreshing hard work. His advisers had primed him on the St. Vitus Day problem. Just during the weekend ahead, Serbs in Serbia as well as on the Austrian side of the border would celebrate their great ethnic holiday. To defuse resentment he had taken a good deal of trouble learning some Serbo-Croat sentences that said how pleased he was to acquaint himself first hand with the history, traditions, and festive occasions of this important region.
He was no linguist. His tongue struggled with those Slavic consonants. A public smile did not come easily to him. Yet he produced the consonants and the smile before any crowd organized for him along the way. Each time, people were surprised by such cordiality from the Archduke notorious for his frown. He, in turn, was exhilarated by their enthusiasm.
He was exhilarated again at Bad Ilidze, a pleasant suburb of Sarajevo. Despite a downpour, a sizable throng awaited him, shouting their “Zivio!” (“Long may he live!”) and waving their umbrellas. That was nice. Nicer still, the embrace of his wife who had arrived earlier on her much less labyrinthine journey. General Conrad also presented himself, saluting with a grimness that carried, here at least, no power. To avoid the contretemps of previous army exercises, the Chief of Staff had asked to attend this time as a purely passive observer.
Under the Archduke’s sole command, then, the simulated war between the “North Camp” (the 15th Austrian Army Corps) and the “South Camp” (the 16th Army Corps) began. For two shower-splattered days it thundered up and down the craggy hills west of Sarajevo, some cautious eighty kilometers away from the Serb border. At the Archduke’s order the field pack of each man was ten pounds lighter than the weight set by General Conrad. This prevented exhaustion and enhanced the spirit of the troops. Franz Ferdinand was impressed by the dispat
ch with which the men handled the most modern equipment. He liked the way the heavy howitzers moved so fast through mud deepening with every squall.
Nothing could dampen the Archduke’s uncharacteristic good mood. Usually his aides must try to restore his calm. Now he reversed the process. Once as he observed a “battle” from a hummock, a man suddenly broke out of the underbrush with a black instrument. Nervous bodyguards jumped the suspect. Franz Ferdinand chortled: “Oh, let him shoot me. That’s his job! That’s just a camera in his hand—he’s a court photographer. Let him make a living!”
On Saturday, June 27, at 10 A.M. the Archduke’s signal ended the maneuvers. Shortly thereafter he sent a telegram to Bad Ischl where the Emperor had begun his summer sojourn on the same day.
I beg to report most humbly that my journey has been excellent despite the unsteady weather; the reception. . . very gratifying and patriotic . . . The condition of the soldiers and their performance were outstanding and really beyond praise. Almost no injured or sick, everybody is healthy and well. Tomorrow I visit Sarajevo, to depart from there at night. In deepest devotion I lay myself at the feet of Your Majesty
Your most humble
Franz
This, his last report to the Emperor, the Archduke scrawled vigorously in his own hand, using not the Gothic script he preferred but Roman characters as demanded by Army regulation for military cables. And Franz Ferdinand also conformed to another, more hurtful rule. His message said “Tomorrow / visit Sarajevo . . .” Morganatic restriction forbade “Tomorrow we visit Sarajevo . . .” We would include his wife on an equal basis. The long arm of Vienna’s protocol reached even into this remote corner of the Empire.
It reached—and struck—the Archduke again, a few hours later, when he showed his First Lord Chamberlain Baron Rumerskirch the toast he had drafted for the evening gala. The Baron sighed and said he was compelled to suggest that the first three words of the phrase “my wife and I” should be omitted. The toast would not only enter the official minutes but no doubt be widely published in Vienna. It should be framed with care so that the court cabal could not use it against His Imperial Highness.
His Imperial Highness re-framed it with care.
That shadow apart, the day was splendid, ending sumptuously. On the night of June 27 the Archduke hosted a banquet (the very one to which Finance Minister von Bilinski had received no invitation) at his personal headquarters in Ilidze, the Hotel Bosna. General Potiorek attended the dinner together with the region’s luminaries. Everybody enjoyed the potage régence, soufflés délicieux, blanquette de truite a la gelee, followed by main entrees of chicken, lamb and beef, followed by creme aux ananas en surprise and cheeses, ice cream, candies. Sommeliers poured an array of wines from Madeiras to Tokays and including, as a bow to local taste, Bosnian Žilavka.
Graciously the Archduke raised a goblet even to General Conrad, then gave a smooth, morganatic, wifeless toast. After all, his Sophie sat quite unmorganatically between two Archbishops. And tomorrow he would make sure that all Imperial obeisance shown him would be hers as well at Sarajevo.
25
MIST SMOTHERED THE BOSNIAN SUNRISE ON SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 1914. THE Archduke and the Duchess began the day on their knees. They prayed at an early Mass in a room specially converted to a chapel at the spa hotel. Afterwards he retired to his bedroom to practice, over and over again, the Serbo-Croation paragraph ending the speech he was to make at Sarajevo’s City Hall. Those Slav consonants hadn’t gotten any easier, but when he finished work, Sophie rewarded him with a happy bulletin just telephoned from Vienna. Their older son Max had done very well in his examinations at the Schotten Academy. The parents congratulated the boy with a cable anticipating the family reunion set for the day after tomorrow.
By then it was just past 9 A.M. Their train awaited them for the brief ride to Sarajevo. It steamed into the terminal there at 9:20 A.M. On the platform a band of the 15th Army Corps cymballed the Imperial Anthem. Red-carpet formalities over, Franz Ferdinand helped his wife climb into the high, huge Gräf & Stift convertible. That moment the weather changed as dramatically as during their entrance at the Vienna Derby three weeks earlier. The mist lifted like a curtain. Brightness fell on a resplendent pair. The Archduke, tall and rugged, shone in the ceremonial uniform of an Austrian Cavalry General—sky-blue tunic, gold collar with three silver stars, black trousers with red stripes; the green peacock feathers of his helmet bounced above the pale-blue gleam of his eyes, the black spear tips of his upturned hussar’s mustache. His Duchess was a stately vision in white: white picture hat with a gossamer white veil, long white silk dress with a red and white bouquet of roses tucked into her red sash, ermine stole draped over her shoulders.
After a long siege of rain, the sun shed on them the radiance of a doubly special day. This Sunday marked not only St. Vitus Day for the Serbs but also the anniversary of a marriage sorely tried yet victorious. Exactly fourteen years ago, on June 28, 1900, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and the Countess Sophie Chotek had taken their vows in stealth, in disgrace, in the pointed absence of the Emperor and the entire Imperial clan. For fourteen years the Crown Prince had had to announce his own wife’s inferiority of blood. During all court functions of all those years she had had to enter alone after the Emperor; he had had to wait for Sophie to creep in at the tail end of protocol, after the youngest Archduchess toddled by in diapers.
Today would atone for much of that. This morning’s dazzle at Sarajevo would be his revenge and her redress.
At the first stop, inspecting the honor guard at Filippovic Barracks, he undid a good deal of those fourteen years. To Sophie’s glory he upended military proprieties. Today the colors dipped for the Duchess no less than for the Archduke. At his instruction she stood not behind him, but at his side. When he walked past the reverence of rifles presented at attention, his hand rested not on the hilt of his saber but on the handle of her parasol as his Sophie strode with him, shoulder to shoulder. Today, instead of denying her existence, he celebrated it. He exalted it. He, Crown Prince of the realm, was her servitor. He carried her parasol at a most public occasion.
And therefore the cannons starting their roar while the Imperial party re-boarded their six automobiles—the cannons booming their twenty-four-fold salute—boomed in her honor as well as his. They boomed while the motorcade rolled along slowly at Franz Ferdinand’s orders; he wanted his Sophie to savor her triumph in leisure, and he wanted her to see at least some of Sarajevo’s one hundred mosques and ninety churches. The cannons boomed from the hilltop fortress specially repainted for the occasion—its Habsburg yellow matched the black-yellow flag fluttering from Franz Ferdinand’s car. The cannons boomed as the procession passéd Cemaszula Street just renamed Franz Ferdinand Boulevard. They boomed as the huge cars turned into Appel Quay along the Miljacka river. They boomed across spires, domes, minarets, whitewashed houses on one side of the street; they boomed across poplars and cypresses greening the hills against the sky on the other. They boomed above gold-crested police helmets behind whose thin line stood a somewhat thicker crowd of people crying “Zivio!” They boomed over portraits of the Archduke placed on many window sills—hundreds of stern Franz Ferdinands glaring down from picture frames at the Prince’s now more amiable live face, gliding by in the seat next to his wife.
The last boom reverberated away. A peculiar echo followed it. One of the cars behind the Archduke’s seemed to have blown a tire. The Duchess reached for the back of her neck where she thought a gnat had stung her. At the same time, confused shouting spread along the quay. Gendarmes started running toward some sort of scuffle that was tumbling down the river embankment.
The Archduke’s raised hand signaled the procession to a halt. A member of his retinue, Count Franz von Harrach, jumped out to reconnoiter.
Two minutes later he was back, breathless: A bomb had been thrown at the car behind them. It had injured some bystanders as well as Lieutenant Colonel Erich von Merizzi of the Archduk
e’s escort. But Merizzi had only been hit in the hand, by a splinter. The perpetrator had just been arrested as he’d tried to escape across the river.
Pale but composed, the Duchess said that a splinter must have touched her, too, in the back of her neck. Instantly the Archduke examined her. He found the barest evidence of a tiny scratch; the skin had not been broken.
“Madness!” the Archduke said. “But let’s go on.”
They went on. Count von Harrach did not resume his seat by the chauffeur. He stood on the running board to shield the Archduke. Shortly after 10 A.M. the motorcade reached City Hall. It was just a few minutes late, as though nothing had happened.
And nobody at City Hall thought anything had. Under the red-gold moorish loggias, on top of a white staircase, bowed an array of Bosnian notables. Turbaned mullahs, bishops in miters and gilt vestments, rabbis in kaftans, municipal personages with sash and decorations. The mayor Fehim Effendi Curćić, in fez and tailcoat, had heard a bang; to him and to the others it had sounded like some additional salute from a smaller cannon. Blithely the mayor launched into his own fulsome greeting: “Your Imperial and Royal Highness, our exalted Crown Prince! Your Serene Highness, our Crown Prince’s most esteemed wife! At this most happy moment our hearts are overflowing with gratitude for the most gracious visit bestowed—”
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