The news of Franz Ferdinand’s impending trip had been widely publicised earlier that spring and the conspirators, several of whom were at that point in Belgrade, decided to assassinate him. A sympathetic major in the Serbian army provided them with six bombs and four revolvers from the army’s arsenal and, at the end of May, Princip and two others, along with their weapons and capsules of cyanide with which to commit suicide after they had done their deed, were smuggled across the border from Serbia into Bosnia with the connivance of sympathetic Serbian officials. Pašić got wind of what was up but was either unable or unwilling to do anything. In any case it was probably too late; the conspirators had arrived safely in Sarajevo and linked up with local terrorists. In the next few weeks some were to have second thoughts and argue for postponing the attempt but not, apparently, Princip. ‘I was not in agreement with the postponement of the assassination’, he told the judge at his trial, ‘because a certain morbid yearning for it had been awakened in me.’10
Their job was going to be made easier by incompetence and arrogance on the part of the Austrian-Hungarians. There had been rumours for years of plots against Austria-Hungary from South Slav nationalists as well actual attempts on the lives of high-ranking officials, even on the emperor himself. The authorities in Vienna and in the trouble spots of Bosnia and Croatia kept close watch on nationalist students, societies and newspapers. Yet a visit by the Habsburg heir to Bosnia, when memories of its annexation only six years before still rankled with Serbs, was bound to inflame nationalist sentiments. And he was coming, moreover, to watch manoeuvres by forces of the Dual Monarchy which might well be used against Serbia and Montenegro one day. The timing of the visit made matters still worse for it coincided with the Serbs’ greatest national festival, the annual feast for their patron saint St Vitus, when they also commemorated their greatest national defeat at the hands of the Ottomans on 28 June 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo. In spite of the tensions surrounding the event security for the visit was lackadaisical at best. General Potiorek, the reactionary and stubborn governor of Bosnia, ignored the warnings that came in from several quarters that the archduke was putting himself in harm’s way and refused to use the army to guard the streets of Sarajevo. He hoped to show off his own achievements in pacifying and ruling Bosnia and also to advance himself with Franz Ferdinand by receiving Sophie with full imperial honours, something she was always denied elsewhere in the Dual Monarchy. The special committee set up to look after arrangements for the visit spent most of its time and energy worrying about such matters as what kind of wine the archduke should have or whether he liked music played during meals.11
On the evening of 23 June, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie boarded a train in Vienna for Trieste. He apparently remarked to the wife of an aide before he left: ‘This thing isn’t especially secret and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few Serbian bullets waiting for me!’ The lights in his railway carriage were broken; the candles that had to be used gave it, so some thought, the appearance of a crypt. On Wednesday morning the imperial party boarded the dreadnought Viribus Unitis (‘With United Forces’) and sailed down the Dalmatian coast towards Bosnia. They landed the following day and went to the small resort town of Ilidze near Sarajevo, where they were to stay. That evening the archduke and his duchess made a quick impromptu visit to explore Sarajevo’s well-known handicrafts. Princip was apparently in the crowd as the imperial couple went into a carpet shop.
On Friday and Saturday, the archduke took part in army manoeuvres in the mountains south of Sarajevo while the duchess visited local sights. On Saturday evening local dignitaries attended a banquet in Ilidze. Dr Josip Sunaric, a leading Croat politician who had been one of those who had sent warnings of plots against the imperial couple, was introduced to the duchess. ‘You see’, she said cheerfully to him, ‘you have made a mistake. It really isn’t the way you always say it is. We were all over the countryside, and without exception among the Serbian population, and greeted in such a friendly manner, with such sincerity and unrestrained warmth that we are really happy about it.’ ‘Your highness,’ he replied, ‘I ask God that – if I will have the honour tomorrow evening to see you again – you can tell me the same words again. Then a large burden will have fallen off my heart, a great stone.’12 That night the imperial party did discuss whether to cancel the visit planned for Sarajevo the next day but it was decided to go ahead.
That Sunday morning of 28 June was fine in Sarajevo and the imperial couple descended from their train to take their seats in an open touring car, one of the few of its kind in Europe. The archduke was resplendent in the blue tunic and feathered hat of the dress uniform of an Austrian cavalry general and the duchess was all in white except for a red sash. The conspirators, seven in all, were already in place, dotted among the crowds that had gathered along the route of the visit. As the procession of cars drove along the Appel Quay beside the river that runs through the heart of Sarajevo, the young Nedeljko Ĉabrinović hurled a bomb at the archduke’s car. Like suicide bombers in a later era he had said farewell to his family and friends and distributed his only possessions. The driver saw the bomb coming and accelerated, with the result that it exploded under the next car and several of the passengers as well as bystanders were wounded. The archduke sent an aide to find out what had happened and then ordered the programme to proceed as planned. The party, now shaken and angry, made its way to the town hall where the Lord Mayor was waiting to make a speech of welcome. He stumbled through it and the archduke brought out his notes to reply. They were damp with the blood of one of his staff. There was a hasty consultation and it was decided that the party would go to the military hospital to see the wounded. As the cars sped back along the Appel Quay, the two leading ones carrying the chief security detective and the mayor of Sarajevo suddenly turned right into a much narrower street. The archduke’s driver was about to follow when Potiorek, the governor of Sarajevo, shouted ‘Stop! You are going the wrong way.’ As the driver put on the brakes, Princip, who had been standing in wait, stepped up on to the running board and shot the archduke and the duchess point blank. She collapsed on to her husband’s legs as he called out ‘Sophie, Sophie, don’t die. Live for my children.’ He then lost consciousness himself. The pair were taken to the governor’s palace where they were pronounced dead.13 Princip, who was trying to shoot himself, was seized by spectators and his fellow conspirators were rounded up by the police who belatedly swung into action.
When a courtier brought the news to the emperor at his favourite villa in the lovely little resort of Ischl, Franz Joseph closed his eyes and remained silent for a few moments. His first words, uttered with deep emotion, showed the depths of his estrangement from his heir who, in marrying Sophie, had not only defied him but, as the emperor saw it, damaged the honour of the Habsburgs. ‘Horrible! The Almighty does not allow himself to be challenged with impunity … A higher power has restored the old order which I unfortunately was unable to uphold.’14 He said nothing more but gave orders for his return to Vienna. Whether he was thinking of how his empire might take its revenge on Serbia is not known. In the past he had opted for peace and Franz Ferdinand had supported him. Now the assassination had removed the one person close to the emperor who might have counselled restraint in those last weeks of Europe’s long peace. The eighty-three-year-old emperor, whose health was failing – he had been seriously ill that spring – was left alone to face the hawks in his government and his military.
The funeral in Vienna on 3 July for the archduke and his wife was a low-key affair. The Kaiser gave out that an attack of lumbago had prevented him from travelling but the real explanation seems to have been that he and his government had heard rumours of plans to assassinate him too. In any case, the Dual Monarchy requested that no foreign heads of state attend, only their ambassadors in Vienna. Even in death, the rigid court etiquette held for the unfortunate couple: his coffin was bigger and placed on a higher dais than hers. The service, in the Habsburg chapel, lasted a brief f
ifteen minutes and the coffins were loaded on to hearses to be taken to the railway station. Since he had long known that his wife would not be allowed to lie beside him in the Habsburg crypt, the archduke had made arrangements that they would both be buried when the time came at one of their favourite castles at Artstetten in lower Austria, where they still rest. In a spontaneous expression of their resentment at the way in which the obsequies were conducted, members of the empire’s great families walked behind the coffins to the station. Ordinary Viennese watched the cortège pass, the Russian ambassador reported, with curiosity rather than sadness and the roundabouts in the Prater continued to spin merrily. The coffins were loaded on to trains and then taken on a barge across the Danube in the midst of a storm so violent that they were nearly pitched into the river.15
Before the funeral took place the discussions had already started about what Austria-Hungary should do in the face of what was widely seen as an outrageous provocation by Serbia. Just as the tragedy of September 11 2001 gave the hardliners the opportunity to urge what they had advocated all along on President Bush and Prime Minister Blair – the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – so too the Sarajevo assassination opened the door wide for those in Austria-Hungary who wanted to settle the South Slav problem once and for all. That meant destroying Serbia – the country generally assumed to be behind the assassination – as a first step to asserting Austria-Hungary’s dominance in the Balkans and bringing the empire’s own South Slavs under control. The nationalist press described Serbia and the South Slavs in terms which owed much to Social Darwinism as Austria-Hungary’s eternal enemy. ‘It should now be clear to everyone’, the leading conservative politician and intellectual Josef Redlich wrote in his diary on 28 June, ‘that peaceful coexistence is impossible to achieve between this half-German monarchy with its sister-relationship to Germany, and Balkan nationalism with its fanatical bloodthirstiness.’16 Even those in the ruling circles who mourned for Franz Ferdinand talked of revenge while his enemies heartlessly blamed him for preventing war on Serbia on earlier occasions.17
Conrad, who as chief of the general staff had been clamouring for war ever since the Bosnian crisis in 1908, heard the news as he changed trains in Zagreb. He wrote immediately to his beloved Gina. Serbia was clearly behind the assassinations and Austria-Hungary should have dealt with it long since. The future of the Dual Monarchy now looked grim, he went on: Russia would probably support Serbia and Rumania would have to be counted as an enemy as well. Nevertheless, he told Gina, war there must be: ‘It will be a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued, because so old a Monarchy and so glorious an army cannot go down ingloriously.’ His message to his own staff and to the Chancellor the next day in Vienna was, so Berchtold noted, simply ‘War. War. War.’18 For Conrad it was out of the question to do anything less, such as mobilising the army as a means of applying pressure for a diplomatic solution. When that happened during the Balkan wars, Conrad told Berchtold, army morale had been badly damaged. ‘A horse’, as the general was fond of saying, ‘that is brought three times before the hurdle and is stopped before jumping won’t approach the hurdle again.’19 When the crisis reached its acute point at the end of July, Conrad continued to firmly oppose a partial mobilisation against either Serbia or Russia for diplomatic purposes. Nor would he contemplate a limited war against Serbia with a halt in Belgrade as Grey and others were going to propose.20 Conrad’s belligerence had wide support from his fellow officers including General Alexander Krobatin, the War Minister, and Potiorek in Bosnia, who was adamant on revenge against Serbia partly out of embarrassment about his own failure to protect the archduke.
In the Foreign Office too, especially among younger officials, many of whom had admired Aehrenthal and his activist foreign policy, opinion was largely in favour of a hardline response to the assassination. Austria-Hungary, it was argued, did not want to fade into insignificance like its neighbour to the south, the Ottoman Empire. As Count Alexander Hoyos, who was to play a crucial role in the next few weeks, said to Redlich, ‘We are still capable of resolve! We do not want to or ought to be a sick man. Better to be destroyed quickly.’21 In the next weeks his subordinates urged Berchtold to act decisively and quickly against Serbia. Russia, it is true, might feel obliged to intervene but it was better to take it on now before it got any stronger. Or perhaps the old solidarity between the two conservative monarchies might just be enough to keep it on the sidelines. The argument that time was running out was also used with reference to the Dual Monarchy’s domestic situation: its own South Slavs might still support their government but waiting was dangerous because Serbian propaganda was already making inroads among them.22 With unfounded optimism, the Foreign Ministry also hoped that Rumania might be scared into remaining loyal by the threat of a closer friendship between Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria.23
The German ambassador Heinrich von Tschirschky, a headstrong, arrogant and belligerent man, added his voice: Austria-Hungary should stand up for itself and show Serbia who was master. Even before his superiors in Berlin had decided on their policy, Tschirschky was telling every official he met in Vienna that Germany would back the Dual Monarchy whatever it decided to do. If Austria-Hungary showed itself to be weak yet again, he warned, Germany might have to look elsewhere for allies.24 Berchtold in fact needed little persuading; where he had held out against war in previous crises, he had been convinced since the end of the Second Balkan War in 1913 that Austria-Hungary would have to go to war with Serbia one day. Now the time had come.25 On 1 July Berchtold had a meeting with a shaken Franz Joseph, who agreed that Austria-Hungary must reassert itself as a great power. ‘We,’ said the emperor, ‘the most conservative power in Europe, were forced into this plight by the expansionary policies of Italy and the Balkan states.’26
The only serious opposition to those who were bent on war came from the Hungarians, in particular from the Prime Minister Tisza. Austria-Hungary did not have enough evidence against Serbia, he wrote to the emperor on 1 July, to persuade the world that the smaller state was guilty. Moreover, the Dual Monarchy’s international position was already weak: Rumania, despite its secret treaty, was unlikely to stand by it and the possible support of Bulgaria was not sufficient compensation. Tisza’s advice was that Austria-Hungary should continue to work for a peaceful settlement with Serbia.27 In the next few weeks he was to be put under great pressure to join the war party. Without support from Hungary the government in Vienna would not be able to act.
The other matter that had to be settled was what Austria-Hungary’s ally Germany was prepared to do. The signals coming from Tschirschky were encouraging and on 1 July Victor Naumann, an influential German journalist who was known to be close to Jagow, the German Foreign Secretary, visited Hoyos to say that Kaiser Wilhelm, if handled rightly, would stand firmly behind Austria-Hungary and so would German public opinion. ‘Austria-Hungary’, Naumann went on, ‘would be finished as a monarchy and a great power if it did not take advantage of this moment.’28 Berchtold decided to deal with Berlin directly on the crucial question of what official German policy was going to be. His emissary, not perhaps by coincidence, was Hoyos, who was known as a leading hawk and who also had good connections in Germany (his sister was married to Bismarck’s son). When Conrad learned of the mission, he asked Franz Joseph ‘If the answer is to the effect that Germany is on our side, do we then go to war against Serbia?’ The old emperor replied ‘In that case, yes.’29
Hoyos set off on the evening of 4 July, carrying with him a long memorandum on the situation in the Balkans as well as a personal letter from Franz Joseph to Wilhelm. Although neither document spoke of a decision for war, their tone was bellicose, talking for example of the unbridgeable gulf between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and the need for the Dual Monarchy to cut the strands of the net which its enemies were throwing over it. The emperor’s letter to Wilhelm concluded, ‘You must also have been convinced after the recent terrible events in Bosnia, that the reconciliation of the antagonism, wh
ich divides us from Serbia, can no longer be considered and that the long-term policy of peace of the European monarchs is threatened so long as this furnace of criminal agitation in Belgrade continues to burn unpunished.’30 Hoyos also carried a verbal message from Berchtold to his elderly ambassador Count Ladislaus Szögyény-Marich in Berlin to say that Austria-Hungary felt that it was the right time to deal with Serbia. In Berlin, Hoyos went beyond even these instructions and told the Germans that Austria-Hungary intended to occupy and partition Serbia.31
On 5 July, while the Foreign Ministry considered the meaning of the messages from Vienna, Szögyény had lunch with the Kaiser. Wilhelm read through the documents and, at first, temporised. It was all very serious and he would have to consult his Chancellor, Bethmann. When the ambassador pressed him, however, Wilhelm abandoned caution. Franz Joseph, he promised, could rely on Germany’s full support: even if it came to war with Serbia and with Russia Germany would stand by the side of its ally. That afternoon the Kaiser belatedly consulted his officials: Bethmann gave his approval to the promise to Austria-Hungary and Falkenhayn, the War Minister, said tersely that the army was ready to fight. The following day Bethmann repeated the German assurances of support to Szögyény and Hoyos. The latter returned, delighted with the success of his mission, to Vienna. After the war he was to remark, ‘No one today can imagine how strongly we at that time believed in German power, in the invincibility of the German army.’ His government set about its next steps in bringing Serbia to heel.32
So it was, a week after the assassination, that Germany issued what came to be known as its ‘blank cheque’ and Europe took a giant step towards a general war. This does not mean, as some have argued, that Germany was determined to bring about such a war for its own ends. Rather its leaders were prepared to accept the possibility partly because, if war were going to come, the time was favourable for Germany and partly because Austria-Hungary had to be kept as an ally. And then there are those individuals, especially Wilhelm himself and Bethmann, who had the power to decide between war and peace and who in the end were persuaded that war was the better option for Germany – or they simply lacked the courage to resist the pressures on them and the arguments of those who wanted war. And perhaps they had simply grown tired, as so many Europeans had, of the tensions and the crises and wanted a resolution. A leap into the dark, as Bethmann described it to his private secretary Kurt Riezler, had its attractions.33
The War that Ended Peace Page 66