Dennis Wheatley - Duke de Richleau 07 (21 page)

De Richleau nodded his
agreement and asked: “What then, General, is your solution to this menacing
state of affairs?”

The reply came promptly. “An
old but, I believe, sound one. We are faced with the problem of the bundle of
sticks which is too strong to be broken in one movement; but if taken one by
one, each stick can be broken separately. Austria does not seek war, but a war
would reunite her peoples as nothing else could do, and I am a strong believer
in the offensive. If any of our enemies gives us cause, we should not hesitate,
but attack and smash her before the rest have time to think up pretexts for
going to her assistance and combining against us.”

Again the Duke nodded,
and his voice was steady as he inquired: “Say, for example, that Serbia gave
fresh cause for umbrage over Bosnia, would you advise your government to
commence hostilities against her?”

Again the reply came
without a second’s hesitation. “Yes, and they would take my advice, for Count
Berchtold sees eye to eye with me in this. Given sixteen days to mobilize, I
would take the field with an army large enough to crush Serbia utterly, and
within three weeks blot her for ever from the map.”

A cold hand seemed to
clutch at De Richleau’s heart. As far as Austria was concerned he now had his
answer. She would make no concessions, as he had hoped. There would be no
chance for arbitration by a council of nations in an endeavour to keep the
peace. Unless Dimitriyevitch and the Black Hand could be muzzled, there would
be war.

Before
leaving Vienna De Richleau was given cause to make a slight modification in his
plans. On his return from his revealing and highly perturbing luncheon with von
Hötzendorf, he was informed by the desk clerk at his hotel that Frau Sacher
would like to see him, so he went at once to her sitting-room.

He found the old lady
enjoying her after-lunch coffee and cigar and, having had an extremely frugal
meal himself, he readily accepted an invitation to join her. As soon as he was
seated, she said:

“The office informed me
only an hour ago that you are leaving us to-night, Count, and I am sorry about
that as I had just succeeded in arranging for you to meet Frau Schratt. I had
hoped to have done so before, but she has been unwell. This morning was the
first time she has come to see me for over a week, but I remembered your wish
and she agreed to lunch here on Monday next, the eighteenth.”

De Richleau’s brain
worked very quickly. Von Hötzendorf was Franz-Ferdinand’s right-hand man, so
evidently spoke for him, and had said himself that he and Count Berchtold were
of one mind on future policy. That meant that, given a
casus belli
by Serbia, all the odds were on
Austria going to war. But there still remained one slender chance that these
apostles of the sword might find their hands tied when the time came. They
could not act without the Emperor’s sanction. The old man would have to be
consulted and he might prove unwilling to let them have their heads,
particularly if he was pressed to do so by the heir whom he disliked and
despised. If anyone knew what attitude he was likely to adopt in such a crisis,
it was Frau Schratt. She might refuse to discuss it, but that was another
matter. This opportunity to endeavour to obtain her views was too precious to
be neglected.

He had intended to spend
at least a week, or possibly a fortnight, in Belgrade, but if things went well
he might get through his business more quickly. In any case, by leaving Vienna
that night and returning by the night train on Sunday, he could get in five
days there and, if necessary, after the luncheon on Monday another night
journey would get him back to the Serbian capital by Tuesday morning.

After barely a second’s
hesitation, he replied: “I am most grateful to you for arranging a meeting, and
anyway, I had intended to return to Vienna shortly. I will invite half a dozen
people for next Monday, and leave it, if I may, in your most capable hands to
order the dishes that you think Frau Schratt would like best for our luncheon.”

She shook her head. “Frau
Schratt is of a most retiring disposition, and I am sure she would much prefer
it if just the three of us lunched in my private dining-room. If you have no
objection, I will arrange it so.”

“Please do, by all means,”
agreed the Duke. “And I thank you again, dear Frau Sacher, for taking so much
trouble on my account.”

All that evening thoughts
of Ilona plagued him, but at length the time came for him to catch his train, and
he found that he was sharing a sleeping compartment with a talkative French
impresario in search of Balkan talent, so the amusing experiences of this
voluble person took his mind off his abortive love affair until it was time to
turn in. The following morning he reached Belgrade.

It was a pocket capital
and, apart from being a seat of government, could hardly have claimed the
dignity of the term ‘city’. Its population was a mere 120,000, so it was
actually no larger than Southampton, and its few good buildings were
concentrated in quite a small area, beyond which spread a higgledy-piggledy
collection of mostly ramshackle structures, nearly all of which had been
erected a generation or less ago.

Situated on rising
ground, it overlooked the confluence of the Danube and the Save, but its
proximity to the former mighty river was the only thing it had in common with
the splendid city that De Richleau had left the night before.

In fact, few contrasts
could have been greater. In Vienna, there were endless miles of shops
containing every variety of article that the ingenuity of man had devised to
make life easy, elegant and pleasant. Here, there were only a few streets in
which a modest selection of imported goods could be obtained. All but an
infinitesimal proportion of the people in the Austrian capital were
well-housed, well-fed and well-clothed; whereas the majority of those in the
Serbian metropolis lived in near-squalor, ate only the coarsest foods, and were
clad in home-made garments. The Viennese bourgeoisie had achieved the highest
culture of any middle-class in the world: in Belgrade culture was almost
non-existent, and the greater part of its inhabitants could not yet even read.

Up to eighty years
earlier, the Serbs had been an entirely peasant people and, apart from cottage
industries, their manufactures were still negligible. For centuries, previous
to 1830, Serbia had been a Turkish province, and the Sultans had seen to it
that no feudal system ever developed there, so the Serbs had no nobility. When,
at last, they had thrown off the Turkish yoke, it had been through a series of
revolts instigated by courageous peasant leaders. The most successful of these
had been Black George—or, to use his native appellation, Karageorge— a
pig-dealer who had served in the Austrian army, and Milosh Obrenovitch, who
invented for himself the title Prince of the Serbs. And between the descendants
of these two had ensued a long and bitter feud for the domination of the
country.

Milosh’s son, Michael,
had reigned till 1842, then been expelled by Alexander Karageorgevitch. In 1859
Michael’s partisans had regained the throne for him, and his descendants had
occupied it until 1903 when, after the revoltingly brutal assassination of the
unprincipled King Alexander and his ex-demi-mondaine wife, Queen Draga, by the
founders of the Black Hand, the present King, Peter Karageorgevitch, has
assumed the reins of power. Thus, there had been no more than a few generations
of Serbian independence to form even a small middle-class of professional men
and officers.

Yet this uncultured
people still cherished memories of the distant centuries before the Turkish
hordes had invaded Europe. They had then had their own Tsars, defeated in turn
the Greeks and the Bulgars, and even laid seige to mighty Byzantium. Under
Stephen Nemanya, Urosh II and Tsar Dushan, Serbia had been a great kingdom. The
names of these long-dead paladins were still venerated in every cottage and
their spirits were still a living force which stirred the patriotism of every peasant
to dreams of re-creating Serbia’s past greatness.

The success of their
recent wars had aroused in them a knowledge of their latent power. In 1912 they
had avenged themselves for centuries of Turkish oppression. Then in 1913, when
the members of the Balkan League had quarrelled over the spoils of victory,
like an omen that the future might repeat the past they had, after a lapse of
many centuries, once again defeated their ancient enemies, the Bulgarians.

Now, with Turkey hurled
back almost into Asia, their eyes turned north towards the Austrian Empire; for
they regarded the Austrians as a race of oppressors, equalled only by the
Turks, and bore them a corresponding hatred. Not only did the Dual Monarchy
still hold enslaved a part of Serbia’s ancient territory and many thousands of
her people, but the Empire had, less than ten years before, endeavoured to
apply a strangle-hold to the economic life of the smaller nation. Serbia was
the greatest pig-breeding country in Europe and the very existence of her people
depended upon the export of swine. For generations Hungary had been her
greatest and almost sole customer. Suddenly the Austrians had clamped down a
ban on the import of pigs into their Empire. The Serbians had found other
markets in Egypt, Greece and France; but it had been a desperate struggle, and
those lean years of the Tig War still rankled.

The Serbians were a
virile race, inured to hardship and, in time of war, capable of fighting a long
campaign with few resources. They were, too, a dour people, as was evidenced by
their national costumes which, instead of being embroidered with gay-coloured
silks as was customary among other middle and eastern European peasant
populations, were of sober black, white and grey. They asked little of life and
were most hospitable within their modest means; but they never forgot an injury
and brooded bitterly over the wrongs they felt had been done them; so they were
an easy prey to agitators sent out to stir their patriotism and ever ready to
snatch up their rifles at the call to arms for a war of revenge.

As De Richleau was driven
in a rickety open carriage from the station to the Hotel Continental, he
thought of all these things, and wondered if Colonel Dragutin Dimitriyevitch
was already preparing to spring his mine. He wondered, too, if in the event of
an Austro-Serbian conflict, von Hötzendorf would prove right in his estimate
that, once mobilized, the armies he commanded would prove capable of
overrunning Serbia in three weeks—and greatly doubted it.

The hotel proved better
than the Duke expected, as it was French-run and the management were
endeavouring to attract the custom of travellers from the west. Nevertheless,
the time-honoured custom of providing for the possible requirements of male
patrons travelling alone was still maintained. He had been in his room only a
few minutes when an olive-complexioned gentleman with a spiky moustache
arrived, carrying under his arm a large book of photographs. They were of young
ladies in various states of semi-nudity, any or all of whom would be delighted
to call upon His Grace at any time. As a connoisseur of beauty in all its
forms, De Richleau looked through the book, then politely declined and, after
having given the man a couple of
dinars
for his trouble, firmly dismissed him.

His unpacking did not
take long as he had decided to leave most of his clothes in Vienna, and when he
had completed it he went out for a walk round the town. On numerous occasions
he had passed through Belgrade in the Orient Express, but he had never before
visited it. Now, he found that it contained little of historical or artistic
interest, except for the old walled citadel on the bend of the river, which had
for centuries housed a garrison of Turkish janissaries. The churches were
mostly small and had the same onion-shaped spires as those in Russia, which was
not surprising since, like the Russians, by far the greater part of the
population belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church.

The lettering in the
shops and street signs would have appeared gibberish to most Englishmen, as it
was in Cyrillic script; but that, again, being used in common with the Russians
was no puzzle to the Duke. Moreover, the language of the southern Slavs so
closely resembled that of their kin in the great northern Empire that anyone
who spoke one found no great difficulty in understanding the other, as De
Richleau was already aware from having cross-questioned Serbian prisoners taken
during his Balkan campaigns.

Walking slowly, as it was
now very hot, he amused himself for some time by working out the English
equivalent of the prices of things in the shops, and, apart from a few imported
articles, he found them incredibly cheap. He remembered a Turkish officer once
telling him that in Serbia a comfortable cottage could be built for £20, and a
middle-class family live reasonably well on £100 a year, which, at the time, he
had thought scarcely credible. But the prices he saw now, and the manner in
which fruit, vegetables and farm produce were almost given away, went to
confirm the statement.