Europe's Last Summer (18 page)

George Malcolm Thomson, a popular historian, writes in
The Twelve Days
(1964) that Artamanov "was, from an early stage, a party to the Black Hand conspiracy to murder the Archduke." Thomson bases his claim on the research of Albertini, research that does not support such an unqualified allegation. Artamanov denied everything in an interview with Albertini. Albertini did not believe Artamanov's story, but could not disprove it.

A document dated June 12, 1914, found in recently opened Russian Ministry of Defense files, relates that in 1910 Russia extended a subsidy of 4 million francs to the Serbian army's officer corps and that the money had been misused and disappeared long since. The document, which originated from the Russian military agent in Serbia hinted that some of the money might have been improperly siphoned off to the Black Hand; and it appears to confirm that the Russian government, based upon this past experience, would not consider providing any more funds to the Serbian officer corps. The assumption is that Russia would not want to help the Black Hand.

Was there a Russian connection in the Sarajevo affair? If there was, no evidence of it has yet been uncovered.

A few days before the assassination, Prime Minister Pasic received an anonymous letter. Its author speculated that the Austrian government might arrange to have "that foolish Ferdinand" killed during the Bosnian maneuvers, and then blame it on Pasic's government as an excuse to start a war against Serbia. It is not what happened, but it could have been.

CHAPTER 21: THE TERRORISTS
STRIKE

Sunday, June 28, 1914. Early in the morning, Archduke
Franz Ferdinand and his consort, Sophie, prayed at mass in a chapel set up for them at their hotel. Leaving the suburban spa of Ilidze, they then boarded a train to Sarajevo, a trip of less than half an hour. At the railroad terminal on the outskirts of town, they transferred to automobiles, in which they rode the rest of the way. The display of motor vehicles was striking; only recently had the automobile come into common use.

The procession of chauffeur-driven cars entered Sarajevo somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 a.m., heading for the town hall. The mayor and the chief of police led the way in the first auto. The Archduke and the Duchess followed in the second, a convertible touring car that had been borrowed for their use. With them was the military governor, General Potiorek. The owner of the borrowed car,
Count Franz von Harrach, sat in front next to the driver. The rest of the procession—between two and four other vehicles, depending upon whose account one accepts—followed.

The rains had finally stopped. The morning mists disappeared. A dazzling sunshine beamed down upon the anniversary couple: he, brilliantly attired in his many-colored uniform; she, radiant in white. At last side by side at a formal official celebration, they took in the sights and sounds along the route, and the enthusiasm of the cheering crowds and the booming of the twenty-four-cannon salutes.

Later, historians were puzzled by the lack of security precautions. Soldiers ought to have lined the route but did not. Some 22,000 Hapsburg troops were in the vicinity, but General Potiorek detailed only an honor guard of 120 to escort and protect Franz Ferdinand and his party. It was explained later that the general wanted to prove that under his iron-fisted rule, order was so firmly established that policing was unnecessary. If so, what Potiorek proved was the reverse of what he had intended.

Turbulent Bosnia was a borderland. It and its neighbors formed the arena where East met West, where rival clans, nationalities, religions, and empires collided. Bosnia's capital city of
Sarajevo, an ancient settlement with roots in the distant past, consisted of a cluster of buildings stretched along both sides of the Miljacka River. It was laced together into a town by bridges. A torrent during the winter, the Miljacka slowed during the summer so that in June the riverbed was beginning to dry up. A British visitor in the late 1930s claimed that the waters of the Miljacka ran red, but that may well have been an optical illusion produced by a reading of history. The road that the motorcade followed into town was the Appel Embankment, which ran parallel to the river. It was bordered on the Miljacka side by a low embankment and on the other side by houses. It was the town's only considerable thoroughfare.

Centuries of rule by the Muslim Ottoman Empire had left their mark on the inhabitants: their dress, habits, and behavior. The appearance of the streets, especially as one turned away from the river into the narrow, winding streets of the interior, was distinctly Oriental.

The skyline of Sarajevo, punctuated by minarets, aglow in the dazzling summer sunshine, served as a reminder that the city often had changed hands. There were a hundred mosques in Sarajevo, and almost as many churches. The synagogues, though less conspicuous, attested to a Jewish presence. A polyglot, multinational, religiously diverse population had learned to live, not only with one another, but also under whatever flag flew. Dominations and powers were temporary at best, and, as it happened, were about to change once again, as a result of the events in Sarajevo that June 28.

That morning, Princip had stationed his fellow conspirators along the Appel Embankment at three places where it was intersected by bridges. The motorcade driving along the quay therefore would be running a gauntlet. Princip's older friend Danilo Ilic was to serve as coordinator with no fixed place of his own, to move his gunmen when and where needed. Ilic, it will be remembered, had tried with no success to persuade Princip to follow orders to abort the mission.

At the first of the bridges, the Archduke's procession entered a danger zone: three conspirators formed a line along the river side of the quay, and two on the land side. The first attempt on the Archduke's life came from the river side, from
Nedeljiko Cabrinovic, who asked a policeman to point out which was Franz Ferdinand's car. Then he knocked the cap off his bomb on a lamppost to detonate it. He threw the bomb wildly at the Archduke's car, hitting the folded-back hood of the convertible, from which it rolled off to explode against a wheel of the car following it.

The Countess felt a graze on her neck from the detonator, flying wide, while an occupant of the car behind, Colonel Erich von Merizzi, an aide to General Potiorek, was wounded on the wrist by flying shrapnel. The noise of the explosion was alarming, another officer and a number of bystanders were lightly injured, and the procession stopped to inquire.

Cabrinovic, the perpetrator, ran from the scene. He jumped from the embankment and tried to escape in the waters of the shallow riverbed. Captured by police who pursued him, he swallowed his poison pill, which turned out to be too old to work; its only effect was to make him throw up.

Princip, who had heard the explosion and shouts from a crowd, hurried to the spot, where it looked as though all was over. The gendarmes had Cabrinovic firmly in custody, and were bustling him off to the police station. None of the other conspirators was to be found.

What happened to the others is most concisely recounted by A. J. P. Taylor. "Of the other conspirators, one was so jammed in the crowd that he could not pull the bomb out of his pocket. A second saw a policeman standing near him and decided that any movement was too risky. A third felt sorry for the Archduke's wife and did nothing. A fourth lost his nerve and slipped off home."

Alone, Princip wandered back to what had been his appointed station on the river side of the Appel Embankment at what was called the Latin Bridge. He then crossed the street. Accounts differ as to where he then stood or sat down.

Franz Ferdinand decided to cancel existing plans, which called for his motorcade to maneuver through winding alleys on the way to the museum; but neither did he return the way he had come. After a stop at the town hall for a reception and speeches, he insisted on driving to the hospital to visit
Colonel Merizzi, lightly wounded in the Cabrinovic attack. The driver of the lead car either was not told or did not understand this; he followed original plans and turned off the Appel Embankment into a side street to drive toward the museum, and the Archduke's driver simply followed. "Turn back!" General Potiorek shouted. The driver stopped. He considered how best to back out. His car's rear may have been blocked by the rest of the motorcade. He would have had to maneuver slowly in the narrow side street, perhaps putting his vehicle into reverse or trying a U-turn. Meanwhile the vehicle stood motionless. All this happened about five feet from Princip. He was surrounded by onlookers. He must have been astonished, but he thought quickly and seized his chance. He reached for a bomb in his pocket, and became aware that he was too hemmed in by the crowd to swing his arm for a free toss at his target. So he pulled out his pistol and fired two shots at point-blank range, hitting the Archduke's jugular with one and the abdomen of the Duchess with the other. At that distance it was almost impossible to miss.

Princip then turned the revolver on himself, but was prevented from firing it by a bystander who hurled himself on the assassin's arm. It was not clear what had happened. To some the two shots that had rung out unexpectedly sounded like the backfires to which automobiles were prone in those early days. Confusion erupted as the crowd and nearby police battled one another to get at the boyish assassin. Princip swallowed his suicide capsule, then vomited when it did not work. The mob began to beat him and may well have been dragging him off to lynch him. Struggling, Princip used the handle of his weapon to hit back. Eventually the police wrestled him away from the crowd. Thereupon he dropped his bomb. Onlookers shouted out warnings as police reinforcements arrived and cleared the scene.

Meanwhile the limousine with the dying royal couple fled to seek help. "Sophie dear! Sophie dear! Don't die! Stay alive for our children!" Franz Ferdinand called out; and then, more weakly, but repeatedly, "It is nothing," as aides anxiously asked how he felt. The fatally wounded couple were rushed to the governor's residence, only minutes away. They had been shot at about 10:30 a.m.; Sophie died at roughly 10:45 a.m.; Franz Ferdinand, at around 11:00 a.m. It was
not
"nothing."

CHAPTER 22: EUROPE YAWNS

Had the crime in Sarajevo been committed even a century earlier, it would have taken weeks or months for word of it to reach faraway places. In the nature of the case, therefore, its consequences might have been far different. But technology had changed things. In the age of the steamship and, above all, the telegraph, news traveled fast. The foreign offices of the world knew of the shootings at once, and within hours condolences began to pour in from places as far away as the White House in Washington, D.C.

While details of the murders remain disputed to this day, some of the main outlines came through accurately at the time. Thus, though the British consul in Sarajevo, muddled by the two assaults, reported that it was the bomb attack that had killed Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, the British ambassador in Vienna had the details right.

In the streets of Vienna, a typewritten account of what had happened was distributed by the Austrian Official Telegraphic Agency almost immediately.

Rumors traveled fast too. A persistent one was that the
Freemasons were responsible. A decade later the novelist Thomas Mann continued to attribute the summer of 1914 crisis, at least in part, to them. The "international illuminati," he wrote, "the world lodge of freemasons," played a role in unleashing the war.

German intelligence was suspected; the Hungarian Prime Minister was blamed. Twenty-five years later
Rebecca West, the British journalist whose account of Balkan affairs is considered classic, still was echoing the belief that it was someone in the Austro-Hungarian government itself who had arranged it all; how else explain the otherwise puzzling lack of security precautions?

Moreover, the Emperor, though horrified by the crime itself, was not unhappy that Franz Ferdinand was out of the way. He had not wanted to have the Archduke succeed him on the throne. "For me, it is a great worry less," he told his daughter in speaking of the Archduke's death. To a close aide he confided: "God will not be mocked. A higher power had put back the order I couldn't maintain."

Even Berchtold noted in his diary that during the first cabinet meeting after the assassination there was "yes, consternation and indignation, but also a certain easing of mood."

President Poincaré of France was at the Longchamps racetrack when news of the Sarajevo killings was brought to him. He remained to see the end of the races. He then went about his usual routine. Paris was unaffected.

Kiel, Germany.
The Kaiser was racing in a regatta aboard his yacht
Meteor.
On shore the chief of his Naval Cabinet, Admiral von Müller, received a coded cable from the German consul general in Sarajevo relaying the news. Müller immediately set out in the launch
Hulda,
overtook the
Meteor,
and shouted out what had happened.

Deliberations were held aboard. Wilhelm decided to return to Berlin to "take the situation in hand and preserve the peace of Europe."

It must have been a terrible blow to Kaiser Wilhelm.
He would have been horrified by the assassination of any royal figure, but in addition he had worked for years to cement his special relationship with Franz Ferdinand. To that end he had been, and showed every sign of continuing to be, a champion of Sophie. Once the elderly Franz Joseph passed away—and that could not be in more than a few years—the two friends and emperors, Wilhelm and Franz Ferdinand, could (in what seemed to be the Kaiser's vision) work together as partners to lead the continent of Europe. Now that dream was smashed. For Germany, it was conjectured, the Hapsburg Empire after Franz Joseph left the scene might be not as close and reliable an ally as it would have been under
Franz Ferdinand's leadership.