The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (90 page)

As the news of the assassinations spread quickly across Europe, it was greeted with the same mixture of indifference and apprehension as in Poincaré’s box. In Vienna, where the archduke had not been much loved, the rides and entertainments in the popular Prater park remained open. Among the upper classes, though, there was despair about the future of a monarchy which repeatedly lost its heirs and renewed animus against the Serbians who, it was widely assumed, were responsible. In the German university town of Freiburg most citizens, according to their diaries, were thinking about their own concerns, whether the state of the summer harvest or their holidays. Perhaps because he was an historian, the eminent scholar Friedrich Meinecke had a different reaction: ‘Immediately it became black in front of my eyes. This means war, I told myself.’
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When the news arrived in Kiel the authorities sent a launch out to find the Kaiser’s yacht. Wilhelm, who had counted Franz Ferdinand as a friend, was shocked. ‘Would it be better to abandon the race?’ he asked. He decided to travel back to Berlin at once to take charge and let it be known that he intended to work for peace, though during the next few days he still managed to find the time for intense discussions over the interior decoration of his new yacht.
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In Kiel itself flags were immediately lowered to half-mast and the remaining social events were cancelled. A British fleet, which had been paying a courtesy call, sailed away on 30 June. The Germans sent the signal ‘Pleasant journey’ and the British replied ‘Friends in past and friends forever.’
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Just over a month later they would be at war.

The act which was going to send Europe on the final leg of its journey towards the Great War was the work of fanatical Slav nationalists, the Young Bosnians, and their shadowy backers in Serbia. The assassins themselves and their immediate circle were mostly young Serb and Croat peasant boys who had left the countryside to study and work in the towns and cities of the Dual Monarchy and Serbia. While they had put on suits in place of their traditional dress and condemned the conservatism of their elders, they nevertheless found much in the modern world bewildering and disturbing. It is hard not to compare them to the extreme groups among Islamic fundamentalists such as Al
Qaeda a century later. Like those later fanatics, the Young Bosnians were usually fiercely puritanical, despising such things as alcohol and sexual intercourse. They hated Austria-Hungary in part because they blamed it for corrupting its South Slav subjects. Few of the Young Bosnians had regular jobs. Rather they depended on handouts from their families, with whom they had usually quarrelled. They shared their few possessions, slept on each other’s floors, and spent hours over a single cup of coffee in cheap cafés arguing about life and politics.
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They were idealistic, and passionately committed to liberating Bosnia from foreign rule and to building a new and fairer world. Strongly influenced by the great Russian revolutionaries and anarchists, the Young Bosnians believed that they could only achieve their goals through violence and, if necessary, the sacrifice of their own lives.
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The leader of the assassination plot was a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, the slight, introverted and sensitive son of a hardworking farmer. Princip, who had longings to be a poet, had gone from one school to another without conspicuous success. ‘Wherever I went, people took me for a weakling,’ he told the police after he was arrested on 28 June, ‘and I pretended that I was a weak person, even though I was not.’
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In 1911 he was drawn into the subterranean world of revolutionary politics. He and several of his friends who were to become his co-conspirators dedicated themselves to acts of terror against important targets, whether the old emperor himself, or someone close to him. In the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 the victories of Serbia and the great increase in its territories inspired them afresh to think that the final triumph of the South Slavs was not far off.
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Within Serbia itself there was considerable support for the Young Bosnians and their activities. For a decade or more, parts of the Serbian government had encouraged the activities of quasi-military and conspiratorial organisations on the soil of Serbia’s enemies, whether the Ottoman Empire or Austria-Hungary. The army provided money and weapons for armed Serbian bands in Macedonia and smuggled weapons into Bosnia much as Iran does today with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Serbians also had their own secret societies. In 1903 a group made up largely of officers assassinated the unpopular king Alexander Obrenović and his wife and put King Peter on the throne. Over the next years, the new king found it expedient to tolerate the activities of the conspirators who remained highly influential within Serbia and who promoted
Serbian nationalism abroad. The key figure among them was the charming, ruthless, sinister, and immensely strong Dragutin Dimitrijević, nicknamed Apis after the Egyptian god who is always portrayed as a bull. Apis was prepared to sacrifice his own life and those of his family and friends in the cause of a Greater Serbia. In 1911 he and some of his fellow conspirators founded the Black Hand, dedicated to bringing all Serbs together by fair means and foul.
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The Prime Minister, Pašić, who hoped to avoid conflict with Serbia’s neighbours, knew of its existence and tried to bring it under control by pensioning off, for example, some of the more dangerous among the nationalistic army officers. In the early summer of 1914 his confrontation with Apis reached an acute stage. On 2 June he resigned, but returned to office on 11 June and on 24 June, as the archduke was preparing to travel to Bosnia, he announced that parliament was dissolved and that fresh elections would be held later that summer. King Peter also stepped down and made his son Alexander regent. As the Bosnian conspirators were putting the final touches to their plans to assassinate the archduke on 28 June, Pašić, who had no wish to provoke Austria-Hungary, was fighting for his political life and not yet capable of rooting out the Black Hand and bringing Apis down.

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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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.