The following two days Sophie visited schools, orphanages, and churches, and Franz Ferdinand, as inspector general, supervised war games in which one army simulated fighting another through the unending rain. As the Archduke reported to the Emperor in writing, all performed excellently. Afterwards, Franz Ferdinand invited Haps-burg army and civilian officials and local dignitaries to a formal banquet at his hotel the night of Saturday, June 27: a dinner dance. It was a night to remember.
The hotel served Franz Ferdinand and his guests a cream soup, then soufflés of some sort, and then trout from the local river that had been jellied. Main courses were beef, lamb, and (accounts differ) either chicken or goose, followed by asparagus, salad and sherbet, and then cheeses, desserts, ice creams, and candies. A great range of wines and spirits were served, including champagne, white wines from the Rhine, red wines from Bordeaux, Madeira, Hungarian Tokay, and, penultimately, a vin du pays: a full, rich white Zilavka from nearby Mostar, drunk just before the cognac.
It was a summer night, and the windows of the Bosna's dining room were open. On the grass below the Sarajevo garrison band was playing a concert of light music. Through the open windows diners could hear the strains of Strauss's The Blue Danube, perhaps the most familiar of Viennese waltzes.
Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had met in Prague, all those years ago, at a dance. Now it was at a dance that they were spending their last night together.
CHAPTER 19: IN THE LAND OF
THE ASSASSINS
Franz Ferdinand, as remarked earlier, was a reactionary: he would have liked to turn back the calendar by a century. The Slavs who plotted against him were more reactionary still; they looked back more than five centuries, as remarked earlier, to the First Battle of Kosovo, at which, they believed, the greatness of Serbia had been lost. On June 28,1914, the conspirators proposed to redeem the defeat of 1389 at the cost of their own lives. Of course it was not really the 1389 battle that had doomed the Christian Balkans; it was the Second Battle of Kosovo—in 1448—that had done so. But the apprentice terrorists who dreamed these terrible dreams may not have known that. There were no scholars among them.
Denizens of the revolutionary underground tend to be thought of as belonging to the political left. But terrorists often occupy a time warp of their own: sometimes they look not forward but backward. They seek to restore kingdoms long since crumbled into dust. They rally to the banners of forgotten causes. They hearken to prophets who preached to the people of a bygone age.
Hence religious fanatics in the caves of Tora Bora in the opening years of the twenty-first century seeking to revive a religion as it was taught in the seventh century. Hence schoolboys in the primitive villages of the Balkans a century ago, hoping to become assassins like the legendary figures of whom they had heard tell in patriotic poetry.
These groups in the terrorist underworld were much the same in format, if not in message. They swore terrible oaths of fidelity, were subject to frightening tests, underwent initiation ceremonies at which blood was drunk from skulls, had a pistol put to their head and obeyed an order to pull the trigger, used code names, and were organized into cells in which only the leader knew members of the other cells. Though their aims differed, they sometimes assisted one another and often borrowed ceremonies, practices, and procedures from one another.
What distinguished terrorists from ordinary assassins was that they did not necessarily desire the immediate consequences of their violence. They killed people that often even they regarded as innocent. Their unique strategy—the strategy of terrorism—was to frighten society into doing something that the terrorists wanted society to do. An ordinary assassin shoots John Doe because he wants John Doe dead. A terrorist assassin shoots John Doe, whose life or death may be a matter of indifference to him, because he wants the authorities to react in a certain way to the killing.
At a time when the rulers of Eurasia repressed free political expression, many young idealists were driven underground. Beneath the empires of old Europe and eating away at their foundations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were networks of secret societies. Their members were visionaries, nationalists, army officers, romantics, patriots, idealists, fanatics, or madmen. The societies were illegal and the life they offered was dangerous, but for young people that often was an attraction rather than a drawback: life underground sounded glamorous and looked romantic. Some of the youthful terrorists believed in bombing and assassination, while others believed that individual violence was less effective than mass organization; but a belief they held in common was that society as it existed had to be blown up and blown away before construction of a better world could begin.
Undoing the consequences of the Industrial Revolution was a goal that many of them sought, though they would have put it differently, and to that end they fomented strikes and undertook sabotage. Others were intoxicated by the heady brew of nationalism: overthrowing alien rule. As Z. A. B. Zeman has pointed out, population pressures lent an intensity and an urgency to nationalists' demands. The Haps-burg and other multinational empires were a breeding ground for young political criminals and deranged radicals of right and left.
Kings, presidents, prime ministers, and other leaders of government and society were murdered promiscuously, without exciting as much surprise as such events would cause today. That was particularly true in the backward, semi-tribal southeast of Europe, where peasants lived with their animals, blood feuds were common, and vengeance killings were the norm.
Through the imaginative fiction of a Joseph Conrad or a Dostoevsky, one can try to picture this secret-society world of long ago in the far-distant Balkans. It was the world from which Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, emerged: an untalented, but serious-minded teenager whose career choice was to be a martyr. He was an adherent of the Young Bosnia movement, a loose grouping of youthful nationalists. Villagers, products of a feudal society, the Young Bosnians, who belonged to the first literate generation in their province, read and discussed relatively up-to-date and sometimes subversive literature: Walt Whitman, Alexander Herzen, Oscar Wilde, Maxim Gorky, and Henrik Ibsen were among the authors whose works they read. It is difficult to imagine what these schoolchildren, with their emotional roots in Serbian fourteenth-century martyrdom and their economic roots in the Middle Ages, made of Victorian and Edwardian modernism. They were acquainted with the writings, theories, and actions of the Russian revolutionary underground, and of the Nihilists of a half century before, but found it difficult to relate the various socialisms that animated the Russians to the peasant world of the Balkans. However, Princip himself owned a small library of anarchist literature that included the works of Michall Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. The verses of Nietzsche often were on his lips. A solitary figure, he lived among books rather than people.
Princip was born July 13, 1894, in the hamlet of Gornji Obljaj in the high woodlands of the Grahovo valley. It was in what Zeman has called "the poorest part of a poor province"; it was the Krajina, in western Bosnia, near Dalmatia. The Princip family had lived there for centuries, during which time frontiers and states had come and gone. They were Serbs of Bosnia, closely attached to their land, their church, their communal organizations, and their clan. Gavrilo left the valley when he was thirteen years old to attend school in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.
A slight, dark, curly-haired boy, on the frail side, an ascetic who neither smoked nor drank, he grew a mustache that made him look older but also made him look a bit like an organ grinder. He rejected religion, fought with his teachers, and attended schools only fitfully. He wanted to be a poet, feeling the sorrows of others. It bothered him that he was physically unprepossessing. When he volunteered for Serbian military service in the Balkan wars of 1912–13, he was turned down by a recruiting officer who said, "you are too small and weak." The remark stung him. He never forgave that officer.
During the twenty years of Princip's life, assassination had been a frequent and characteristic manifestati
on of the split between society and its underworld. Among those killed had been the President of France (1894), the Shah of Persia (1896), the President of Uruguay (1896), the Prime Minister of Spain (1897), the President of Guatemala (1898), the Empress of Austria (1898), the President of the Dominican Republic (1899), the King of Italy (1900), the President of the United States (1901), the King and Queen of Serbia (1903), the Prime Minister of Greece (1905), the Prime Minister of Bulgaria (1907), the Prime Minister of Persia (1907), the King of Portugal (1908), the Prime Minister of Egypt (1910), the Prime Minister of Russia (1911), the Prime Minister of Spain (1912), the President of Mexico (1913), and the King of the Hellenes (1913). On average, one head of state or head of government was murdered every year.
When the nineteen-year-old Princip read or heard in March 1914 or thereabouts that the heir to the Hapsburg Empire was to visit Bosnia in June, he hit upon the project (he claimed) of organizing an assassination. To the end of his life he insisted that it was his own idea. Be that as it may, other restless nationalists had plotted to kill Franz Ferdinand without success on many occasions, most recently in January 1914. There are those who believe that it was not so much that the Archduke was hated by the Young Bosnians—indeed they were badly informed and, in a number of respects, quite mistaken about his views—but that he was an outstanding symbol of the existing order that the students wanted to frighten and to overthrow.
According to another set of informants, it was the belief of the conspirators that Franz Ferdinand advocated "trialism"; he intended to make the Slavs full partners in government along with Austro-Germans and Hungarians. This policy might defuse Serb nationalism and deprive Young Bosnia and the others of their issue.
A contrary theory is that the Serbian nationalists had received false information that Austria-Hungary was on the point of attacking Serbia. The maneuvers in Sarajevo (they told one another) were a mere dress rehearsal. After the Balkan wars, everybody knew that Serbia was exhausted and would require several years to recuperate. Franz Ferdinand (they whispered) planned to take advantage of this helplessness by launching an invasion. They wrongly claimed that in Vienna, in the inner circle of government, the Archduke was the leader of the war party. In fact, he was the leading advocate of peace.
Princip asked friends to join in the plot. The friends agreed. He requested lessons in the use of firearms; again, friends agreed. One friend—a certain Milan Ciganovic—knew "a gentleman"—no name supplied—who could and did supply weaponry: bombs, revolvers, and poison with which to commit suicide after killing their targets. The same "gentleman" ranked high in a secret organization that promised to smuggle them across the frontier from Serbia into Austrian-occupied Bosnia in time for Franz Ferdinand's visit.
The revolvers were four Belgian automatic weapons, the latest issue. The six bombs were of a special Serbian manufacture, tiny, lightweight, and easy both to conceal and to use. The poison was cyanide.
Why did the "gentleman"—Major Voja Tankosic, right-hand man of the head of the Black Hand, a secret society within the Serbian army of which more will be said presently—choose to facilitate the assassination? Is it possible that his organization, through him, recruited Princip and his friends rather than vice versa? Or, if the plot really did originate with Princip, did Tankosic back it because he seriously meant what he said years later: that he did it "to make trouble for Pasic," the Prime Minister of Serbia?
Another of the many versions of the story of the Sarajevo murders supposedly was told by the Black Hand leader Apis to a friend in 1915. The friend published it in 1924. In this account, Tankosic complained to Apis one day: "Dragutin, there are several Bosnian youths who are pestering me. These kids want at any cost to perform some 'great deed.' They have heard that Franz Ferdinand will come to Bosnia for maneuvers and have begged me to let them go there. What do you say? . . . I have told them they cannot go but they give me no peace." To this, Apis responded something like: why not give them a chance? But then, sometime later, reflecting upon it, Apis began to think that it was important to kill Franz Ferdinand, and that the schoolboys lacked the requisite skills. So he sent a message to Princip to abort the mission, intending to send someone more seasoned instead. But Princip insisted on going ahead.
There have been three trials in which magistrates have sat in judgment on the Sarajevo affair: Austrian (1914), Serbian (1917), and Yugoslav (1953). All three were politically motivated, and of their findings, none compels credence. Even the exhaustive research and interviews undertaken by and for the great Italian historian Luigi Albertini in the interwar years resolved nothing. Witnesses saw a chance to settle a score or to advance a cause. Some forgot or confused things. Serbian nationalists have remained proud of the murders; many have wanted to take credit for them, or others perhaps wanted to make themselves seem important by knowing how they really happened. Apis, in asserting that he was personally responsible for the killing, may have believed that he was absolving his country from blame. Or he may have believed that, for one reason or another, he would not be condemned by the Serbian tribunal that tried him in 1917 if the judges realized that he was the patriot who killed Franz Ferdinand. Or the tribunal may have ordered Apis's execution in order to keep him from telling . . . we do not know what.
In the end, all that we know with certainty is that Princip fired the gun.
The sinister group that aided Princip was called Ujedinjenje ili Smrt ("Union or Death"). Later it became known as "the Black Hand." It was founded March 3, 1911, by seven nationalists who continued to protest the results of the Bosnian crisis of 1908–09. When the Serbian government accepted, albeit reluctantly, the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, so did the existing government-sponsored nationalist organization, the Narodna Odbrana (National Defense). From being a military-oriented anti-Austrian grouping it converted itself into a largely cultural society.
Dissenters from the decision to accept the annexation later formed the ultra-secret Black Hand in order to carry on the struggle. One of its founding members was a student of the history of European secret societies in France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. A self-conscious traditionalism (some might call it imitation) is evident in the constitution (in thirty-seven articles) and bylaws (in twenty-eight articles) of the elite secret society that formally came into existence in May 1911. It modeled itself largely on the Freemason lodges and on Mazzini's Young Italy movement in the nineteenth century.
The Black Hand infiltrated Narodna Odbrana and perhaps other organizations, but it was not widely known itself outside of government circles. Its existence, however, was known to a number of foreign countries. It constituted a leading faction within the military and was represented within the government. The organization consisted of extremist army officers and extreme nationalist politicians. Its dominating figure (though perhaps never its formal leader) was an army officer, now the powerful chief of military intelligence, named Dragutin Dimitrijevic, a bull-like man code-named "Apis." In 1903, Apis had led a murder party that slaughtered the King and Queen of Serbia in their palace, then threw their mutilated corpses out of the window. During the reign of the murdered king, Serbia had been a satellite of Austria. Under the dynasty that Apis and his colleagues restored to the throne, successive administrations pursued anti-Austrian policies, but not sufficiently so for Apis. Consenting to the Bosnian annexation in 1908–09 was, in his view, "treason."
The Black Hand pursued ultimate goals that were different from Princip's. Apis and his colleagues wanted Serbia to rule all the lands in which Serbs lived. Princip dreamed of creating a federation in which Croatia, Slovenia, and other southern Slavic peoples were united. These differences were not necessarily relevant in the spring of 1914; they were long-range goals.
Whether he knew it or not, however, in the short term, Princip was walking into a political crossfire. The Serbian government and even the Serbian army were split in two. Apis was in the grip of a fierce conflict with the sixty-eight-year-old Prime Minister
, Nicola Pasic, a veteran politician who, like Apis, was a Serb nationalist but, unlike Apis, was cautious. Each led a faction in a fight that was climaxing as Princip initiated his project. In May 1914, Apis persuaded the reigning monarch, King Peter, that Pasic ought to be dismissed. Then Russia intervened. As Serbia's sponsor among the Great Powers, Russia could, to some extent, lay down the law. Nicolai Hartwig, the Russian minister in Belgrade, intervened to retain Pasic as Prime Minister. Hartwig recognized that Serbia needed years of rest in which to recover from the Balkan wars and to consolidate its gains. It was no time for reckless adventurism.
On May 26, Gavrilo Princip set out from Belgrade, and headed toward a prearranged rendezvous with his fellow conspirators in Sarajevo. He traveled for nearly ten days through wild, forbidding country, difficult to traverse. His greatest challenge would be to cross the unfriendly frontier between independent Serbia and Hapsburg-ruled Bosnia. But it all was made easy for him. Agents were waiting to help him at every point along the way. It was a "tunnel" route developed and controlled by Narodna Odbrana and borrowed for the occasion by the Black Hand. On June 4, Princip arrived in Sarajevo to meet fellow conspirators, to prepare, and to rehearse.
The historian Albertini believed that Ciganovic, who had put Princip in touch with Tankosic of the Black Hand, was a police informer. If so, the Prime Minister from afar followed Princip's progress step-by-step. According to one version, the Prime Minister gave orders to border guards to stop Princip at the Serbian frontier— orders that were disobeyed by Serbian officials loyal to Apis. Instead, they let the conspirators pass, and then told Pasic that they had not received his orders until it was too late. In a variation of that version, those same officials then confessed to Pasic what they had done. One way or another, the Prime Minister (it is widely believed) learned that terrorists—Princip and a companion—carrying pistols and bombs had crossed the Drina River into Bosnia, and he either knew or guessed that the Archduke must be the target. But Pasic always denied that he had specific knowledge of what was about to occur.
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