Europe's Last Summer

by David Fromkin

  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.

  From Kiel, the London Times correspondent cabled to his editor that "German interest in the Austrian problem will be even more intense" than it had been before.

  According to a leading contemporary newspaper editor in Vienna, long afterwards, "the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand . . . came as a relief in wide political circles even to the highest official circles." Bülow, the former German Chancellor, reported that he was told by a Hungarian diplomat that the outrage "was a dispensation of Providence" because the anti-Hungarian Franz Ferdinand might have broken up Austria-Hungary in a civil war.

  Monday, June 29. England. The "Outrage," as the assassinations were called, dominated the foreign reporting published in the morning's London Times. According to the newspaper's Sarajevo correspondent, the terrible events in the Bosnian capital were "evidently the fruit of a carefully laid plot."

  Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, having "narrowly escaped death" from a bomb thrown at them at 10:15 a.m. by one assailant, were struck down soon afterwards by another, "a high school student" who fired a Browning automatic pistol. The fact that one of the attackers was from Bosnia and the other from Herzegovina pointed to a plot that was widespread. However, no information as to the race or creed of the assassin was available. Both criminals had been "with difficulty saved from being lynched," reported the Times correspondent.

  The news account was supplemented by background pieces. A sympathetic note about eighty-four-year-old Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, who had been dealt another blow in the sixty-sixth year of his reign, reminded readers of the violent deaths of his wife, his brother, and his son, concluding, "few can have had to suffer a succession of calamities so grievous as the stricken old man who sits upon the proudest throne on the Continent."

  Yet the Emperor showed no sign in public of being stricken. Nor was the Austrian public upset by the news; "there is little trace of public excitement," reported a correspondent in Vienna.

  According to the British consul in Sarajevo, "Local paper speaks of Anarchist crime, but act was more likely that of Servian [sic] irredentists, preconcerted long ago."

  A concise biography of Franz Ferdinand explained that since in his early years he was not expected ever to mount the throne—his cousin Rudolf then was the heir, and presumably would have been succeeded by his future children—there seemed to be no reason to train him in statecraft. His tutors therefore were guided by the principle that his "intellectual faculties . . . should not be overtaxed." By his mid-twenties he was "a good horseman, a crack shot, and a painstaking officer, [but] his knowledge of political and constitutional questions was limited." These latter were matters that he began studying only in 1889 when, on the death of Rudolf, he became heir to the throne. Rudolf had been the Emperor's son; Franz Ferdinand was only a nephew.

  In the City of London, securities markets were weak at the opening, but recovered once it became evident that the Vienna exchange and other continental bourses were holding firm.

  Sir Mark Sykes, a Tory backbencher who was by no means parochial in outlook—he had traveled widely in the Middle East, an area on which he was one of his party's few experts—spoke for many when he told the House of Commons that it was no time to focus on foreign developments, no matter how gripping; it was "difficult to discuss foreign affairs freely when our home affairs were in such a particularly evil plight."

  Tuesday, June 30. Sykes's sentiments were echoed in a Times leader (an editorial) that agreed that what happened in Sarajevo "fills the first place in the public mind" and would "occupy the attention of all students of European politics" but that domestic politics must not be ignored: "our own affairs must be addressed." The Times presumably referred to the threat that in a few weeks the United Kingdom might dissolve in a civil war to determine the fate of Ireland—and much else.

  The permanent head of the Foreign Office, in a communication to his ambassador in Russia, expressed his wish that the fallout be limited. "The tragedy which has recently occurred at Sarajevo will, I hope, not lead to further complications; though it is already fairly evident that the Austrians are attributing the terrible events to Serbian intrigues and machinations" some good might come of it all: "it is possible that the new heir will be more popular than the late Archduke."

  In France, at the first cabinet meeting since the assassinations, the killings (according to President Poincaré's biographer) were "hardly mentioned."

  The British ambassador to Italy reported to London: "It has been curious to study here the effect of the abominable assassination at Sarajevo. While ostensibly the authorities and the press have been loud in their denunciations of the crime . . . it is obvious that people have generally regarded the elimination of the late Archduke as almost providential."

  Paris could take no notice. It was completely caught up in a scandal, a wonderful scandal. The scandal had everything: sex, violence, international intrigue, love and passion and jealousy and wrongdoing in high places. It was the notorious Caillaux affa
ir.

  Joseph Caillaux, who had become Prime Minister of France in 1911, was a left-wing politician who had been forced out of office in 1912 for being, allegedly, too accommodating to Germany. In 1913 he again became a cabinet minister, but was under frequent attack from the right. He was indeed a leading advocate of friendship with Germany—and he was a something of a pacifist.

  Caillaux was an old friend of President Poincaré's. In their bachelor days they had been companions in pleasure-seeking. One difference between the two was that Poincaré was discreet while Caillaux was a showoff. When the two men spent a vacation in Italy together, along with their mistresses, the contrast was striking: in the words of Caillaux, "mine I displayed, his he kept hidden."

  When, at the age of forty-three Poincaré married, in a civil ceremony, the wedding was so private that few knew of it. Caillaux, however, when he married, proceeded to carry on a clandestine love affair with another mistress, who eventually became his second wife.

  Despite the personal friendship between the two men, they had become political adversaries by 1913–14. Having just been elected President of France, Poincaré, on March 4, 1913, supported proposed legislation to increase the length of military duty in the French army from two to three years. It seemed to be the only way for France to offset Germany's population lead: 70 million to 40 million. Caillaux opposed the measure. The bill was adopted on August 7. Caillaux, who was elected chairman of the Radical party, continued to attack the legislation. So did the somewhat pacifist Jean Jaurès, who had unified the country's Socialists.

  The political campaign against Caillaux in 1914 was spearheaded by the most powerful journalist in France, Gaston Calmette, editor of the leading journal of the right, Le Figaro. Calmette claimed he would make public certain documents that would show that Caillaux, when he was minister of finance in 1911, had obstructed justice in a financial scandal in which he personally had perhaps been involved. Calmette also threatened to publish the love letters of Caillaux and his second wife, written at a time when Caillaux was still married to his first wife.

  More was to come: German cables to Caillaux, dating from the Agadir crisis of 1911, that supposedly showed Caillaux to be sympathetic to Germany had been intercepted by the French foreign office. Calmette supposedly was going to publish these, too, whereupon the German government protested against the interception of its correspondence.

  Caillaux now went to his old friend President Poincaré, asking him to prevent Calmette from revealing his dossier, and warned that unless the President did so, he (Caillaux) would disclose what he knew about Poincaré's secret negotiations with the Vatican. These were evidenced by intercepted Italian cables. If known, these would compromise the President with his secularist anticlerical supporters.

  Thereupon the French government officially denied the existence of the intercepted German cables, and Caillaux, in return, refrained from revealing the existence of the Italian cables in his possession. All that now threatened Caillaux was Calmette's proposed publication of the love letters.

  On March 16,1914, the second Mme Caillaux went to Calmette's office, asked to see him, waited, and when she saw him, fired six shots from an automatic pistol and killed him.

  Her murder trial was scheduled for July 20. In July, therefore, the attention of Paris was riveted on the trial. Leftists and rightists fought in the streets. There was no time and no attention left for the Archduke and his consort.

  Poincaré jested that the affair had put new ideas in his head: he might send out his wife to shoot down his own opponents.

  If there were any country in Europe in which the killings in Sarajevo should have been felt keenly, it would have been the Archduke's own Austria. People should have been crying in the streets. Yet Z. A. B. Zeman writes that in Vienna "the event almost failed to make any impression whatever. On Sunday and Monday, the crowds in Vienna listened to music and drank wine . . . as if nothing had happened."

  The author Stefan Zweig was seated on a park bench in Vienna the afternoon of June 28. He was aroused from the book he was reading by a sudden silence: the distant sound of a band no longer could be heard; the music had stopped. People were gathering around the bandstand, listening to some announcement. Zweig joined them. The crowd was receiving news of the assassinations in Sarajevo. These were Austrians, hearing of the death of their leader-to-be. Yet, Zweig wrote later, "there was no particular shock or dismay to be seen on their faces, for the heir-apparent was not at all well-liked. . . . He was never seen to smile, and no photographs showed him relaxed. He had no sense for music, and no sense of humor, and his wife was equally unfriendly. They both were surrounded by an icy air; one knew that they had no friends. My almost mystic premonition that some misfortune would come from this man with his bulldog neck and his cold, staring eyes, was by no means a personal one but was shared by the entire nation; and so the news of his murder aroused no profound sympathy."

  Indeed, in all the capitals of Europe, the reaction to the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne was calm to the point of indifference.

  CHAPTER 23: DISPOSING OF

  THE BODIES

  Prince Montenuovo, chief controller of the Hapsburg Imperial Household and chief persecutor of Sophie while she was still alive, was in charge of arrangements for the two bodies. He had them shipped to Vienna so as to arrive late at night: 10 p.m. on July 2. Montenuovo expected nobody to meet them so that, unobserved, he could separate the two corpses. The Archduke could be sent to the Hapsburg family Hofburg Chapel, while Sophie could go to Artstetten, a castle where Franz Ferdinand had built a chapel for his wife and himself.

  Montenuovo's plan was derailed when the bodies were met at the Vienna train station by the Archduke Charles, Franz Ferdinand's nephew who had succeeded to the position of heir apparent. Charles was accompanied, Albertini tells us, by "the whole officer corps of the Vienna garrison." So both bodies went to Hofburg Chapel for memorial services.

  Even so, the Archduke's coffin was higher and larger, and bore "his full insignia" as the second-highest-ranking prince of the empire, while hers bore a pair of white gloves and a black fan—the insignia of her service as a lady-in-waiting.

  The children of the couple were forbidden to attend the memorial services for their parents. They did send flowers, one of the only two bouquets allowed.

  Foreign royal personages were asked by Vienna not to attend and therefore did not do so. The ceremony occurred on July 3. Afterwards the chapel was closed. In the night the coffins were transferred back to the railroad station but were intercepted; thereafter they were accompanied by a large body of nobles led by Sophie's brother—a group that refused to be excluded.

  At Artstetten the bodies of the Archduke and his morganatic wife reached their burial ground, harassed and humiliated in death as they had been in life by the Hapsburg court. It was shabby behavior by the court grandees. It also was shortsighted: it undermined its claim to have been injured by the crime that Gavrilo Princip had perpetrated.

  CHAPTER 24: ROUNDING UP

  THE SUSPECTS

  Battered, bleeding, and vomiting, Princip was brought into the police station. Cabrinovic, the bomb thrower, had arrived only a short time before. Following continental legal procedures, an examining magistrate, Leo Pfeffer—a local functionary—had been appointed to investigate Cabrinovic's crime. When the police brought in Princip, the scope of Pfeffer's inquiry was widened. Two such attempts within minutes of one another suggested something larger than a murder; it pointed to a conspiracy.

  At first, wrote Judge Pfeffer, Princip, "exhausted by his beating, was unable to utter a word. He was undersized, emaciated, sallow, sharp featured. It was difficult to imagine that so fragile looking an individual could have committed so serious a deed."

  Later, under interrogation, Princip regained his voice, and asserted that he had no accomplices and had acted on his own initiative. He denied all knowledge of Cabrinovic. Of himself, he said: "people took me for a weakling. . . .
And I pretended that I was a weak person even though I was not."

  Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his family

  Aerial view of Sarajevo in 1914

  The Archduke and Duchess begin their day in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914.

  The scene of the first assassination attempt

  The royal couple leaves the city hall.

  The arrest of Gavrilo Princip

  Emperor Franz Joseph I

  U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and

  Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan

  Colonel Edward House,

  Wilson's diplomatic envoy

  Serbian Prime Minister Nicola Pasic

  The leader of the Austro-Hungarian Army, Conrad von Hötzendorf

  In turn, Cabrinovic, though he admitted knowing Princip, denied any knowledge of what his friend had done. If Princip, too, had made an attempt on the Archduke's life, it must have been (according to Cabrinovic) because he harbored similar feelings and had arrived at the same conclusions as to what had to be done.

  The correspondent of the London Times reported on June 29 that Princip and Cabrinovic "are said to have assumed a most cynical attitude during their examination" and to have persisted in claiming that nobody else was involved.

  Their story—that two friends by coincidence had tried to assassinate the same public figure, independently of one another, on the same day in the same place, at roughly the same time—was inherently absurd. The reason they had no more plausible account to provide was that they had made no effort to devise one: theirs was a suicide mission; they had swallowed their cyanide; they should have been dead, and therefore in no need of a cover story for the authorities.