Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  Colonel Edward House, Woodrow Wilson’s adviser, did not eavesdrop on this scene. But he happened to be touring Europe at that time on a mission for the American President. He was to collect information for a plan by which Wilson might calm down the continent. And the American did catch the mood producing conversations such as the one in Carlsbad. “The situation is extraordinary,” he reported on May 29, 1914, from Berlin to the White House. “It is militarism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about a different understanding, there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred. Too many jealousies.”

  It turned out that the White House must tend to belligerence much closer to home. American nationals had been abused in Mexico. In April, Marines had seized Vera Cruz. By May the United States stood on the brink of war with its Southern neighbor. Woodrow Wilson faced too much New World trouble to straighten out the Old.

  Lenin in 1914. Culver Pictures, Inc.

  Stalin ca. 1914. Culver Pictures, Inc.

  Hitler amid the crowd acclaiming the German declaration of war on Russia. Date: August 1, 1914. Place: Odeonplatz, Munich. Culver Pictures, Inc.

  Dapper Leon Trotsky’s passport photograph, 1914.

  Viktor Adler, leader of Austria’s Socialist Party. Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbibliothek

  A married couple in love: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie. Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbibliothek

  Chess players and kibitzers at the Café Central. Werner J. Schweiger

  Ball at the Imperial Palace in Vienna. Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbibliothek

  Caricature of Karl Kraus, Vienna’s preeminent satirist, peddling his periodical, Die Fackel Die Muskete

  General Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of Staff of Austria’s Armed Forces. Bildarchiv d, Öst. Nationalbibliothek

  Emperor Franz Joseph strolling with his lady love, the actress Katharina Schratt, in Bad Ischl. Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbibliothek

  Sigrnund Freud with his daughter Anna on summer holiday in the Dolomites shortly before his confrontation with Jung at the International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Munich in September 1913, Mary Evans-Sigmund Freud Copyrights, Colchester

  Emperor Franz Joseph in his hunting costume in Bad Ischl. Öst. Staatsarchiv-Kriegsarchiv

  The assassin Gavrilo Princip (right) with his co-conspirator Trifko Grabež (left) and a friend on a bench in Belgrade’s Kalmedgan Park, May 1914. Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbihliothek

  Count Leopold voe Berchtold, Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbihliothek

  June 12, 1914, sixteen days before the assassination: The Kaiser visits Franz Ferdinand at Konopiste. From left to right: The Archduke in the uniform of the 10th Prussian Uhlan Regiment; his wife, the Duchess Hohenberg; the Kaiser in hunting costume, having his hand kissed by one of the Archdukes sons. Archiv Gunther Ossmann, Wien

  The Chief of Serbia’s Intelligence Bureau, Colonel Dragutin C. Dimitrijevic, flanked by aides. Also known by the code name “Apis,” he was the head of the Serbian terrorist organization The Black Hand, which funded the assassins. Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbibliothek

  Koeopiste. The esplanade leading to the rose garden at Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s castle. Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbibliothek

  June 28, 1914, ten minutes before the assassination: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife leave Sarajevo City Hall. Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbibliothek

  The death car: Franz Ferdinand and his wife in the back seat with Count Harrach standing on the running board. Bildarchiv d. Öst. Nationalbibliothek

  The assassin Princip just after his arrest. Culver Pictures, Inc.

  But the arithmetic of the militarism alarming Colonel House was indeed awesome. Despite Socialist resistance, the Berlin parliament had raised the peacetime strength of the German military establishment from 660,000 to nearly 800,000. The three-year conscription period added enormous striking power to the French army. Within four years Russia’s preparedness program had increased her forces by 500,000 men to 1,300,000, and her forces were growing still. In a similar span Austria had expanded her army from 400,000 to half a million. “We spend half as much on armaments as Germany,” wrote the Socialist Arbeiter Zeitung soon after the Generals’ High Tea at Carlsbad, “yet Austria’s gross product is only one-sixth of Germany’s. In other words, we spend proportionately three times as much on war as Kaiser Wilhelm. Must we play Big Power at the cost of poverty and hunger?”

  As these words were published on May 29, a cold spell shivered through the Vienna Woods. Twenty-four hours later the sun returned. Again lilacs flashed, cuckoos called, kites soared above apple blossoms in the hills wreathing the city. At almost the same time the First Lord Chamberlain made a smiling announcement at Schönbrunn Palace. The congestion in His Majesty’s lungs had cleared. Most signs of pneumonia were gone and so was the fever. The august patient was making a strong recovery. In fact, His Majesty’s physicians had reason to hope that he would be able to return to a normal schedule in about two weeks.

  The legend of Franz Joseph could continue, perhaps, forever, in the flesh. And from the trivial to the crucial, everything seemed to change for the better along the Danube. Nevetle, a yearling from the stable of Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold, came in first at the Freudenau races in Vienna. This brightened the wit of upper officials supping at Meissl & Schadn. They were familiar with certain perfumed coaches often waiting at a side entrance of the Minister’s offices at the Ballhausplatz. To them the fact that his filly had won the Con Amore handicap signified that—with the Emperor improved—the Count’s continued tenure would also continue his luck in the conduct of affairs, be they foreign or female.

  Indeed, private sport aside, the Foreign Minister could point with satisfaction to news important to the world at large. At a meeting with legislative leaders he quoted a statement just made by the French Prime Minister: It expressed deep admiration for the wisdom with which Franz Joseph—so recently restored—guided the destiny of the realm. Count von Berchtold also mentioned that the King of England had confirmed his intention to hunt with Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in Austria come fall. For Serbia the Count had words of hope and moderation. (Of Albanian complexities he said nothing, possibly because they were simply too complex: On the one hand, the insurrection against the mbret had caused half his government to resign and himself to seek refuge on the Italian warship Misurata; on the other hand, the mbret had created yet another decoration, the Order of the White Star of Skanderbeg, whose glitter on the breasts of some disorderly majors re-ordered things to the point where the mbret could slink back to his capital again.) On the whole the Austrian Foreign Minister was happy to conclude that Cassandra wails about the imminence of war were as unfounded as earlier evil rumors about the imminence of the monarch’s death.

  Berchtold was not the only one to exude optimism. Early in June his Berlin colleague Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg sent the German ambassador in London a note whose cheer contrasts with the grimness of the generals at Carlsbad just a couple of weeks before. The German Chancellor said that he could not blame Russia for wanting a stronger voice in the Balkans and that “I do not believe that Russia is planning an early war against us. Whether it will come to a general European conflagration will depend entirely on the attitude of Germany and England. If we two stand united as guarantors of European peace . . . then war can be averted.”

  A few days later, on June 24 (three days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s arrival in Sarajevo), the German ambassador reported a most amiable chat with Sir Edward Grey, the English Foreign Secretary: “The Secretary said that it was his endeavour to go hand in hand with us [Germans] into the future and to remain in close contact over all the questions that might arise. . . As regards Russia, he had not the slightest reason to doubt the peaceful intentions of the Russian government. Nothing could take place that would give this relationship [between Russia and England
] an aggressive point against Germany. He believed moreover that lately a less apprehensive frame of mind on the question had been gaining ground with us in Germany . . .” The Foreign Ministers kept soothing, the chimneys of gun factories kept smoking.

  At the other end of the political spectrum, Vladimir Lenin did not anticipate war. When the Socialist International had called an Emergency Conference in Basel in 1912 on the threat of a worldwide conflict, he had not bothered to attend. Soon afterward he’d written to Gorki: “A war between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the revolution in all of Eastern Europe, but it is not likely that Franz Joseph and [Tsar] Nikolosha will give us that pleasure”

  Now, in May 1914, Lenin had no eye for international clouds. It was not war between nations that was on his mind but the battle between factions within Socialism. He spent his huge energies on carving out an ever stronger Bolshevik position vis-á-vis the milksop Mensheviks and all other rivals contending for leadership of the revolutionary movement. From Poronin in the Galician mountains, on the Habsburg side of the Austrian-Russian frontier, Lenin’s letters and couriers kept streaming into the Tsar’s territory. They carried instructions on how to increase still further the circulation gains of the St. Petersburg Pravda that had put the Menshevik paper Luch out of business; how to spread Bolshevik control of the Metal Workers’ Brotherhood so that Bolsheviks would dominate related trade unions as well; how to encourage a trio of Moscow millionaires—who hoped to liberalize the Tsar by encouraging pressure from the savage left—in the financing of Bolshevik activities. Lenin’s chief purpose that spring: to present an array of Bolshevik voices as powerful as possible at the Unity Conference of all Russian Socialist Party segments set for July 1914 in Brussels, and then to march fully mobilized into the Congress of the Socialist International to open in Vienna on August 26.

  Meanwhile Dr. Sigmund Freud girded for intramural grapeshot at his Congress—that of the International Psycho-Analytical Association scheduled for September 1914 at Dresden. Now, three months earlier, it was apple-blossom time in Vienna and at Berggasse headquarters “war” meant “Jung.”

  After all, relentless pressure from Freud’s forces had just pushed the Swiss psychiatrist out of the presidency of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. Some sort of counterblow from Zurich must be expected. Yet June started the way May ended—quite clemently.

  For one thing, evaluation had been completed of the tests Freud had undergone—with excellent news. There was no sign whatsoever of any intestinal tumor. Soon afterward Freud’s symptoms subsided. His fear of cancer vanished together with his Emperor’s pneumonia. As for the Freud-Jung front, the first salvo from the enemy was subtle rather than searing. Jung fired it by way of his address to the British Medical Association in Aberdeen: “The Unconscious in Psycho-Pathology.” The speech abolished psychoanalysis, at least in Jung’s vocabulary: He didn’t so much as mention the word. But except through omission he didn’t attack Freud’s movement either; at one point he even credited his former mentor with calling attention to the importance of dreams.

  Of course that sort of gesture furthered the aims of ill will by a show of good manners. At the same time it produced a sort of lull. Freud could—almost—return to normal business. He devoted himself to the famous Wolf Man case. Here Freud traced a phobia of wolves to the patient’s glimpse, at a very young age, of his parents copulating a tergo. In truth, one aspect of the paper was yet another chapter of the anti-Jung argument. Jung held that such primal scenes were usually a neurotic fantasy. Freud maintained they were real. But in the Wolf Man paper he softened the collision between dogmas by admitting that the difference might not be “a matter of very great importance.”

  The war with Jung was on, but at this point it did not require any very ugly waging. Freud looked forward to his summer cure at Carlsbad in a mood much brighter than that of the two chiefs of staff who had taken the waters there some weeks earlier.

  21

  VIENNA PERKED UP DURING THE LAST WEEKS OF SPRING. AT ONE OF Princess Metternich’s famed “mixed dinners,” industrialists heard from courtiers proof of Franz Joseph’s complete recovery: Once more His Majesty was taking walks in the Schönbrunn Palace gardens with his one and only Frau Schratt. This unofficial but adorable bulletin lifted the stock market to the level from which it had dropped at the onset of the All-Highest illness.

  The weather was genial. It had the good taste to rain only at night. The sun seemed to have melted away most angry demonstrations along the Ringstrasse. Those controversies still left in town showed a luscious Viennese sheen. At the Café Central, Havanas were puffed, mochas were sipped, chocolate eclairs were being forked as the disputants faced the issues: Was Gustav Mahler’s adaptation of Hugo Wolfs Der Corregidor really as calamitous as some reviews complained? Or did its problem reside not in the music but in the flawed presentation? And was the culprit of that flaw an opera management known for its anti-Mahler bias after the great maestro had passéd? And for how long would that same straitlaced management keep Richard Strauss’s voluptuous Salome out of its repertoire? And, still speaking of the Court Opera, did diva Selma Kurz deserve ten curtain calls for her Lucia di Lammermoor? Shifting to ballet, what about Pavlova’s Directoire dress—wasn’t that a bit out of key when she danced the gavotte, no matter how dazzling her entrechats? And had Frank Wedekind enhanced his own play Samson by not only directing it but also taking on the role of Og, King of the Philistines? Or was it time for that rather weathered eroticist to let go of the greasepaint?

  Outside Austria thornier themes drew grimmer contestants. In Great Britain, it was Irish against English as well as English women against English men. Suffragettes threatened to kidnap members of the royal family who would then be ransomed for the right to vote. The King could no longer take his morning ride through Hyde Park. Shouting ladies kept waylaying his horse. In France, the Socialist victory at the May elections showed popular resentment of the three-year conscription term while at the same time hardening President Poincaré’s insistence on it; the conflict produced daily melees between people and police. Russian strikes stopped factory wheels from Moscow to Tiflis. The Duma at St. Petersburg had become so rowdy that even the nicely cravated Alexander Kerensky of the usually well-behaved Labor Party had to be escorted from the chamber for causing a disruption.

  But it was Serbia—Russia’s protégé, Austria’s bane—that shook with the most severe domestic turmoil. In Serbia the opposition between the two most powerful political camps sharpened toward a showdown. Prime Minister Pašić led one side; his Radical Party stood for measured nationalism. As nationalist, Pašić proclaimed Serbia’s right to defend her interests (and pocketed, some said, commissions from the French firm Schneider-Creuzot, which was producing arms for Serbia’s defense). But as a man of measure, Pašić feared that excessive action against Austria would risk a crisis before Serbia was ready. He suspected that zealots, mostly officers, would use war to usurp the government.

  Pašić’s chief opponent was the chief zealot: Colonel Apis, officially head of Army Intelligence, secretly leader of the Black Hand. Apis would accept nothing less than the most drastic fulfillment of the Serb cause, above all the breaking of Habsburg chains that bound Slav brethren in Austrian Bosnia.

  In the spring of 1914, Belgrade simmered with the incompatibility between Pašić and Apis. The Prime Minister dismissed Apis’s main supporter in the cabinet, Minister of War Miloš Božanović. Apis’s side retaliated through the periodical Pijemont. “A gang of men without conscience,” it said about Pašić’s party in May 1914, “. . . this government cannot be tolerated for a moment or rebellion will break out in our country.” Apis had no public connection to the paper publishing the attack. Yet Belgrade recognized him as the target of the counterattack when the Minister of the Interior banned Pijemont. Gendarmes summoned from the countryside patrolled Belgrade’s streets: Serbia’s other armed force had been alerted against an army coup.

  Vi
enna took note of Serb frictions but not of their deeper implications. Just at the end of May, the Chief of Austrian Intelligence—the one man in Vienna most likely to know Belgrade behind the scenes—retired abruptly. Apis’s Habsburg counterpart, Colonel “Ostrymiecz” von Urbanski, was pensioned off. (The War Ministry did not deny rumors that he had been caught selling to a film producer memorabilia of his late associate Colonel Redl, the famous and now posthumously cinemagenic traitor.) The loss of its director disoriented Austria’s information gathering service. Yet even at its best it would not have sniffed out an event in Belgrade of which not even the Serbian Prime Minister had an inkling.

  Underground, in the cellar of a shabby house, three young men went through a ceremony whose consequences would explode over millions of square miles of the world above.

  On the night of May 27, 1914, Gavrilo Princip and his two disciples walked down seven steps on Krakjice Natalije Street into a small room in the basement. They were met by a figure robed and hooded in black.

  “Who among you three speaks for the others?”

  “I do,” said Princip, the youngest and smallest.

  “Do you know one important reason why you are going to execute this mission?”

  “Because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is the oppressor of our people.”

  “Do you know when you are going to execute this mission?”

  “When the oppressor comes to Sarajevo.”

  “When will that be?”

  “On June 28. That is another important reason—that day. He dares to come there on St. Vitus Day.”

  “And what is a third important reason?”