Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  “Mr. Mayor!” The Archduke’s gravel voice cut through the air. “What kind of gratitude! A bomb has been thrown at us! Outrageous!”

  The mayor gagged. Fezzes, turbans, kaftans trembled and huddled. The Duchess whispered briefly into the Archduke’s ear. The glare in his eyes softened. “Very well,” the Archduke said. “Very well. Mr. Mayor, get on with your speech.”

  The Duchess’s intervention allowed everything to continue with remarkable smoothness. The mayor went through the rest of his oration. For a moment it seemed as if Franz Ferdinand would not be able to answer because the text of his response (with its Slavic finale) had been left in the car disabled by the bomb. Just then an equerry came running with white pages blotched red from the wounded officer.

  Franz Ferdinand ripped the script out of the man’s hand. The Duchess put one finger on her husband’s arm. Once more her touch composed him. Evenly he wiped the blood away with a handkerchief offered by the equerry. Evenly he began to read his speech, improvising only one deft change. “I consider,” he said, “the welcome extended to my wife and me as expressions of joy that the attempt on our lives has been foiled.”

  All dignitaries clapped hands in relief. The Archduke went into his Serbo-Croat peroration: “Standing in this beautiful capital city, I assure you, our Slav and Mohammedan citizens, of our august Emperor’s continued interest in your well-being and of my own unchanging friendship”

  “Zivio!” from the dignitaries. Much applause. A courier roared up on a motorcycle. Good tidings from the garrison hospital to which the injured officer had been brought. Doctors confirmed that he had only a slight flesh wound.

  Now the ceremonies resumed their planned course. The Duchess went upstairs to the second floor of City Hall where Muslim ladies wanted to tender their respects to her unveiled. Franz Ferdinand recovered his mordant humor. “Did you hear?” he said to an aide. “The bomb thrower wanted to swallow cyanide? Idiot! Doesn’t he know our Austrian criminal justice system? They’ll give the man a decoration!” Thin-lipped smiles from the retinue. “And maybe they’ll have to give out more than one decoration. Maybe we’ll have some more Kugerln coming our way.” The Archduke was speaking in Viennese dialect, relishing its sardonic diminutives. “Kugerln” meant “bulletlets.”

  More thin-lipped smiles all around. With a mocking bow the Archduke turned to General Potiorek, Bosnia’s Military Governor. “What do you think, General? Any more Kugerln in your valued judgment?”

  “Your Imperial Highness, it was an isolated lunatic,” Potiorek said. “I think Your Imperial Highness can go qn at ease.”

  “The program, then, as scheduled,” Franz Ferdinand said. “But first I’ll visit Merizzi in the hospital.”

  “Your Imperial Highness, the wound is nothing,” Potiorek said. “Merizzi will be released within an hour—”

  “This man is my fellow officer,” the Archduke broke in. “He is bleeding for me. You’ll have the goodness to understand that. You’ll have the further goodness to order another car to take my wife back to her hotel—”

  Now it was the Archduke who was being interrupted. The Duchess had returned from the upper floor. She stopped his sentence not with words, but with a silent headshake. She stepped closer to her husband. A small step, but irrefutable. She was not going to the hotel in a different car. Not under any circumstances. She was staying by his side.

  The Archduke gave a mellowed nod; revoked his order for another automobile. As they walked out of City Hall he took her parasol again. Just outside the entrance, he gripped her hand. They stood in the blinding sunshine on top of the stairs, a clear target for any sharpshooter in the multitude below.

  The multitude did nothing but cheer. “Zivio! . . . Zivio!”

  From Sarajevo’s church towers the clocks struck half past ten in the morning. To the notables at City Hall the clangor ended a crisis.

  26

  THE SAME CHURCH BELLS TOLLED A VERY DIFFERENT MESSAGE TO THE EARS of a teenage schoolboy with a bomb and a pistol under his jacket. “All is over, all is over,” they tolled for Gavrilo Princip. It was all over. It had all been for nothing. For nothing, all the training, the planning, the efforts, the hardship of the last four weeks.

  Exactly a month ago, on May 28, he had left Belgrade with his two cohorts, Grabež and Cabrinović. Sarajevo lay a little more than a hundred miles away, but it had taken the three youths eight days to cover the distance. Through part of the journey within Serbia they trudged across forest and bush to avoid police checking out transients. Princip didn’t mind. He was the youngest, smallest, frailest of the trio. He was also the commander of the mission. With the Black Hand in Belgrade he had mapped out a route, tortuous but safe, called the “Apis Tunnel”

  The Tunnel worked. At the town of Sabac, the first station of their trip, Princip found a Serbian Army Captain playing the right exotic card game at the right coffee-house terrace (that of the Café Amerika) at the right time of day. The captain, a Black Hand agent, excused himself “to go for a walk with my nephew.” When Princip rejoined his mission-mates half an hour later, he carried in his pocket papers identifying the group as “customs officers” with Princip as “the sergeant in charge.”

  They were now ready to cross the border into Austria. And just then Princip found himself badly beset by a problem he thought he had eliminated at the outset.

  While still in Belgrade he had made his partners take a vow as solemn as their Black Hand oath: to exercise utmost caution and discretion; to avoid all social contacts save those required by common courtesy; to leave politics out of all conversations with outsiders; and, of course, to tell no one the truth of where they were ultimately going or why. The rule applied to all encounters, be they Austrian, Croat or Serb, no matter how friendly. Even a Serb might be an undercover minion of the Serb Prime Minister who was Apis’s foe. “What your enemy should not know, you must not tell your friend.”

  Grabež, a juvenile delinquent until his politicization by Princip, honored this pledge. The unpleasant surprise was Cabrinović. Cabrinović had been an activist even before he’d met Princip. He’d seemed cool and dedicated during target practice in Belgrade. That changed when they embarked on the awesome adventure itself; when they’d marched up the gangplank of the steamer with weaponry and cyanide under their coats, committed to slaughter or suicide or both.

  At that point Cabrinović had begun to be nervously garrulous. It was as if he wanted to save his life by “accidentally” giving away the mission. While still on the ship he struck up a prolonged conversation—with a gendarme, of all people. Luckily an impassive, incurious gendarme.

  Princip admonished him afterwards, to little effect. In a town close to the Austrian border, Cabrinović ran into an acquaintance, a fellow volunteer for Serbia in the Balkan War of the previous year. With him, Cabrinović’s talk became so unnaturally animated that his coat fell open to reveal the bombs. Princip dragged him away just in time.

  More folly at Koviljaca, a spa near their entry spot into Habsburg terrain. Here Princip decided that they should act like ordinary tourists, engaged in tourist activities like buying postcards. Princip addressed his own card to a cousin in Belgrade, with the message that he was on his way to a monastery where he would prepare himself for high school finals. But Cabrinović? He wrote to friends in Sarajevo and Trieste, inside the Austrian Empire where mail was likely to be monitored at the border. Worse yet, Cabrinović scribbled on one such chancy card the Serb nationalist saying “A good man and a horse will always find a way to break through.”

  That was too much for Princip, who always reviewed his crew’s correspondence. He tore up the card, took Cabrinović to a toilet stall in a cafe where he confiscated Cabrinović’s bombs and pistol. He informed Cabrinović that he must make the rest of the journey alone; alone, he was less likely to endanger his companions or the task they must fulfill. He was to enter Austria separately, at one of the alternate crossing points designated by the Black Hand. If all went well
, they would reunite in Sarajevo.

  And reunite they did at the Bosnian capital on June 4, with Cabrinović arriving, obediently, by a different path. Princip had chastised him into prudence, at least for a while. But at Sarajevo Princip met trouble from another source. It was also unexpected: Ilić.

  Ilić, the fourth of the quartet of conspirators, had been among Princip’s earliest companions in the cause, while Princip had lived in Sarajevo. Ilić had remained there with the Black Hand’s knowledge and encouragement. His job: to scout security measures taken in the city, along with other details of the Archduke’s coming. Ilić had served as the Sarajevo pillar of the developing plot. Princip found the pillar turning into putty.

  Ilić’s first words were that he had recruited three more youths “as auxiliaries” in the planned assassination.

  “You’ve tripled the chances of betrayal!” Princip said.

  Ilić protested. These three, he said, were all proven idealists. In fact, they would be valuable as part of the core of a new party that might be formed and whose formation might perhaps be a better tactic than the planned action—

  Better than the action against the Archduke? Princip couldn’t believe his ears.

  Well, he had been thinking about it, Ilić said. Better in the sense that—that killing the Archduke at this point might perhaps turn people against the Black Hand, but perhaps if a political party were started first, why, it would give the cause a more legitimate base, make it more widely popular, and then, perhaps, there would be very strong popular support for a radical act later, so that’s why he, Ilić, had founded a legal political weekly just three weeks ago, it was called Zvono (“The Bell”) and it would help create a more revolutionary climate with the ideas of Friedrich Engels, Bakunin, Trotsky buttressing the Serb cause—

  “No,” Princip said.

  The anxiety that had spilled crudely out of Cabrinović was now pouring, more intellectualized, out of Ilić. Nothing but anxiety lay behind all this stuttering.

  Princip’s small hand came down hard on Ilić’s shoulder. No, he told Ilić. There was no “perhaps.” There was no “better tactic.” There was only the deed it was their duty to do. They had not come together in Sarajevo as Socialists or journalists or intellectual politicians. They were warriors for Serb freedom. They had sworn to act. Now they must prepare to perform the action.

  Princip’s words did not cure Ilić of dread. But Princip’s unblinking blue eyes and unrelenting low voice subdued Ilić’s resistance. For the next three weeks Ilić kept nursing his misgivings obliquely in the pages of Zvono. In the June 15 issue he discussed “Seven Who Were Hanged,” a story by the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev, praising it as “a significant contribution to the argument against capital punishment.” Ilić printed Andreyev’s own comment that “ . . . it is my intention with this tale to point out the horror and impermissibility of capital punishment. The death penalty confuses the conscience of even resolute men . . .”

  But even as Ilić’s essay impugned capital punishment, he himself helped Princip trigger the death sentence to be visited on the Habsburg heir apparent.

  Ilić arranged for Princip’s lodging at his mother’s house. Ilić retrieved the conspirators’ arsenal. Princip, ever vigilant, had avoided the risk of entering Sarajevo armed; the bombs and pistols had been deposited with a “safe” cinema proprietor in Tuzla, a town close to Sarajevo. Ilić, who knew the pattern of local police surveillance, brought the weapons into the city. On the day he published his brief against capital punishment, Ilić obediently placed the instruments of execution under Princip’s bed.

  Together Princip and Ilić combed Sarajevo newspapers for the Archduke’s specific whereabouts during his forthcoming visit. The big Jesuit-controlled daily Hrvatski Dnevnik spoke the loyalist sympathies of Catholic Bosnia (as opposed to the much more Belgrade-minded Greek Orthodox element). Hrvatski Dnevnik looked forward to the Archduke with headlines like hail, our hope! but with no information interesting to people who wanted to get that hope into their gun-sights. The German-language Die Bosnische Post was more helpful. In Princip’s band only Ilić fully had mastered the oppressors’ tongue, and on June 18 he found in Die Bosnische Post the Archduke’s exact itinerary through the city. He mapped it out for Princip long before it appeared on posters calling on the populace to line their Crown Prince’s path with cheers.

  Every day before the Archduke’s arrival, fear and doubt flickered through Ilić. Every day he helped Princip inch closer to the thing he feared and doubted. After a while Princip ran out of the money handed him by the Black Hand in Belgrade. Ilić gave him “a loan” of twenty kronen. When that ran out, Princip ordered Ilić to procure gainful employment for himself and Cabrinović. Ilić found Princip office work at a welfare society. He got Cabrinović a job at a printing plant.

  Ilić also acted as navigator, evading police patrols, when the band visited Grabež who lived with a girl friend in the village of Pale, 15 miles southeast of Sarajevo. As the band strolled through Pale’s remote meadows, Princip would pull out his gun to practice his marksmanship on starlings and finches, then order the others to follow suit.

  In Sarajevo itself, Princip drew on Ilić’s expertise in devising a surface of innocuous urban adolescence. Princip was a celibate, nonsmoking, nondrinking, murder-intoxicated teenager. He and his friends spent their evenings as normal youths who chased pleasure through the lovely summer nights. They hung about a wine shop popular with the lads and lasses in the street just renamed for Franz Ferdinand. Princip pretended to flirt with girls. For the first and last time in his life he drank Žilavka.

  Princip had the plot poised, primed, and camouflaged— when it was threatened once more, again by Ilić. Very early one morning he knocked on Princip’s door. The assassination, he breathed, must be postponed—word from the Black Hand in Belgrade, whose emissary he had just met in the nearby town of Bled. Princip said that he, as mission leader, had heard nothing. He demanded proof. Ilić said that written orders were too great a risk, but here was printed evidence of the reason behind the decision—and waved a Bosnian newspaper with reports of turmoil in Serbia between militants of the Black Hand stripe and supporters of the more moderate Prime Minister. Princip read the reports. He dropped the paper and said, “All the more reason to go forward with the plot.” The plot went forward.

  Two days later Ilić waved newspapers with the bulletin that King Petar of Serbia had retired from active rule; his son Alexander was the Prince Regent. This, Ilić said, might change everything, including their business in Sarajevo. Princip answered that no order about any change had reached him; pistol practice as usual in Grabež’s meadow.

  These words he said aloud. Silently he determined that when the time came, Ilić should not be entrusted with a weapon.

  The time came. On the late afternoon of June 27, that rainy day before the Archduke’s visit, the bombs and pistols were distributed to all conspirators except Ilić. Princip instructed his team to hide the arms. They were to fool and josh the evening away at the usual wine shop—after all, it was Saturday night. But before sleep they were to spend some minutes— always singly, one by one, never together—at the grave of a Black Hand martyr in Kosovo Cemetery. Here they were to meditate; to dedicate and to consecrate themselves for the grim service they would render to Serbia tomorrow.

  And at the Kosovo Cemetery they all did just that—one by one, in the misty late-night hours of June 27, 1914.

  27

  AT 8:15 THE NEXT MORNING, WHILE THE ARCHDUKE AND HIS WIFE PRE-pared to entrain for Sarajevo, Princip summoned his band for the last time. They met in the back room of the Vlajnic Pastry Shop, near the scene of the day’s action. Suddenly it was Cabrinović—not Ilić—who created a last-minute difficulty.

  Since his return to Sarajevo, Cabrinović had lived in his parents’ house, telling them he’d come home to leave behind his life as a hobo radical. He’d behaved himself accordingly, working in his father’s cafe, acting “nicely”
—until now; until the imminence of the climax became too much. That morning the elder Cabrinović decided to hoist the Imperial colors from his establishment. He was a Habsburg loyalist and wished to show respect for the Crown Prince. Suddenly his son broke into protests against “the odious flag.” An argument erupted. The father told the boy to leave the house if he didn’t like its banner. The boy stalked off, shouting that soon the Austrian Crown Prince would be a joke—the Serbian King would rule Bosnia!

  When Cabrinović joined the other confederates in the pastry shop, he was still shaking with an anger all the angrier for its admixture of fear. He came into the back room spouting about his father. Princip restricted him to a whisper. Hissing furiously, Cabrinović not only reported his fight at home but announced yet another indiscretion. He would have himself photographed right now; if he should die for Serbia this morning, at least a picture of him would survive—the world would have a photograph of him just before his sacrifice—a memento for his father!

  Princip remained calm. One must be calm at the brink. Coming down hard on Cabrinović now would only have upset the fellow still more. The thing to do was to factor Cabrinović’s instability into his, Princip’s, final dispositions.

  He told Cabrinović to post himself at 9 A.M. sharp with the unarmed Ilić and the three armed auxiliaries near the corner of Cumunja Bridge and Appel Quay. Princip’s own station as well as Grabež’s would be some three hundred yards farther down the Archduke’s route along Appel Quay, closer to City Hall.

  With this deployment, the unreliables (Cabrinović, Ilić, the auxiliaries) would be tested first because they would see the target first. If they failed, the serious core of the squad, namely Princip backed by Grabež, could still bring the enterprise to the desired end.

  Still calm, Princip dismissed his group. They bade each other farewell since they might never see each other alive again. Princip told them to leave the pastry shop one by one and to arrive at their respective posts a few minutes apart along different paths. Cabrinović was allowed to go to a photographer’s studio on condition that he appear at the exact spot at the exact time, as ordered.