Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  Cabrinović swore to his leader that he would. During that brief huddle in the back room, Princip had managed to invest Cabrinović with some of his own self-control. Cabrinović proved that a few minutes later in the street. He stumbled on an old crony (with whom he presently had his picture taken), and then on two girls of their acquaintance. Crony and girls wore their Sunday clothes; they were on the town for the gala morning that featured an Archduke’s visit. Crony and girls joked with Cabrinović. None of them noticed anything amiss.

  Neither did Maxim Svara, son of the Attorney General of Sarajevo and a former schoolmate of Princip’s. Princip happened to run into him on the way to what no one must know was his battle station. Princip casually small-talked with Maxim, pistol and bomb arranged so as not to bulge his jacket even slightly. For six blocks they strolled together on Appel Quay. All along they watched flags being run up on poles and people assembling to watch the Habsburg prince ride by. Then the two youths wished each other good day. Maxim turned left to the Cathedral where the bishop was offering High Mass in honor of the dynasty. Princip continued walking along the Quay until he reached Latin Bridge.

  From 9 A.M. on he stood there. He waited in the gathering crowd. His ear was cocked for the motorcade. His hand was ready for the trigger of his pistol, for the cap of his bomb, for his capsule of cyanide.

  Just after 10 A.M. he heard cries of “Zivio! . . . Zivio! . . .” followed by a powerful growl of car engines and then, suddenly, a detonation. The bang faded into shouts. At once Princip pressed forward fiercely through the throng and saw, at last, the bomb-smashed wooden shutter of a store front with the Habsburg flag waving above, a big car with gesticulating generals and blown-out tires, some people sitting on the curb bloodying their Sunday best—and Cabrinović held in a rough grip by two gendarmes . . . Cabrinović retching from the cyanide, dripping from the river across which he’d obviously tried to escape. No sign of the Archduke, but Princip assumed his body had been spirited away.

  So Cabrinović, the unstable, had come through after all. Yet obviously he had been prevented from swallowing the cyanide and might not be able to remain silent under tough interrogation. He would give away the Black Hand. Princip’s fingers tightened around the Browning. He must kill first Cabrinović, then himself. That moment a whole new stampede of gendarmes came down on Cabrinović with their gold-crested helmets and whisked him off. Princip heard the sputter of car engines being cranked up. The motorcade sped off much faster than it had come. And everywhere people who had been closer to the lead car were saying how calm the Archduke had acted, how crazy these fanatics must be with their bombs, how lucky the Archduke had not been hurt.

  The Archduke had not been hurt.

  It had all been for nothing—at least so far. Desperately Princip looked for his confederates in order to regroup. But they were hard to find in the excitement everywhere and the rapid influx of new spectators. The bomb had made the high visit dramatic. Now the Archduke was much more than an interesting sight. He had become a sensation. Very soon this sensation was due to drive back from City Hall, again along Appel Quay. More and more people brimmed on the sidewalk. Nobody of Princip’s team was among them, no matter where he looked. They had all fled. They had scattered. They had deserted. Princip was alone. Alone with his bomb, his pistol, and the knowledge of how unlikely he was to use either because of the precautions the enemy would now take.

  But, having driven himself so far without mercy, he decided to go on without much hope. He crossed over to the other side of the Quay. That way he would be closer to the automobiles, just in case the Archduke really did return along Appel Quay, as called for by the original schedule. Once more, he waited, this time at the corner of the quay and a side street. He heard the church clocks strike 10:30A.M. , tolling all is over, all is over, into his ears. He heard the motorcade return at 10:32, and all would have been over indeed—the very spot on which Princip stood would not be memorialized today by two footprints sunk in concrete, the house at his back would not have become a museum enshrining Princip’s heroism, the bridge to his left would not now be named Princip Bridge—if . . .

  If two mistakes had not been made by the entourage of the Austrian Crown Prince. The first was nearly logical. Since Cabrinović had thrown the bomb from the river side of the quay, an officer of the escort stood on the running board on the same side—not on Princip’s side—to protect the Archduke with his body. The second mistake was as mysterious as fate itself. The chauffeur of the lead car, filled with police, had been clearly instructed on what route to take to the garrison hospital where the Archduke wished to visit his wounded aide. Nonetheless the chauffeur made the wrong turn on Appel Quay into the side street off Latin Bridge.

  This mistake did not escape General Potiorek, who sat in the front seat of the second car, that of the Archduke. The General cupped his hands to shout to the first car, “Turn back! Back to the Quay!” The chauffeur obeyed. To obey he must make a U-turn. To make a U-turn in the narrower side street he must come to a halt. Since he came to a halt, so must the drivers of the motorcade behind him. An inevitability decreed that the second car must stop at the corner, directly in front of a thin, small youth who was reaching inside his coat.

  The many days Princip had spent on target practice, the weeks of training and rehearsal, the months of waiting, planning, of steeling himself and disciplining his crew, of patience, cunning, and perseverance—they all converged on this one moment, at 10:34 A.M., on this sunlit corner of the Appel Quay and Rudolf Street, in front of the Schiller Delicatessen Store.

  The chauffeur had just begun to work the wheel for the U-turn. Count Harrach of the Archduke’s escort stood on the running board, on the river side of the quay. There was nothing between Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg and Gavrilo Princip except five feet of translucent summer air. For this one moment the pale blue eyes of the son of a postman looked into the pale blue eyes of a lord descended from thirteen European dynasties. The next second the son of the postman realized he could not throw the bomb he was already gripping inside his coat: the Archduke was too close and the crowd too dense around him for hauling out his arm. Therefore he pulled out his Browning. He turned his head away (later he would say he had been confounded by the sight of the Duchess, a woman) and, perhaps to compensate for this lapse, pressed the trigger twice.

  And then all was really over. After the two bangs Princip saw the car pull away fast, the Archduke still sitting upright, unaffected, unscathed, even after this final effort.

  Princip put the pistol to his own head, but someone wrested it from his hand. He reached for the cyanide capsule, managed to get it between his teeth, bit it open, already felt a taste of bitter almonds, but a policeman’s stick came down on his head and knocked the thing out of his mouth. From everywhere arms reached for him, gripped him and punished him, yet nothing punished him more in this nightmare tumult than the fact that he was still alive and so was the Archduke.

  General Potiorek, the Military Governor of Bosnia, was under that same impression, but only for about five more seconds. After the explosions he looked back instantly at the august pair; the two sat erect and unruffled. But just as the car turned back onto the Quay, the Duchess began leaning oddly against the Archduke. The Archduke’s mouth began to dribble red. Count Harrach on the running board, appalled, fumbled for his handkerchief and leaned over to wipe the blood from the Archduke’s lips. The Duchess, leaning, cried at her husband, “For heaven’s sake, what has happened to you?” The Archduke, who usually roared at any irritation, sat stiffly and silently as he bled. The General shouted at the driver to proceed at top speed to his residence. The Archduchess’s head had drooped onto her husband’s knees. Blood from the wound in her abdomen soaked through her white silk dress and stained the red and white bouquet of roses clenched in her hand. The Archduke, still sitting stiffly, whispered with his blood-filled mouth: “Sopherl, Sopherl, stirb nicht! . . . Bleib am Leben fur unsere Kinder!” (“Little Sophie, little Sophi
e, don’t die! . . . Stay alive for our children!”) Then he, too, began to droop forward. Count Harrach tried to hold him up as the car hurtled and veered. He asked, “Is Your Highness in great pain?” The Archduke’s head had slumped down onto the head of his wife resting on his knees. “It’s nothing,” he said, quite clearly even above the car engine’s roar. “It’s nothing,” he said again. He kept saying it, more softly, seven more times, the last time just before the car stopped at the Governor’s residence. When the two were lifted out of the automobile, her blood had mingled with his on the leather seat.

  In the residence a doctor tore open the Archduke’s collar to reach his smashed jugular. The gold collar had turned scarlet. Inside the collar seven amulets against seven evils became visible, all wrought of silver and gold. They, too, were dripping scarlet. By the time the church clocks of Sarajevo struck 11 A.M. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had both stopped breathing, she less than ten minutes before him. They died as they had lived, in unison.

  History’s will was done.

  28

  THAT SUNDAY VIENNA’S SKIES WERE AS BRIGHT AND JOVIAL AS SARAJEVO’S. So were those of nearby Baden, a cozy Biedermeier spa where, on a bench under an oak tree, the writer Stefan Zweig was reading a biography of Tolstoy. Shortly after half past two in the afternoon, something made him look up from the page. Something had stopped happening. It took him a moment to realize just what: a few hundred feet away, in the band shell of the Spa Park, the musicians had broken off in the middle of a waltz.

  At Aspern Airfield on Vienna’s southern edge, a young summer-happy crowd under straw hats and flowered bonnets craned necks at an aeronautical display. At half past two the smartly kepi’d brass band launched into “The Airmen’s March.” They never finished it.

  In Vienna itself all green spaces were teeming vivaciously. Everybody was outdoors, celebrating Peter and Paul, a favorite Saint Day of the town. The poor basked and munched bacon rind on the “free” park benches. The less poor sliced cervelat on more comfortable chairs costing one heller each. The rich nibbled chocolate cake served prettily doilied on cafe terraces. All enjoyed the jasmine-scented air, the violins undulating in pergolas. Sometime before 3 P.M., policemen seemed to shoot out of the ground to whisper into the ears of orchestra conductors everywhere. Everywhere bows dropped away from strings. Flutes fell silent. The music stopped.

  Never since the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf twenty-five years earlier had so much music stopped so suddenly in Vienna.

  There was a difference, though. Back in 1889, Rudolf had been Austria’s gracious and graceful young promise. His death had anguished the Empire, seeming to sever it from its future. Now, in 1914, Vienna was startled but not stricken. Franz Ferdinand’s arctic image had thawed a bit lately, yet for most citizens he evoked neither hope nor youth nor grace. His public face was lined too grimly, his mustaches were too much like fixed bayonets. He augured oppression at home, abrasiveness abroad.

  “If that Archduke had lived to sit on the throne,” Freud said the day after the assassination to his patient the Wolf Man, “war with Russia would have been inevitable.” The truth was precisely the reverse. Yet most Viennese shared Freud’s breezy misjudgment and his mistaken relief. This included the realm’s highest councillors, who knew the Archduke well. They absorbed his death rather briskly. Many had been offended by his un-Austrian, unmannerly directness, by his uncouth insights. The journal of Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold confides that during the first cabinet meeting after the outrage". . .one noted, yes, consternation and indignation but also a certain easing of mood.”

  One noted it in Franz Joseph, too, at his Alpine villa in Bad Ischl. The All-Highest summer holiday had started earlier than usual in order to elude an encounter with Franz Ferdinand. By going on vacation the Emperor avoided official business like the Archduke’s personal report on the Bosnian maneuvers. No more danger of that now. Franz Joseph promptly returned to his capital to deal with the enormity that freed him from all further vexations by his nephew.

  “Certainly Papa was shocked,” his daughter the Archduchess Valerie records in her diary, “but I found him amazingly fresh. When I said that Karl [The Archduke Karl, Franz Ferdinand’s nephew, just become the new Crown Prince] would acquit himself well, Papa said ‘For me it is a great worry less.’“

  Throughout the Empire headlines screamed from front pages framed in black. But to his adjutant, the Emperor was candid about his composure. “God will not be mocked,” he said. “A higher power has put back the order I couldn’t maintain.” Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand had disordered the hierarchy by inflating his wife’s place in it. Now she had lost her life, and soon she would lose her inflated place.

  At first, however, the Duchess’s status seemed unchanged by her slaying. Cannons from the great fortress of Sarajevo had boomed to greet the live Crown Prince and his wife at their entry into the city on the morning of June 28. The cannons boomed again, twenty-one times, on the evening of June 29, to bid farewell to their embalmed remains. Though the funeral train puffed through the Bosnian night without halting, army regiments stood at attention at every station it passéd. The train rolled on to the Adriatic coast where the foremost dreadnought of the Imperial fleet was waiting, the Viribus Unitis, on which the breathing Archduke has sailed toward Sarajevo just five days earlier. Now marines in dress uniforms sheltered the two caskets under a baldachin on the quarter deck and draped them with flags and flowers. Early on June 30, the huge man-of-war began to stream northward at a speed solemnly slow, under a hot sun, under black pennants and a flag at half-mast, followed by other battleships, cruisers, destroyers, civilian yachts, motorboats, fishing boats, even ferries, all with flags half-mast and flying black ensigns. This giant, wave-borne cortege moved close to the shore, where more cannons rumbled their mourning from the hills and priests stood in full vestments on the beaches, swung thuribles censing the corpses, and called out blessings for the souls of the faithful departed.

  On the evening of July 1, the dolorous armada steamed into the harbor waters of Trieste. More cannons boomed, more regiments presented arms and lowered colors as the caskets were transferred from the black-garlanded ship to a black-garlanded special train. Twenty-four hours later, on the night of July 2, it came to a halt in Vienna’s South Terminal.

  Here the responsibilities of the military ended. Here began the jurisdiction of Prince Montenuovo, First Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty, foe of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for life and beyond.

  Neither Franz Joseph nor any member of the dynasty met the funeral train. There was just one exception. Only the new Crown Prince, the Archduke Karl, escorted his predecessor through the dark and empty streets.

  Next morning the dead couple lay in state at the Palace Chapel from 8 A.M. to noon. Not one second longer. Some 50,000 people converged from every district of the town onto the Inner City. It was not so much affection that drew them as awe and curiosity. Most were turned away because of the absurd briefness of the viewing period. Those who managed to pass the chapel portals found something curious indeed.

  The two coffins stood side by side, but their closeness only emphasized their inequality. Franz Ferdinand’s was larger, much more ornate, and placed twenty inches higher than Sophie’s. His bore the many insignia of his rank—the Archducal crown, the General’s plumed helmet, the admiral’s hat, his ceremonial sword, and all his principal decorations including the Order of the Golden Fleece. Her coffin was bare except for a pair of white gloves and a black fan. These were the emblems of a lady-in-waiting.

  She had been a lady-in-waiting before her marriage. Her subsequent elevations to Princess and then to Duchess were now cancelled. Only a little over 100 hours earlier Franz Ferdinand had committed for her sake yet another disorderliness against the privileges of genealogy. He had carried her parasol before the honor guard at Sarajevo in order to lift her to his level before the world. Now his caparisoned coffin was used to push her down again, to exhibit her inferiority by contrast
. The First Lord Chamberlain and the Serb schoolboy assassin, working in tandem, had put the woman back in her place.

  There were many wreaths that morning, sent to the chapel from great notables like the American President Wilson down to humble folk like the Shoemakers’ Guild of Lower Austria. There was no wreath from the Emperor or any other Habsburg.

  At the stroke of noon the public was turned away. At 4 P.M. Franz Joseph appeared, accompanied by Archdukes and Archduchesses but not by any of Franz Ferdinand’s children. Their mother was a morganatic corpse. They were morganatic orphans, hence not members of the Highest Family. No foreign dignitaries attended. Every monarch and president in Europe had wired his intention to come. By return cable the First Lord Chamberlain had advised them to “kindly have your ambassador act as representative to avoid straining His Majesty’s delicate health with the demands of protocol.” (The King and Queen of Rumania were politely stopped at the border.)

  So the ambassadors came—and departed again almost immediately together with the Emperor. Vienna’s Cardinal Piffl ran through the funeral services in less than fifteen minutes. At 4:15 P.M. the bodies were locked away. They had been brought to the chapel in the dark of the previous night. They were not taken out again until the new night was very dark again.

  Vienna of the schöne Leiche, of the corpse beautiful, where paupers scrimped and schemed to be buried like princes, now had a prince reduced to an impoverished and furtive funeral. None of the nobility had been invited to pay their final respects to the Heir Apparent or to accompany him on his last journey through the streets of the capital. But as the remains of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were rolled out of the chapel, a band of aristocrats pushed past the police. Led by the Archduke Karl and by Count Chotek, Sophie’s brother, they made less lonely the scant procession behind the coffins moving to the West Terminal.