Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  Near midnight a car coupled to a milk train took the dead sixty miles west along the Danube to the small town of Pöchlarn. There only a delegation of local veterans saluted, in old uniforms wetted down by a sudden squall.

  Two plain black hearses of the Vienna Municipal Undertaking Service transported the coffins onto a ferry. In midstream a thunderbolt frightened the horses into a panic that almost pitched the caskets into the Danube.

  At 1 A.M. on July 4, the hearses gained the other shore. A few minutes later they stopped before the castle of Artstetten,* Franz Ferdinand’s family manor. In its crypt the pair found the peace that now began to drain away from the world outside.

  * * *

  * Today the town of Artstetten, like thousands of others all over Europe, has a memorial to the local fallen of the Great War. But only in Artstetten does the list begin with a Crown Prince and his wife: The Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg-Este and Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg.

  29

  THE NEXT DAY ALL OF VIENNA WAS ABUZZ WITH THAT MIDNIGHT IN ART-stetten. Some deplored its meanness. No one saw it as overture to vast, lethal chaos. On the contrary. The court considered that funeral a fitting end to dissonance. It recovered a harmony disturbed by the slain Crown Prince himself.

  His very testament assaulted tradition. For centuries Habsburgs had been buried beneath the nave of Vienna’s Capuchin Church. Franz Ferdinand, however, had anticipated that his Sophie would not be allowed to enter eternity among them. Since they would exclude her, he would exclude himself. His Last Will defied the custom of the house he had come so close to heading: He was to lie not with his kinsmen but with Sophie in the vault he had had built for them both in Artstetten.

  As a result—in Palace eyes—their remains were inevitably subject to the consequences of his wilfulness. Since Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had died together, his final journey must share not only the destination but the limits of hers. Their funeral must not take on the grandeur his would have shown had he married suitably. The aberration he had visited on Habsburg while alive must not be ratified by their state funeral after his death. No: The ceremonies of his death must atone for the irregularity of his life. And the fact that a teenage zealot had killed him made not a scintilla of difference. The madness of a schoolboy must not change dynastic principle. That principle must override assassin and assassinated. In sum, the funeral was essential to Franz Joseph’s “restoration of order.”

  Of course another source of disorder remained: Serbia. It was more dangerous than the man it had killed. Sarajevo proved that Serbia had been eating away far too long at the Empire’s security, dignity, tranquillity. The First Lord Chamberlain’s etiquette had disciplined the late Archduke. Next, Serbia must be punished. And for that purpose etiquette was not enough.

  Within twenty-four hours of the murder, the Belgrade government wired condolences to Vienna, vowing that Serbia would “. . . certainly, most loyally do everything to prove that it would not tolerate within its borders the fostering of any agitation .. . calculated to disturb our already delicate relations with Austria-Hungary.” These sentiments came too late. They were not enough.

  Belgrade’s Prime Minister made a further gesture of appeasement that at the same time rebuked the ideology of Colonel Apis’s Black Hand. The Prime Minister ordered all places of entertainment closed in Belgrade on the day of Franz Ferdinand’s funeral. He also cancelled the rest of the week-long celebrations of St. Vitus, the Saint’s Day so sacred to the Serb national soul. It was not enough.

  Throughout Bosnia, Habsburg-loyal Croats and Muslims smashed shops and inns and hotels owned by Serbs. In Bosnian schools, Serb students were beaten up. In Vienna, mobs kept attacking the Serb Embassy, barely stayed by police. It was not enough.

  Not after Sarajevo. Not when Princip’s initial interrogations established the fact that he had done the deed after a stay at Belgrade, probably with Belgrade’s help. None of it was enough.

  Order in Franz Joseph’s sense could be restored only by a decisive act of the Habsburg government against Serbia. But an act of what kind? Of what force? Franz Joseph instructed his ministers to submit options.

  At a cabinet meeting hastily called on June 29, four days before the funeral, Foreign Minister von Berchtold showed himself still guided by the pacifism of the late Crown Prince. He proposed relatively temperate demands: that Serbia dismiss its Minister of Police, jail all suspected terrorists, and dissolve extremist groups.

  Prime Minister Tisza of Hungary sided with Berchtold for reasons of his own. Tisza could not be very furious with the Serbs for removing his worst enemy, the Crown Prince; nor did Tisza relish a war in which a victorious Austria would swallow Serbia, thereby increasing the Empire’s Slav population and reducing the Magyars to an even smaller minority. Still, neither Berchtold (whose main resource in a debate was a small, fine flourish of his cigarette-holder) nor the Calvinist Tisza (who kept quoting I Kings 2:33 on the dangers of bloody vengeance) were a match for General Conrad. For now Conrad’s anti-Serb wrath was triumphant. His one tamer, the Crown Prince, lay dead. And the Crown Prince’s very death by a Serb documented that Conrad had been right all along. There was a deadly snake hissing at Austria’s heels, he now said; it would not do to slap at this serpent. Its skull must be crushed.

  Conrad’s argument would have overridden all others, had it not been for the German envoy in Vienna, Count von Tschirsky. Von Tschirsky acted in the spirit of his monarch’s prudence vis-á-vis the Serbs, the prudence so laboriously inspired in the Kaiser by the late Crown Prince. On June 30, two days after Sarajevo, the German ambassador called on the Austrian Foreign Minister to warn “. . . with great emphasis and seriousness against hasty measures in settling accounts with Serbia.”

  Berchtold made the most of these cautions when he went to his Emperor. Austria, he argued, could not afford to define its stance against Serbia without Berlin’s backing. After all, Russia was Serbia’s protector; Austria needed the weight of the German army—the world’s most powerful—as counterpoise to the Tsar’s endless regiments. Only Germany’s full support would keep St. Petersburg from meddling. But, as the German ambassador had just shown, only a temperate Austria would earn such support.

  The Emperor agreed: Conrad was not to do any Serb skull-crushing, at least not yet. Any decision of the kind must be made shoulder to shoulder with Berlin. Franz Joseph himself would elicit Kaiser Wilhelm’s sympathies in a handwritten letter.

  Of course Berchtold wanted the sympathies to be low-key rather than inflammatory. He knew that the Kaiser had lost a boon companion at Sarajevo—but that going to war over this loss would mean cancelling the Kaiser’s delightful summer cruise to Scandinavia. Berchtold knew that the Kaiser was much better at attitudinizing gorgeously than at thinking cogently or feeling deeply. Being a bit like the Kaiser himself, Berchtold knew that His Majesty’s emotions were unsteady, unsure, manipulable. In addressing such a man, Franz Joseph’s letter must manipulate accurately.

  Berchtold saw to it that in writing the Kaiser, Franz Joseph modulated his phrases a shade closer to restraint than to firmness. Franz Joseph’s letter spoke of “the terrible events at Sarajevo” and of the need to “neutralize Serbia as a political power factor"; it did not, however, mention military action nor did it preclude purely diplomatic means.

  The letter was a discreet invitation to answer circumspectly. All-Highest circumspection from Berlin would reinforce similar circumspection in Vienna; it would work toward an honorable peace rather than an onerous war; it would improve the chances for the Kaiser’s Scandinavian cruise and, for Franz Joseph, the prospect of a cloudless sojourn at Bad Ischl.

  Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold schemed well. His own chef du cabinet, Count Alexander Hoyos, outschemed him. Hoyos performed no echoing deeds before or after July 1914. But during that one month his intrigues were historic.

  Berchtold had chosen Hoyos as his chief assistant because, as an aristocrat, he habitually preferred mode over matter.
To the Foreign Minister, Hoyos’s politics—as rabidly anti-Serb as General Conrad’s—signified less than the Hoyos cachet: Originally of Spanish origin, the Hoyos clan had long been prominent in the inner sanctum of the Court. Indeed the name Hoyos runs scarlet through the final Habsburg decades. In 1889 Count Josef von Hoyos had been invited to Crown Prince Rudolfs hunting lodge at Mayerling on the morning of Rudolfs suicide; he had brought the news to Vienna. Twenty-five years later his young cousin Alexander Hoyos also became a messenger after an Archducal death. The later Hoyos, however, did more than report calamity. He sped it on its way.

  On the afternoon of July 4, 1914, twelve hours after Franz Ferdinand’s burial, a courier was about to carry Franz Joseph’s letter to Berlin. Suddenly Alexander Hoyos volunteered to take it himself. Why? Because, Hoyos claimed, His Majesty’s words (and their nuances) would be amplified by the fact that they traveled to Germany with a senior official of the Austrian Foreign Minister’s office.

  Such reasoning made sense to the Foreign Minister. He thought he was finessing General Conrad through his Emperor’s letter to the Kaiser. Actually he was being finessed by General Conrad through Count Hoyos.

  Hoyos arrived in Berlin on July 5, just after the German Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow had left for his honeymoon in Lucerne. The timing, while accidental, served Hoyos well. As mere chef du cabinet he would have had no easy access to von Jagow, a personage of full ministerial rank in Berlin. But the German Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs who acted for the Minister in his absence was a different matter.

  While the “Wrinkled Gypsy” (the Kaiser’s name for Szögyény-Marich, Austria’s aged ambassador to Germany) was at Potsdam Palace, presenting Franz Joseph’s letter to the Kaiser, Hoyos sat in the Under Secretary’s office “interpreting the letter’s unofficial essence.” He explained that Franz Joseph’s phrase “neutralizing Serbia as a political power factor” meant nothing less than the detoxification of Serbia by full force. Hoyos also “interpreted” an implication that, he said, Franz Joseph was too diplomatic to spell out, namely, that the time had come for Germany to prove herself a full-blooded and reliable ally at long last, and that furthermore, only Germany’s outspoken willingness to place its unique might behind Austria’s action would prevent reprisals by other powers. Berlin’s courage would do more than buttress the brother-Empire; it would ensure the peace of Europe.

  The German Under Secretary listened and took fire. He telephoned the Kaiser’s Chancellery at Potsdam Palace to ask, urgently, for an audience.

  Next morning the Kaiser strolled the Palace gardens with his Chancellor and the Under Secretary. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, “Lanky Theo” (in the Kaiser’s badinage), was eager to return to his country estate, wary of Balkan complications yet also too weary to interrogate the Under Secretary who was aflame with Hoyos’s “oral elaboration” of the letter from Vienna. The Chancellor let the Under Secretary spout.

  And the Kaiser lent his ear. His stroll became a strut. He heard that between the lines Franz Joseph was appealing to his, Wilhelm’s, valor as Germany’s first soldier, to Wilhelm’s chivalry as a Prussian knight who would not fail his venerable fellow-sovereign in Vienna. Then and there Wilhelm swore not to fail him. And since, by not failing him, Wilhelm at the same time was ensuring the peace of Europe, he could take off safely for his Scandinavian cruise.

  On July 6, at 9:15 A.M., Wilhelm’s train steamed for the port of Kiel where his yacht Hohenzollern rode anchor. “This time,” he told the industrialist Gustav von Krupp at an on-board dinner that night, “this time I haven’t chickened out”

  Austria-Hungary saw proof of that the following day. Berchtold in Vienna and Tisza in Budapest received telegrams from Berlin. They were identical and both were signed by the Wrinkled Gypsy, the Habsburg ambassador to Germany. However, both had been drafted by the victorious Hoyos. “His [German] Majesty” the cable read, “authorized me to convey to our august sovereign . . . that we may count on the full support of the German Reich. He quite understands that His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty [Franz Joseph], with his well-known love for peace, would find it hard to march into Serbia, but if we [Austrians] really recognize the necessity of military measures against Serbia, he [Kaiser Wilhelm] would deplore our not taking advantage of the present moment which is so favorable to us.”

  This, of course, was drastically different from previous German advice on the subject. It almost mandated the occupation of Serbia. An astonished Berchtold began to telephone long distance. He discovered the turn of events in Berlin. In vain he reported to the Vienna cabinet that Hoyos had overstepped his authority. That Hoyos had not been empowered to meet substantively with the German Under Secretary. That Hoyos had expressed his personal opinions, not those of the Emperor or the Austrian government. That Hoyos’s distorted account of the Habsburg position had distorted the Kaiser’s response.

  All in vain. All too late. Hoyos had maneuvered irrevocably well. The Kaiser himself had been recruited in General Conrad’s cause. Who dared unrecruit the Kaiser—especially a Kaiser away on his Norse cruise? Who dared resist Conrad’s imperative to crush the Serb skull, now that Prussia’s spiked helmets were massing behind the General?

  No one in Vienna. Wafflers in the cabinet, like Finance Minister Bilinski, came around to General Conrad’s side. After a while even Tisza relented. And Berchtold? Berchtold caved in quickly, easily, even lithely. No deep convictions encumbered the Count. The wind had veered and he veered with it, making the movement into ballet.

  The new Berchtold proposed that Serbia should be invaded, yes; but only after it had rejected Austrian demands that were diplomatically impeccable as well as absolutely unacceptable.

  The cabinet nodded. General Conrad agreed, too. A diplomatic showdown would condition the populace for a call to arms. And it would give him time to mobilize fully for the crushing of the Serb skull for the total extirpation of Serb power.

  Now the cabinet’s collective sense must receive All-Highest approval. On the night of July 8, Berchtold entrained for Bad Ischl where Franz Joseph had returned after the Archduke’s funeral. It is a measure of Berchtold’s spinelessness that he invited Hoyos along, to brief His Majesty on the strength of the new German support. It was as though Hoyos had never tricked Berchtold in Berlin.

  Berchtold smoothly submitted the cabinet’s position. The early morning sun shone on this crucial encounter. Outside the windows of the Imperial villa, thrushes and larks were in sweet voice. Franz Joseph pondered. Yes, the restoration of order, the redemption of Austria as a major power that couldn’t limply suffer the gunning-down of its Crown Prince— yes, that did require a settling of accounts with Serbia. But a settling so dangerous? Causing what repercussions? International war was a supreme disorder Franz Joseph had no wish to face at his age. Berchtold, however, spoke only of a police action deftly justified, well prepared in advance, and executed fast enough to render pointless any aid Serbia’s friends might want to extend.

  How decide on such a sun-dappled day? Frau Schratt was waiting to be taken for a stroll through lilies in full flower. As a lover, Franz Joseph was an ascetic, but an ascetic with style. As a Foreign Minister, Count von Berchtold lacked policy, consistency, vision. But he wore his lacks with style. Nothing but style underpinned the Empire—style and an army with the world’s smartest uniforms. That’s why the Emperor held on to his stylish Berchtold. Perhaps Berchtold’s proposal carried some risks. But it was not raw. It was steeped in style. The Emperor nodded at the Count. The Count bowed from the waist. An hour later he and Hoyos boarded his salon car at Ischl station and rode back to Vienna. The ultimatum was on its way.

  30

  ON JULY 9, THEN, THE DECISION FELL TO CRUSH THE SERB SKULL. GENERAL Conrad’s agenda would be honored. But it would be implemented à la Count von Berchtold. It would be much more civilized than the murder it avenged. It would be sophisticated theater of the sort only Vienna could devise.

  This skul
l-crushing would come as a fine third-act surprise. Until then the secret would be nursed backstage, refined and rehearsed behind shuttered blinds in Count von Berchtold’s offices at the Ballhausplatz. Like a cunning playwright, Berchtold planned his plot. He would mislead his audience— Serbia’s patrons like Russia, France, and France’s ally, Britain. He would lull them all into mid-summer drowsiness. For the next few weeks he would play down diminuendo the Austrian hue and cry over Sarajevo. He would encourage the holiday mood of the season. At the same time, unbeknownst to all, the Ballhausplatz would craft its diplomatic time bomb; the Ministry of War would hone its mobilization plans. Then, out of nowhere, Berchtold would spring the ultimatum. But, as in a drama of hidden identities, it would go by another name; only a “note” would be thrust at Serbia, yet a note charged with conditions much tougher, with a deadline much shorter, than most ultimatums. This nonultimatum super-ultimatum would be abruptly posed, inevitably refused—and followed instantly by the lethal pounce of Conrad’s troops. Before the audience could catch its breath, before Europe’s torpid chancelleries could stir, it would be over. The curtain would fall on Serbia conquered. Austria would take bows, having performed as a still vital and puissant great power.

  All in all, an excellent Habsburg libretto. Act I called for marshalling, discreetly, the evidence to be used later against Serbia. Here the best source was testimony from the conspirators, now in police custody.

  Princip and Cabrinović had been quickly apprehended. Within four days of the deed, police sweeps of possible suspects happened to net Ilić and Grabež. Arrests continued and spread all over Serbia. Many hundreds with no connection at all to the crime were jailed and grilled. Princip knew that because he was allowed to read newspapers. Therefore he became more responsive at interrogations. He talked (as he put it) “to prevent more innocent people from coming to harm.” He also talked for propaganda reasons “to educate the new generation with our martyrdom.” But he talked selectively; he named only Grabež and Ilić as well as the band’s “auxiliaries,” who, already on the list of the potentially seditious, would have been rounded up in any case. He did not breathe a syllable about Colonel Apis or the Black Hand. Grabež and Ilić talked a bit more. Ilić was most anxious to save his life; therefore he talked the most, but even he did not give away the Apis group.