Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  On July 10, Berchtold dispatched an aide to Sarajevo to evaluate the information. On July 13, an analysis arrived by top-secret cable from the Bosnian capital:

  Statements by accused show practically beyond doubt that accused decided to perpetrate the outrage while in Belgrade, and that outrage was prepared . . . with help of Serb officials . . . who also procured bombs, Brownings, ammunition and cyanide. Bombs definitely proven to be from Serb Army stores, but nothing to show they had been taken out for this express purpose .. . Hardly any room for doubt that Princip, Grabež, Cabrinović smuggled across frontier with help from Serb customs . . . However, no evidence of complicity of Serb government ministers in directly ordering assassination or in supplying weapons ...

  All this fell a bit short of Berchtold’s hope. It failed to implicate Belgrade’s highest authorities. However, it did taint them for condoning, if not encouraging, a terrorist climate and the willingness on the part of lesser officials to cooperate in the outrage. And that was enough to activate Berchtold’s scenario. It started to go forward on tip-toe, while Europe dozed.

  The groundwork for deceiving the continent had already been laid on July 8, in a conference between the Foreign Minister and the Chief of Staff. “I recommend,” Count von Berchtold had said to General Conrad, “that you and the Minister of War leave Vienna for your vacation so as to keep an appearance that nothing is going on.”

  On July 14, the Army announced that General Conrad had started his holiday at Innichen, a remote hamlet in the Dolomites, 3,500 feet high. War Minister Krobatin, the official Wiener Zeitung said a day earlier, had gone to take the waters at Bad Gastein. All along Franz Joseph remained in Bad Ischl, apparently with little on his mind save sniffing blossoms with Frau Schratt.

  As for Berlin, it played along. Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg was charmed by Berchtold’s dramaturgy; Berchtold’s denouement would prove that Austria was not a baroque carcass but suprisingly alive, doughty, adept, decisive—a worthy confederate of Germany.

  And so the Germans acted on Habsburg’s cue. On the yacht Hohenzollern the Kaiser sported innocent through the North Sea. The German Chancellor holed up in his country place where he communed with Beethoven on the grand piano and read Plato in the original Greek. The German Foreign Minister continued to honeymoon at Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. The German Minister of the Navy, Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, promenaded with wife and children through the greenery at Bad Tarasp in the Engadine. The Chief of the German Admiralty also went on holiday, and so did the German Minister of War. General von Moltke took the cure at Carlsbad, again.

  The sun shone. The days passéd. The jolt of Sarajevo subsided. The world discovered that Austria, instead of rounding on the Serbs, rusticated placidly along with its German ally. Belgrade relaxed. So did St. Petersburg, Paris, London. The feeling grew that Habsburg’s response to the assassination would be as reasonable as it was tardy.

  And since so many leaders jaunted away from Vienna and Berlin, why should their counterparts elsewhere stick to their desks? One by one the dramatis personae of the opposing camp began to play their parts in Count von Berchtold’s script.

  Together with his daughter, the Chief of Staff of the Serbian Army went on vacation—in Austria, of all countries, at Bad Gleichenberg. On July 15, Raymond Poincaré, President of France, that is, of Serbia’s closest Western ally, embarked on a cruise as cheery as the Kaiser’s. With his Prime Minister he sailed on a summit junket to Norway and Russia. Tsar Nicholas II, Serbia’s eastern protector, awaited his French guests at Tsarskoe Selo, a pleasure dome of multi-hued marble overlooking the Gulf of Finland that served as his summer castle. “Every day,” he noted in his diary, “we play tennis or swim in the fjords.”

  In England, the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, a childless widower and lover of leafy solitude, indulged himself in leafy solitude. Near Winchester, by the banks of the river Itchen stood his cottage, brushed by willows and embraced by ivy. During much of that July, Sir Edward could be found here. He spent the days leaning against the rail of a footbridge, lowering his rod down to the stippled trout.

  The First Lord of the British Admiralty pursued a more ebullient pastime at Overstrand on the Norfolk coast: There Mr. Winston Churchill had his holiday house. On its beachfront he worked away with spade and bucket, assisted by his children. The Churchill family was building sand castles that featured deep moats to trap the tide.

  At almost the same time the British Prime Minister Sir Herbert Asquith sent his daughter off to Holland “so that the girl can have some fun.” Sir Herbert himself did not stray too far from No. 10 Downing Street. After all, he had to tend to something of a crisis. More fuss was afoot about the Irish Home Rule Bill.

  The sunny, stable high over Europe was of double benefit to Vienna. Politically, it painted just the right trompe l’oeil backdrop for Count von Berchtold’s stage. But the fine summer also met the personal needs of the Viennese. Perhaps more than other cities, theirs had been an incubator of the treacheries of the human soul. Perhaps more than others, it cultivated the therapy of the meadow.

  After many rainless weeks, a nocturnal downpour on July 9 washed away the dust. At dawn the west wind scented the streets with the pine of Alpine pastures. (It was the day Berchtold’s team began to draft in secret the nonultimatum super-ultimatum.) By noon the sun had re-burnished the foliage of the Vienna Woods. And since only a few streetcar stops separated the Viennese from their Woods, the weather drew them outdoors in unprecedented numbers. They might stoop the work day away in dank factories or behind cramped desks. But on Sunday the lagoons of the Danube splashed with swimmers. At night, the vineyard inns sounded with more song than ever. “Wien . . . Wien . . .” they sang, turned toward the heart of the city, namely its past. They still sang about its dreamy courtyards, its gothic alleys, its Biedermeier gardens—all dear and cozy and going, going, gone. Who would suspect that, hidden away at the Ballhausplatz, Count von Berchtold was preparing a giant grenade? In July 1914, Vienna presented itself as a spectacle of nature and nostalgia—the very opposite of imminence and war.

  31

  NATURE AND NOSTALGIA. THEIR TWIN LURE WAS FELT BY MANY DURING JUST those weeks. On July 12, Sigmund and Martha Freud left Vienna for Carlsbad. They arrived there at almost the same time as the Chief of the German General Staff, General von Moltke. The Freuds, though, lived just outside the spa. They took rooms at the Villa Fasolt on the Schlossberg, a hummock among wooded knolls. This landscape resembled the environs of Fribor, a small Moravian town where Freud had lived during his first four years. In Fribor, by the foothills of the Carpathians, he had been “. . . the happy child who received his first indelible impressions from this air . . . from this soil.” Even as an adult “. . . I never felt really comfortable in the city. I believe now that I was never free from a longing for the beautiful woods near our home”

  During this summer Freud began to develop thoughts for a paper (never published) called “Philogenetic Fantasy,” about mankind’s infancy—a pre-Ice Age, pre-Angst, pre-Jung Eden with food and space aplenty, succeeded by much rawer and more crowded times in which paranoia became a survival instinct.

  In contrast to Freud, Leon Trotsky could not afford an expensive resort. He spent July of 1914 in his sparse apartment near the flowering edge of the Vienna Woods. Longingly, no doubt. His autobiography shows that for all his sophistication, Trotsky retained the yearnings of a country boy born in the Southern Ukraine “. . . a kingdom of wheat and sheep . . . The village would flare up in my consciousness and draw me on like a lost paradise . . . In my years as commander of the Red Army . . . I was greatly pleased to see each new [rural] fence constructed of freshly cut pine boards. Lenin, who knew this passion of mine, often twitted me about it.”

  Yet this same summer saw Lenin sharing this same passion. His headquarters at Cracow near the Austro-Russian border had been chosen for reasons beyond revolutionary expediency. “Illyich likes Cracow so much,” his wife would write, “becaus
e it reminded him of Russia.” But Lenin, born in a Volga backwater many miles from the nearest railroad, liked better yet a nook in his Habsburg exile that was smaller and greener than Cracow.

  “Autumn is magnificent in the Tatra range,” he’d written his sister Maria in April 1914. “If we have a fine autumn we shall probably live in the country.” The summer of 1914 was too seductive. Lenin didn’t wait for fall. In July he and his wife Krupskaya moved to Poronin in the Tatras. Krupskaya suffered from a goiter and couldn’t walk far from their cottage. But Lenin took off with knapsack, walking stick, and notebook “clambering up the steeps like a mountain goat.” Sometimes he stopped to make notes on the contentious Socialist Congress scheduled in Vienna for the following month. But for most of July (while the Ballhausplatz hatched the nonultimatum super-ultimatum) Lenin hiked the glorious days away.

  Lenin was an occasional visitor in Vienna. Hitler, like Trotsky, had lived there for years. Unlike Trotsky he’d never been drawn to the city’s green precincts. He had painted, brooded, ranted, on pavement only; in fact he’d meticulously kept away from the Vienna Woods as if their fragrance might compromise his bitterness. But in this balmy summer he seemed to be haunted by leaf and tree. In July Hitler meandered through Munich’s sub-Alpine outskirts, those pointing toward Salzburg and his native Upper Austria. He sketched river shores and villas, often with a garden motif.

  That summer the idea of the garden, of nature and nostalgia, also haunted another demon. A virtuous demon, this one, obsessed with morality as others are obsessed with hate. Karl Kraus was the most merciless critic in Austria of Austria. About three times a month he published Die Fackel (The Torch), a magazine of inexhaustible indignation and surgical brilliance. At first it had printed polemics from a variety of writers. But by 1914 no other Jeremiah even approached Kraus’s eloquence; by then every syllable in Die Fackel hissed from his pen. His wit seared Vienna’s operetta Machiavellis, its hand-kissing nastiness, its whipped-cream ethics. Die Fackel lit up the ways in which the city debased manners and debauched language.

  But the summer of 1914 proved that Kraus, Austria’s scourge, shared certain sympathies with the late Austrian Crown Prince. Of course both were dedicated haters—the Archduke forever frowning and the torch-hurling Jew. But there was another affinity. Both men were drawn to nature and nostalgia, the dual hallmark of the season. Both loved the garden because it sustained virtue that had withered elsewhere. For the Archduke, the garden—particularly his great garden in Bohemia—was a haven of divine grace; it sheltered him and his Sophie against the godless and malevolent artifice of Vienna’s court. For Kraus, the garden was a sanctuary from civilization, which had “betrayed God to the machine”

  The Crown Prince loved the garden lavishly, naively, as evidenced by the vast rose beds of Konopiste. Kraus loved the garden mystically. Show him a border of violets, and his acid genius would pulse in an orphic vein. To Kraus, nature occasioned a transfiguring nostalgia. Nature and nostalgia were part of a trinity whose third member was the Maker Himself.

  Not long before the summer of 1914, Karl Kraus wrote “The Dying Man,” a poem that spies a beacon glimmering from the garden of Creation. It glimmers on through the Fall to guide the fallen toward Redemption; a Redemption whose flowers are the same as those of Genesis.

  In the poem God, the Gardener, addresses man, the moribund:

  Im Dunkel gehend, wusstest Du urns Licht.

  Nun hist Du da und siehst mir ins Gesicht.

  Sahst hinter Dich und suchtest meinen Garten.

  Du bliebst am Ursprung. Ursprung ist das Ziel.

  (Walking through darkness you surmised the light.

  Now you are here, you are standing in my sight.

  Looking back, you sought the garden gate.

  Source is your destination. Source, your anchorage.)

  But the garden did more than furnish Kraus with apocalyptic metaphor. During July of 1914, he experienced the garden as a very personal, real, blooming, and twittering haven. In the park of Janowitz, the Bohemian estate of his mistress, Baroness Sidonie von Nadherny, he could lean back under chestnut boughs. He could breathe deeply and release himself from his angers. In public he was the mordant aphorist capable of defining a woman as “an occasionally acceptable substitute for masturbation.” In private, among Janowitz’s groves, he kissed his baroness’s slim fingers as they intertwined with his own. In Janowitz Park he relished his rare moments of repose and affection.

  Less than fifteen miles away from Janowitz lay Franz Ferdinand’s Konopiste. On June 15, when the archducal gardens had opened to the public, Kraus and his baroness had been among the dazzled visitors. This was the ultimate garden. Therefore it was the ultimate antithesis to what Kraus hated most: Vienna’s artificiality, especially the kind perfected by the Viennese press with its deliciously concocted slanders, the bribed bias of its reportage, the slick charm of its feuilletonists. Through sheer organic honesty of stalk and leaf and petal, the garden rebuked all such ink-stained turpitude.

  Shortly after visiting Konopiste, Kraus fired off a philippic culminating in the declaration

  that the preservation of the wall of a manor park, where between a five-hundred-year-old poplar and a bluebell flowering today, all the miracles of creation are salvaged from the wreck of the world—that such a thing is more important in the name of the spirit than the pursuit of intellectual infamy which takes God’s breath away!

  These words in Die Fackel, vibrating on the rim of “the wreck of the world,” were the last Kraus wrote before the shots of Sarajevo.

  After Sarajevo (while Berchtold was hatching the nonultimatum super-ultimatum), Die Fackel of July 10, 1914, ran a eulogy of the late Crown Prince that was also a hymn to nature’s naturalness as well as the indictment of a culture. “In this era so deplorable for humanity,” wrote Kraus,

  which in our Austrian laboratory of the apocalypse is expressed by the grimace of gemutlich sickliness—in such an era the Archduke had the measure of a man. Only now, as Vienna mimics mourning, do we realize . . . how much he disdained that indispensable affability used by the powerful to promote their careers . . . He was no greeter. He had no winning ways to charm the people past their grievances. He did show character through his radical championship of the commonplace against a fake modernity.

  He proved himself by his taste. At his estate he opened to the people a floral landscape intelligible on the most popular level, a park with few rarefied pretensions . . . He was not part of the fancy dynamics of Austrian decay . . . he wanted to rouse our era from its sickness so that it would not sleep past its own death. Now it sleeps past his.

  Even as Kraus wrote that passage, Europe drowsed on toward a great death. In fact, some of his admirers had a hand in both the drowsing and the dying. Many bright young diplomats read him with awe. This included the group under Count von Berchtold laboring on the composition of the missive Berchtold was to unveil exquisitely, explosively, during the second act of his scenario—the nonultimatum super-ultimatum to be served on Serbia.

  “We were all devotees of Karl Kraus” one of the group would later reminisce in a memoir. “We all devoured, fascinated, every issue of Die Fackel. From Kraus we had learned to believe in the magic of the word as the womb of thought . . . We were the last generation [of Habsburg Foreign Office officials], and our highest aim was to crystallize language into utter perfection. For four weeks we worked on the phrasing of the ultimatum as if we were polishing a jewel.”

  To Kraus, had he known of it, such adulation would have been abomination. For him “the magic of the word” lay in quarrying the truth, not in tricking it out. Die Fackel aimed to expose, as he once put it, the “difference between an urn and a chamber pot.” In July of 1914 his fans on the Ballhausplatz manipulated the word in order to blur just this distinction. They were festooning the chamber-pot crassness of an ultimatum with the adornments of an urn, to be passéd on a silver server from Excellency to Excellency.

  32

>   MEANWHILE EXCELLENCIES ALL OVER EUROPE CONTINUED IN THE ROLES assigned to them by Count von Berchtold’s Act I. The weather continued as the Count’s obedient stagehand. A slumbrous tropical sun made the continent a lotus land. Belgrade announced that the Serbian King would shortly travel to a spa abroad. In London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, took a languid view of international relations; speaking at a banquet, he said that while some clouds always hovered on the horizon, there were fewer this year than last, and that His Majesty’s Government would help to dissipate even those . . . In Vienna itself, a skeptical journal like the Socialist Arbeiter Zeitung relaxed its suspicions of the government. “The quiet and slow pace of events,” it wrote, “suggests that no drastic action will be taken against Serbia.”

  Just past the midpoint of July, rumors skittered along the Ringstrasse. What was happening behind those drawn blinds at the Ballhausplatz? The stock market registered a sudden, though not major decline.

  But Count von Berchtold knew how to restore the blandness required by his scenario. On July 18, he visited British Ambassador Sir Maurice de Bunsen at the ambassador’s summer residence Schloss Stixstein. The Foreign Minister “was unusually chatty and agreeable,” Sir Maurice would later report, “. . . not a word was let drop that a crisis impended.”