A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  The Serbs had been part of a wave of so-called South Slavs (Yugoslavs, in their language) that moved into the Balkan region during the seventh century, when the Eastern Roman Empire was beginning to totter (Rome itself had collapsed much earlier) and many tribal groups were on the move. In the centuries that followed, the Serbs built a miniature empire under their own tsar. For a time it was uncertain whether all the Serbs would be Orthodox or some would be Roman Catholic, but eventually they settled into the Orthodox faith. Thereby they helped to ensure that a thousand years hence their descendants would identify themselves with the greatest of Slavic and Orthodox nations, Russia, and would look to the Russians for protection. They assured also that religious differences would contribute to separating them from Catholic Austria and from the Magyars (many of them Calvinist Protestants) who dominated Hungary.

  From the late Middle Ages, in the aftermath of their defeat at Kosovo, the Serbs were trapped inside the empire of the Ottoman Turks. By the eighteenth century the Turks, the Austrians, and the Russians were entangled in what would turn into two hundred years of bloody conflict in and over the Balkans. In 1829 a Russian victory over the increasingly incompetent and helpless Turks made possible the emergence of a new principality that was, if almost invisibly tiny, the first Serbian state in almost half a millennium and a rallying point for Serbian nationalism. In the 1870s another Russo-Turkish war broke out, with Serbia fighting actively on the side of Russia this time and gaining more territory as a result. Now there was once again a Kingdom of Serbia, a rugged, mountainous, and landlocked little country surrounded by the whole boiling ethnic stew of the Balkans. Its neighbors were Europe’s only Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians some of whom thought of themselves as Serbs and some of whom did not. Among those neighbors were Magyars, Bulgars, Croats, Albanians, Macedonians, Romanians, Montenegrans, Greeks, and—just across the border in Bosnia—brother Serbs suffering the indignity of not living in Serbia. Despite the inconvenient fact that Serbs were only a minority of the Bosnian population (fully a third were Muslims, and one in five was Croatian and therefore Roman Catholic), the incorporation of Bosnia into an Orthodox and Slavic Greater Serbia became an integral part of the Serbs’ national dream. The fact that under international law Bosnia was the possession of two of the great powers—officially of the Ottomans but actually of the Austrians in recent years—mattered to Serbia not at all.

  As the years passed, trouble erupted with increasing frequency, and sometimes with shocking brutality. At the start of the twentieth century Serbia had a king and queen who were friendly to Hapsburg Vienna. In 1903 a group of disgruntled army officers staged a coup, shot the royal pair to death, threw their naked bodies out the windows of their Belgrade palace, and replaced them with a dynasty loyal to Russia.

  In 1908 Austria-Hungary enraged Serbia by annexing Bosnia and the adjacent little district of Herzegovina, taking them from the Ottoman Turks and making them full and presumably permanent provinces of the Hapsburg empire. Serbia turned to Russia for help. The Russians, however, were still recovering from a 1905 war with Japan in which total and humiliating defeat had exposed the incompetence of both their army and their navy, forced the abandonment of their ambitions in the Far East, and ignited a revolution at home. As a result—and to its further humiliation—the Russian government felt incapable of doing anything to support the Serbs.

  In 1911 the same conspirators who had murdered Serbia’s royal family founded Union or Death, the Black Hand. Then in 1912 came the First Balkan War. Serbia joined with several of its neighbors to drive the Turks all the way back to Istanbul. The victory doubled the kingdom’s size and raised its population to four and a half million. A year later, in the Second Balkan War, Serbia defeated its neighbor and onetime ally Bulgaria. Again it grew larger, briefly seizing part of the Dalmatian coast but being forced to withdraw when the Austrians threatened to invade. Serbia was still getting not nearly as much support as it wanted from Russia, but France, seeing a strategic opportunity in the Balkans, was now providing money, arms, and training to the Serbian army. France’s motives were transparent: to make Serbia strong enough to tie up a substantial part of the Austro-Hungarian army in case of war, so that France and its ally Russia (and Britain too, if everything went perfectly) would be free to deal with Germany alone.

  To what extent did the government of Serbia know in advance of the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand? To what extent could Belgrade therefore be held responsible? As with many parts of this story, the answer is neither clear nor simple. Prime Minister Nikola Pasic, a shrewd old man with a majestic white beard, did hear about the plot weeks before the shooting, but he emphatically disapproved. He put out the word on the Belgrade grapevine that the plot should be called off. On the other hand, Serbian officialdom was not entirely innocent. The leader of the Black Hand was the country’s chief of military intelligence, one Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, a monomaniacally dedicated Pan-Serb nationalist whose physical strength had caused him to be nicknamed “Apis” after a divine bull in ancient Egyptian mythology. Apis had been the mastermind behind the strategy that led to Serbia’s successes in the Balkan wars. Now, in 1914, he was the mastermind behind the plot to kill Franz Ferdinand. But there has never been any evidence that Pasic’s cabinet was involved.

  Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pasic

  “Our cause is just. God will help us.”

  On the contrary, Apis and his allies in the Black Hand and the military saw Pasic as an obstacle, even as an enemy. The prime minister’s lack of enthusiasm for extreme measures, for another round of war, was contemptible in their eyes. Pasic was so unacceptable to the Serbian army’s high command that in June 1914 the generals forced him out of office. He was almost immediately restored, but only at the insistence of the Russians and the French, who regarded him as sane and sensible and therefore as a badly needed man in the Balkans. Pasic’s return to office was a defeat for Apis, an indication that his influence was waning. Apis may have seen the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as a way of precipitating a crisis that would cause Pasic’s government to fall, and if the crisis led to war, he would not have been likely to regard that as too high a price to pay. Pasic, on the other hand, understood that Serbia was physically and financially exhausted after two wars in as many years—its casualties had totaled ninety thousand, an immense number for such a small country—and that the army was in no condition to challenge the Austrians. In case of war, Serbia would be able to muster only eleven badly equipped divisions against Vienna’s forty-eight. And of course Pasic was mindful of Russia’s failure to come to Serbia’s aid in 1908, in 1912, and again in 1913.

  Why didn’t Pasic intervene more actively to stop the assassination? Actually, he went so far in that direction as to put himself at risk. He sent out an order that the three conspirators whose names had become known to him should be stopped from crossing the border into Bosnia. But the answer came back that he was too late—the three were already across. He then directed his ambassador in Vienna to deliver an oral warning. But this ambassador, himself an ardent Serb nationalist, had no great enthusiasm for such a mission. He met with Austria’s finance minister rather than with someone better positioned to take action on such a matter. He expressed himself so vaguely—he said he was concerned that “some young Serb might put a live rather than a blank cartridge in his gun, and fire it,” never indicating that Belgrade had knowledge of an actual plot and even knew the names of conspirators already in Sarajevo—that the finance minister could see no reason for alarm and was given no basis on which to do anything. It must have seemed to Pasic, who could have known nothing of how his warning had been diluted, that there was nothing more he could do. That summer Serbia was in the midst of an election. The result would decide whether Pasic remained as prime minister. It would have been suicide, certainly politically and perhaps literally, for him to become known as the enemy—the betrayer, even—of the most violently passionate patriots in the kingdom.

 
By then no one but the assassins themselves could have stopped the assassination. Not even the Black Hand, not even Apis himself, was now in control. On June 14 Apis told a meeting of the Black Hand executive committee of his plans for Sarajevo in two more weeks. The committee’s members did not react as he expected. They voted that the plot must be called off. Like Pasic, they realized that the assassination could lead to war with the empire next door, and undoubtedly they understood that the prime minister had reason to be opposed. Apis, through a chain of intermediaries, managed to get word to the assassination gang to abandon its plot. Now it was his turn to be ignored. Gavrilo Princip, in an interview with a psychiatrist as he lay dying of tuberculosis in an Austrian prison midway through the war (an interview in which, strangely, he often spoke of himself in the third person), would say that in going to Sarajevo “he only wanted to die for his ideals.” He had been happy to accept the Black Hand’s weapons but unwilling to obey when instructed not to use them.

  Chapter 2

  Never Again

  “In 1908–1909 we would have been playing cards up, in 1912–1913 we still had a clear chance, now we have to go for all or nothing.”

  —AUSTRIAN FIELD MARSHAL FRANZ CONRAD

  Leopold von Berchtold and Franz Conrad were polar opposites as men, and over the years they had often been at odds over how Austria-Hungary should deal with its Serbian problem. But in the days following the assassination, their differences disappeared and they became partners. To understand how this happened is to understand much about the origins of the war.

  Conrad (Conrad von Hötzendorf was his full family name, but the von part was an addition, an honorific that had come with his grandfather’s elevation to the nobility) was a soldier to the marrow of his bones, sometimes even a rather fanatical one. His father had been an officer; he himself began his military training at age eleven, and he became chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff in 1906 at the age of fifty-four. He looked the part: a compact, tidy figure with a fierce mustache that turned up at the corners and pale hair cut in a brush. He was an almost neurotically hard worker, intent upon trying to turn the hodgepodge Austro-Hungarian armies into a modern and effective fighting force, constantly drawing up and issuing new orders and war plans, painfully conscious that the empire was militarily weak and its status among Europe’s great powers no longer assured. He was certain that the empire could save itself only by asserting itself in the Balkans—above all by eliminating Serbia’s endless subversion and, if possible, by eliminating Serbia. Time after time, until Emperor Franz Joseph grew sick of hearing it, he had urged attacks on the Serb kingdom. At times he even wanted to attack the recently created Kingdom of Italy, which officially was Austria’s ally but had taken over a great expanse of what had previously been Hapsburg territory and was obviously hungry for more. In 1911 Conrad had been dismissed from his position as chief of staff because of his obsessive aggressiveness. But a year later war in the Balkans made his talents and his energy seem indispensable. And so he was recalled to duty and showed himself to be no less bellicose than before. In the course of 1913 he made no fewer than twenty-five proposals for war on Serbia.

  Conrad von Hötzendorf Chief of Staff of Austro-Hungarian Army Frustrated by Austria’s passivity during the two Balkan Wars.

  Count Berchtold, by contrast, was an enormously wealthy, deeply cultivated, pleasure-loving aristocrat of ancient family. And he too looked the part: polished, serenely self-assured, a vision of elegance in spotless collars and cuffs and diamond stickpins. He spoke German, French, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak, and he had married a Hungarian heiress. (Unusually, he held both Austrian and Hungarian citizenships, and when asked his nationality, he said he was “Viennese.”) He owned a racing stable and was famous for his charm and his success with women. He was also widely regarded as weak, lazy, frivolous, and unreliable. He had spent much of his early career as a diplomat in Paris and London, splendid places for a wealthy young nobleman eager to indulge his many appetites. He became the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Russia in 1907 and was appointed foreign minister in 1912, when he was fifty years old. His conduct in the Balkan crises of that year and 1913, when Serbia enlarged itself at the expense of the Turks and the Bulgarians while Vienna stood by watching, had cemented his reputation for passivity and vacillation. Conrad among others came to be convinced that Berchtold lacked the backbone to protect Hapsburg interests in the slippery world of great power diplomacy. Berchtold himself was well aware by then that important people regarded him as unworthy to be foreign minister and that he needed to repair his reputation. He was ready to believe what Conrad had always believed: that the monarchy had squandered too many opportunities in its area of greatest vulnerability, the Balkans. He expected good opportunities to be far less plentiful in the years ahead, now that Serbia had grown bigger and Russia was recovering its strength, and he was as determined as Conrad not to let the next one slip away. He had become, in short, dangerous: a weak man determined to appear strong. Within forty-eight hours of the assassination he was calling for “a final and fundamental reckoning with Serbia.”

  Austria-Hungary in 1914 was a second-rate and declining empire trying desperately to hang on to its traditional place among the nations that recognized one another as Europe’s leading powers. In the half-century leading up to the Sarajevo assassinations, it had been displaced as leader of the German states—had been, in effect, evicted from Germany—by Otto von Bismarck, Prussia’s great chancellor and the creator of the new German Empire. Then it had lost great hunks of territory—Tuscany, Lombardy—to a new Kingdom of Italy that, although also militarily weak, was supported in its expansion by France. Austria-Hungary had become a paradox, simultaneously obsolete and ahead of its time. In an era of nationalism run rampant, it was not a nation at all but a cobbled-together assortment of thirteen nationalities that spoke sixteen languages, belonged to five major religions, and were organized into seventeen “lands” served by twenty parliaments. But it had the potential to provide a model for a Europe in which diverse peoples could live together in peace and might even, one day, think of uniting. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as much as Franz Joseph disliked him, had appeared to understand that potential. His murder left the empire without the one man who might possibly have been strong and canny enough to lead it through the crisis of 1914. The archduke had always disliked Conrad’s lust for military adventures and almost certainly would have restrained him. He was “a man,” as Berchtold would observe sadly amid the ruins of postwar Europe, whom “the monarchy needed.”

  Just across Hungary’s southernmost border was the nightmare Kingdom of Serbia, stirring unrest whenever it could. For many Austrians, and not only for such hawks as Field Marshal Conrad, the empire faced a simple choice: it could maintain a strong position in the Balkans, or it could allow itself to be gradually undone by implacably hostile, Russian-sponsored Balkan troublemakers. The threat was not only external—every new Serbian success seemed an incitement for the many ethnic minorities inside Austria-Hungary to seek either independence or union with whatever Balkan nation they felt themselves to be linked to by culture, religion, blood, and geography. The situation was a recipe for trouble, and throughout the decade leading up to 1914, one development after another added new poisons to the mix.

  The first of these developments, when it came in 1906, was a Gilbert and Sullivan–style affair that came to be known, in suitably comic fashion, as the Pig War. Serbia was still a tiny country at that time, but its position on Bosnia’s border gave it opportunities for mischief that the expansionists were delighted to exploit. Exasperated officials in Vienna, almost desperate to find some way to strike back, decided that they could punish and perhaps even subdue Serbia economically by refusing to import its livestock, pigs included. They enacted an embargo that went on for five years and accomplished nothing except to make Vienna look ridiculous. The Serbs were able to find so many new markets for their animals that their exports increased. They learned—or thoug
ht they learned, which came down to the same thing—that they could defy the mighty Hapsburgs and pay no price for doing so.

  Things turned in a more serious direction in 1908. Austria, having had no success in stopping Serbia from making trouble in Bosnia and Herzegovina, became increasingly concerned about the fact that, in strict legal terms, these two southernmost pieces of its empire didn’t belong to it at all. According to international law, they were still provinces of the Ottoman Empire, though Austria had occupied and administered them since 1878, when the Turks had been forced to withdraw after suffering another in their seemingly endless series of defeats. Vienna saw that it had good reason to fear the consequences if somehow this territory ever became part of Serbia. And the aggressiveness of the Serbs, coupled with the increasingly decrepit state of the Ottoman Empire, made such a development far from unimaginable. So Vienna announced that it was annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Serbia, predictably, howled in protest and appealed to Russia. But Russia was still recovering from its disastrous war with Japan and the revolution that followed and therefore was powerless to intervene.

  Conrad, who was by then entering his third year as the Austrian army’s chief of staff, wanted to send his troops into Serbia and regarded victory as assured. He had at his disposal a standing army of more than three hundred and sixty thousand men, while Serbia at this point had fewer than twenty thousand. Even more important, he had the full support of the Germans, who understood the extent of Russia’s impotence and were increasingly worried about Austria’s slow decline. The time seemed right for eviscerating Serbia, perhaps for partitioning her out of existence. Characteristically, Conrad started saying that scores might be settled with other neighbors too: with tiny Montenegro, for example, another Balkan nuisance and an ally of Serbia’s. And perhaps even with Italy, which had its own territorial ambitions in the Balkans but would have been hopelessly outmatched in a war with Austria.