July 1914: Countdown to War
Page 3
The sun shone brilliantly across Bosnia on the morning of Vidov Dan, as the Habsburg heir prepared to run out the clock on his visit. Franz Ferdinand wore the uniform of an Austrian cavalry general, with a blue tunic over black trousers with red stripes, topped off by a gold collar with three silver stars. Sophie was elegantly outfitted in a “gossamer white veil” and white hat, with a bouquet of roses tucked into her red sash. Together they arrived in Sarajevo by train from Ilidža at 9:20 AM, accompanied by Governor Potiorek, who acted as tour guide. A brief review of local troops followed, at which Sophie, significantly, was allowed to walk side by side with her husband. The archducal couple then took the position of honor in an open car in the imperial motorcade, behind the lead car holding the mayor and police chief, with three other staff cars trailing behind. The cannons boomed a “twenty-four-fold salute” to announce the start of the royal progress, followed by shouts of “Zivio!” (“long live the heir”) from the crowds. As everyone in town knew, the motorcade would now, between 10 and 10:30 AM, proceed down the length of the Appelquai toward the town hall, along the right side of the road bordering the river; on the return route, the motorcade would proceed on the opposite, landward side of the quai.11
There, along the Appelquai, the assassins waited. Counting Ilitch himself, there were seven in all. Chabrinovitch, Grabezh, and Princip, fresh from Belgrade, formed the core muscle of the conspiracy. Ilitch had recruited three more locals: Vaso Chubrilovitch and Cvjetko Popovitch, both Bosnian Serbs, and, perhaps to throw investigators off the scent of the crime, a token Bosnian Muslim with the wonderfully evocative name of Mehmedbashitch (“Mehmed” being a Turkic variant of Mohammad and “bashitch” the Slavicization of the Turkish word for kickback, baksheesh). Ilitch, the organizer, chose a post for himself on the landward side of the Appelquai across from the Cumurja Bridge, flanked by Popovitch. Directly opposite, Mehmedbashitch, Chubrilovitch, and Chabrinovitch took up key positions along the river. The motorcade would pass by the first two, who carried pistols, just before passing the Cumurja Bridge and then Chabrinovitch, with his handheld fuse bomb. In case these three missed their chance, Princip was waiting with his revolver right before the cars reached the next bridge, the Lateiner. Finally, if the first four failed, the motorcade would have to get by Grabezh—the only assassin who carried both bomb and pistol—short of the Kaiser Bridge.
For all the brilliant redundancy of Ilitch’s plan, there was a glaring weakness. Perhaps overestimating the dedication of his own recruits, the organizer of the assassination plot had given the two most important positions to Vaso Chubrilovitch, a young Bosnian with little training and less courage, and Mehmedbashitch, a Muslim of questionable loyalty to the Serbian cause. Neither man raised a finger when the motorcade passed him by. Only the third assassin and first of the Belgrade conspirators, Chabrinovitch, acted. As the motorcade was passing by the Cumurja Bridge, Chabrinovitch knocked the cap off his bomb and hurled it at the archduke’s car. Luckily, the driver had seen the assassin readying to strike; he accelerated rapidly, and the fuse bomb, after grazing Ferdinand’s face, bounced off the back hood and detonated underneath the staff car that followed behind. The explosion did serious damage to the latter vehicle, wounding Potiorek’s adjutant and several bystanders on the quai. Chabrinovitch jumped into the dry riverbed, only to be seized by policemen before he could pop his poison pill (if he intended to).
Never was the quiet dignity of the Habsburgs more in evidence than in the minutes following the attempt on the archduke’s life. Dismissing his own minor scratch, Franz Ferdinand calmly surveyed the damage to the car, asked if anyone had been injured, and made sure all wounded men were sent forthwith to the garrison hospital for treatment. “Come on,” he remarked, “the fellow is insane. Gentlemen, let us proceed with the program.” When the motorcade resumed its course along the Appelquai at a higher speed than before, so as to discourage further attempts on the archduke’s life, Ferdinand scoffed and asked his driver to slow down so that his subjects might see him better. His instinct was sound: having seen Chabrinovitch’s bomb fail to hit its target, Princip and Grabezh had abandoned their positions.12
Despite his show of pluck in the face of this act of terrorism, the archduke was in a foul mood when the party reached the town hall. Sophie, uninjured but for a small scratch and not too badly shaken, went off to meet with a deputation of Muslim women, while Ferdinand prepared to endure one last round of public speeches. The scene was novel, at least. Underneath a canopy of “red-gold Moorish loggias”—a nod to Sarajevo’s Ottoman past—the archduke was greeted by “turbaned mullahs, bishops in miters and gilt vestments, rabbis in kaftans.” But there was an unmistakable air of awkwardness. When Mayor Fehim Effendi, unsure of how to behave in the wake of the incident on the quay, simply read off his prepared text of platitudes and compliments for the Habsburg heir—read in German, which he spoke decently well for a Bosnian—Ferdinand finally snapped, interrupting Fehim Effendi to say, “That’s rich! We come here to visit this city and we are greeted with bombs. Very well, then, go on.”13
It was approaching eleven AM. The program called for a visit to the museum before lunch, which would require navigating the most crowded part of the city by way of Franz Josef Strasse. To avoid further trouble, the archduke’s military advisers suggested he skip the museum and proceed to Potiorek’s gubernatorial Konak, turning left at the first bridge along the quai—the Kaiser—to avoid the trouble spot at the Cumurja farther down; from the Kaiser it was a straight shot to the Konak (this route also passed through the Muslim quarter, presumably safer than the Serbian neighborhoods). With his characteristic sense of honor, Ferdinand chose a third option: visiting the garrison hospital to check on Potiorek’s adjutant and the other wounded before proceeding to the Konak for the luncheon that would, at last, terminate his duties in Bosnia. While the hospital, like the museum, was most directly reached via the narrow Franz-Josef Strasse, Potiorek insisted that the motorcade proceed straight along the broad Appelquai at high speed so as to foil bomb throwers, reaching the garrison hospital by the long—but presumably safe—way.14
It was a sensible plan. Meanwhile, Princip and Grabezh were still milling about the quai, despondent after watching Chabrinovitch’s arrest following his near miss. Ilitch and his Bosnian recruits, despite being perfectly located to make mischief after the motorcade had been halted after the bombing, had all slunk away to hide. Grabezh had not distinguished himself either, having failed to strike—even after the motorcade resumed its progress along the quay—because, he claimed later, the crowds at the Lateiner Bridge were too thick. The Serbs’ one remaining hand bomb, held by Grabezh, would have almost no chance to hit a car traveling at full speed. Grabezh and Princip were both carrying pistols, but the idea that either one of them could, after a few weeks’ target practice, hit the archduke with a kill shot in a rapidly moving car was fanciful. Grabezh, knowing this, had taken up a new position at the Kaiser Bridge, hoping that, if the returning motorcade turned there toward the gubernatorial Konak, it would slow down enough for him get off a shot at close range. Had the archduke not insisted on visiting the wounded men at the garrison hospital, his car would have had to slow down, briefly, turning onto the bridge where Grabezh was waiting—although the Serb would have had only a second, at most, to get off his shot.15
Gavrilo Princip had not given up, either. He, along with Chabrinovitch, had set the conspiracy in motion. Both men were committed terrorists. Both had taken oaths to carry out this terrible deed over the Sarajevo gravestone of Bogdan Zherajitch, a Herzogovinian Serb revered for his assassination attempt on General Vareshanin, Potiorek’s predecessor as military governor of Bosnia, in 1910. Zherajitch, like Princip and Chabrinovitch, had been trained by the Black Hand. Although he had failed to kill the governor, Zherajitch had gotten off five shots before committing suicide. Princip, in the days before the archduke’s arrival, spent hours next to Zherajitch’s grave, gathering strength for his task. On the night before Vi
dov Dan, Princip had made one last pilgrimage, covering the terrorist’s tombstone with flowers to consecrate his own expected martyrdom on the morrow.16
So far, Princip had failed his hero. Chabrinovitch had at least made his attempt on the archduke (even if failing to kill himself, as Zherajitch had done). Thus far Princip had not even done that much. True, it was not his fault that Ilitch had placed him fourth in line on the riverside that morning. In the tense aftermath of the bombing, with officers and onlookers blanketing the scene, it would have been nearly impossible for him to get close enough to the archduke to get off a good shot. And yet, for a Serbian terrorist committed to die for his cause, this was no excuse.
Fortified by his graveside pilgrimages, Princip did not lose faith after Chabrinovitch was arrested. As Grabezh had the Konak route covered, Princip took up a new position on the museum route, opposite the Lateiner Bridge, in front of the Moritz Schiller spice emporium at the corner of Franz Josef Strasse, where the archduke’s car would turn right from the Appelquai if it followed the original program. So dangerous was the publication of the archduke’s itinerary that now, whether he proceeded to either of his two remaining destinations, his motorcade would have to slow down at a sharp corner where a Serb terrorist was waiting, loaded pistol in hand. Still, Ferdinand’s stubbornness in choosing a third destination, and Potiorek’s decision to abandon the Franz Josef Strasse and run all cars at high speed, had dramatically lowered the odds of a successful second attack. If everything proceeded according to the new plan, both Grabezh and Princip would watch the motorcade pass by in a blur, just out of reach. Princip would be a bit closer, but—at nine meters or thirty feet from his new position—a fast-moving car would present an almost impossible target.
Princip’s murder weapon, an FN Model 1910 Browning semi-automatic pistol. Source: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna, Austria.
The 1911 Gräf & Stift convertible in which Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were traveling when shot by Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914. Source: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna, Austria.
It was just past eleven AM when the archduke, his wife, Potiorek, the mayor, and their beefed-up police escort left town hall, proceeding at full throttle along the river side of the Appelquai. As a further precaution, the driving order had been reconfigured, with a police car leading, the mayor’s car second, followed by the Ferdinand-Sophie-Potiorek car, and three more staff cars behind. A close friend of the archduke, Count Harrach, had volunteered for good measure to ride on the car’s left running board so he could fend off any assault from the river, from which side the earlier bomb had been thrown. With the principals now in the middle of a long, tightened, fast-moving motorcade, they would be harder to single out by any bomb thrower and almost invulnerable to a shooter.
Grabezh, on the Kaiser Bridge, could only watch the cars as they zoomed by him without turning. As they neared the Lateiner Bridge, about a quarter-mile distant from town hall, the motorcade should have reached full speed—should have, but did not. Whether because they had forgotten about Potiorek’s rerouting or because Potiorek had been negligent in informing everyone, the first two cars turned right onto Franz Josef Strasse. The third car, too, carrying Potiorek and the archduke, turned. Realizing the error, Potiorek ordered the driver to turn back just as they rounded the sharp corner in front of the spice emporium. After hitting the brakes, the archduke’s chauffeur struggled for a fatal moment before he could shift the car into reverse gear. Gavrilo Princip thus found his target sitting motionless for a period of two or three seconds, just 2.5 meters (about 8 feet) away, with Count Harrach—acting as bodyguard—marooned helplessly on the wrong side of the car. Stepping in to point-blank range, Princip fired two shots with his Browning pistol. The first pierced Franz Ferdinand’s neck and the second Sophie’s abdomen.
As the archduke’s car, having turned around at last, sped in the other direction toward the Konak, it was not yet clear to the others in the car that the shots had hit their target. Sophie, sensing something was amiss, thought only of her husband, asking him, “In God’s name, what has happened to you?” Franz Ferdinand, likewise, although knowing he had been hit, could think only of Sophie. “Sopherl, Sopherl,” he managed to say even as blood dripped from his mouth, “don’t die on me. Live for our children.” Asked by Count Harrach whether he was badly injured, the archduke replied, with all the reserve expected of a Habsburg, “It is nothing.” As both he and his wife slowly expired, Ferdinand repeated again and again, each time more softly than the last: “It is nothing.”17
By eleven thirty AM on 28 June 1914, Ferdinand and Sophie were dead.
* Also murdered were the queen’s brothers and several government ministers.
I
REACTIONS
1
Vienna: Anger, Not Sympathy
IT WAS A GORGEOUS DAY ACROSS EUROPE, typical of the glorious summer of 1914. “Throughout the days and nights,” the novelist Stefan Zweig recalled, “the heavens were a silky blue, the air soft yet not sultry, the meadows fragrant and warm.” On Sunday afternoon, 28 June, Zweig, like nearly everyone in Austria, was outdoors enjoying the weather, sitting on a park bench in the spa town of Baden, reading a Tolstoy novel. Shortly after two PM, a notice announcing the death of the heir to the throne was posted near the bandstand. Seeing the announcement, the musicians abruptly stopped playing, which alerted everyone that something was amiss. Before long, everyone in town knew the story.1
News of the murders in Sarajevo spread quickly across the country. Among government officials, Chief of Staff Conrad, who had taken leave of Franz Ferdinand just hours before the archduke was murdered, was the first to know. Conrad had taken the ten thirty PM train from Sarajevo to Croatia, where he was to supervise maneuvers. Shortly after noon on Sunday, as Conrad passed through Zaghreb, Baron Rhemen, a general of cavalry, entered his coupé and passed on the terrible story. At his final stop, in Karlstadt, Conrad received an official telegram informing him of the deaths of the Habsburg heir and his wife, and that the assassin was a “Bosnian of Serbian nationality.” Conrad concluded right then that the assassinations could not have been “the deed of a single fanatic,” but rather must be “the work of a well-organized conspiracy.” In effect, the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was “the declaration of war by Serbia on Austria-Hungary.” This act of war, he resolved, “could only be answered by war.” Without delay, Conrad wired to Emperor Franz Josef I at his alpine villa at Bad Ischl, asking whether he should break off the planned maneuvers in Croatia and return to the capital. The answer was yes. For the second evening in a row, Conrad boarded the night train, this time en route to Vienna.2
Conrad’s coolly belligerent reaction to the news was wholly in character. Army fit and ramrod-thin, the chief of staff was every bit as stubborn as Franz Ferdinand, to whom he owed his elevation to the position. The slain archduke had secured Conrad’s appointment in 1906 and his reappointment in 1912 following a short-lived sack the previous November, both times over the objection of Emperor Franz Josef, who found Conrad’s ambitious military reforms irksome. (It had not helped that the ever-belligerent Conrad had advocated invading Italy, Austria’s nominal ally, in November 1911, when Italy was at war with the Ottoman Empire.) That Conrad was keen to crush Serbia was one of the worst-kept secrets in Europe. As Cato the Elder had signed off his speeches in the Roman Senate with the reminder that “Carthage must be destroyed,” so Conrad had been consistently urging his colleagues to “solve the Serbian question once and for all” since the First Bosnian Crisis of 1908–1909.* Although, thanks to Germany’s firm backing against Russia in this crisis, Vienna was able to win European recognition of Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbian nationalists had never accepted its legitimacy: both Narodna Odbrana and the Black Hand had been formed in order to overturn the annexation. Although unsuccessful so far in overthrowing Austrian rule in Bosnia, Serbs were scoring victory after victory elsewhere. Serbia had nearly doubled in size and populat
ion during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, gaining at the expense of Turkey and Bulgaria. Serbia’s prestige was skyrocketing, while Austria’s, owing to her failure to intervene in the Balkan Wars, was plummeting. Small wonder the Bosnian Serbs had embraced irredentism—and political terrorism.3
Rounding out the atmosphere of menace facing Vienna, Russia, Serbia’s Great Power patron, was flexing her muscles again. In a period of internal weakness following her humiliation in the Russo-Japanese War and her subsequent Revolution of 1905, Russia had backed down during the First Bosnian Crisis. Four years later, her pan-Slavist minister to Belgrade, Nikolai Hartwig, had all but single-handedly organized the Balkan League (Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro), which declared war on the Ottoman Empire in October 1912, launching the First Balkan War. True, Russia had not mobilized herself in this conflict, which saw Turkey defeated on all fronts, nor did she in the Second Balkan War, launched by Bulgaria against her former allies in June 1913 in a quarrel over the spoils from the First (a quarrel Bulgaria lost soundly, after Romania and Turkey piled on her, too). But then, with Austria sitting on the sidelines during both wars even as her Serbian archenemy won victory after victory, Russia had not had to get involved. With the Serbs humiliating Turkey and scaring off Austria from intervening even without Russian backing, Conrad feared that the dual monarchy was running out of time to resolve its smoldering problems with Slavic minorities. That Franz Ferdinand had himself disapproved of Conrad’s belligerent line during the Balkan Wars did nothing to dampen Conrad’s fire—nor did the archduke’s death now prompt a reconsideration. Conrad spared no time for sentiment as he plotted Austria’s vengeance. It was now or never.