July 1914: Countdown to War (5 page)

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
T WAS A GORGEOUS DAY ACROSS
E
UROPE
, 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 population 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.

Count Leopold von Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, found himself at the center of the diplomatic storm of July 1914.
Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2004-1110-500.

Count Leopold von Berchtold, Austria-Hungary’s foreign minister, was attending a country fair at Buchlowitz, near his ancestral estate at Buchlau, when he learned the news. He and his wife, Nandine, had been close with Ferdinand and Sophie. Not long ago, they had all spent a happy weekend together at the archduke’s estate at Konopischt, where the brilliantly redesigned gardens were in full springtime bloom. Berchtold, a
handsome, fashionable, stupendously wealthy aristocrat not taken terribly seriously at court—he had been the emperor’s third choice when appointed to the post in 1912—had neither the Habsburg stoicism of his friend Franz Ferdinand nor the ruthless focus of Conrad. Intelligent, well-mannered, and thoughtful, Berchtold was believed to dread making decisions. It was Berchtold who had stood in Conrad’s way during the Balkan Wars, teaming up with Franz Ferdinand and the emperor against the war party and consigning Austrian policy to a listless, reactive passivity that had done nothing to keep Serbia in check. True to form, the foreign minister was stunned with grief upon learning of his friend’s death, which left him speechless. After taking a long moment to compose himself, Berchtold walked to the station and boarded the next train to Vienna, arriving late Sunday afternoon.