The Sleepwalkers (19 page)

The likeliest apple of future Austro-Italian discord in the Balkans was Albania, still locked within the Ottoman Empire, which both Italy and Austria viewed as falling within their sphere of influence. Since the 1850s, Austria had, through its vice-consulate in Skutari, exercised a kind of religious protectorate over the Catholics in the north of the country. But the Italians, too, took a strong interest in Albania with its long Adriatic coastline. By the turn of the century, Rome and Vienna had agreed that they would support Albanian independence in the event of a collapse of Ottoman power in the region. The question of how exactly influence would be shared between the two Adriatic powers remained unresolved.

In March 1909, Serbia formally pledged that it would desist from further covert operations against Austrian territory and maintain good neighbourly relations with the empire. In 1910, Vienna and Belgrade even agreed, after much wrangling, a trade treaty ending the Austro-Serbian commercial conflict. A 24 per cent rise in Serbian imports during that year bore witness to improving economic conditions. Austro-Hungarian goods began to reappear on the shelves of shops in Belgrade, and by 1912, the dual monarchy was once again the main buyer and supplier of Serbia.
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At meetings between Pašić and the Austrian representative, there were assurances of goodwill on both sides. But a deep awkwardness had settled over the two states' relations that seemed impossible to dispel. Although there was talk of an official visit by King Petar to Vienna, it never materialized. On the initially genuine pretext of the monarch's ill health, the Serbian government moved the visit from Vienna to Budapest, then postponed it, and then, in April 1911, put it off indefinitely. Yet, to the chagrin of the Austrians, there was a highly successful royal trip to Paris in the winter of 1911. The French visit was deemed so important that the Serbian envoy in Paris returned to Belgrade to help prepare it. An earlier plan to combine the journey to France with stops in Vienna and Rome was jettisoned. Petar arrived in Paris on 16 November and was accommodated in the court of the Quay d'Orsay, where he was welcomed by the president of the republic and presented with a gold medal, fashioned especially for the occasion, commemorating the king's service, as a young Serbian exile and volunteer, in the French war of 1870 against Prussia. At a state dinner on the same evening – and to the intense annoyance of the Austrians – President Fallières opened his speech by hailing Petar as ‘the King of all the Serbs' (including, implicitly, those living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and ‘the man who was going to lead his country and people into freedom'. ‘Visibly excited', Petar replied that he and his fellow Serbs would count on France in their fight for freedom.
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Behind the scenes, moreover, the work to redeem Bosnia-Herzegovina for Serbdom continued. Narodna Odbrana, ostensibly converted into a purely cultural organization, soon resumed its former activities; its branch organizations proliferated after 1909 and spilled over into Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Austrians monitored – as far as they were able – the espionage activity of Serbian agents crossing the border. A characteristic example was a certain Dragomir Djordjević, a reserve lieutenant in the Serbian army who combined his cultural work as an ‘actor' in Bosnia with the management of a covert network of Serb informants; he was spotted returning to Serbia for weapons training in October 1910.
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Austrian representatives in Serbia were also aware from an early stage of the existence of Ujedinjenje ili smrt!, though they were at first unsure of what they should make of this mysterious newcomer to the Belgrade scene. In a report filed on 12 November 1911, the new minister in Belgrade (Forgách's successor), Stephan von Ugron zu Abránfalva, notified Vienna of the existence of ‘an association supposedly existing in officer circles' that was currently the subject of press comment in Serbia. At this point, ‘nothing positive' was known about the group, save that it called itself the Black Hand and was chiefly concerned with regaining the influence over national politics that the army had enjoyed in the Obrenović era.

Further reports from Ugron and the Austrian military attaché Otto Gellinek fleshed out the picture somewhat. Apis was now identified as the dominant figure in the new network and a more elaborate picture emerged of its objectives: ‘The programme of the movement consists in the removal of all personalities in the country who stand in the way of the Greater-Serbian idea' and the enthronement of a leader ‘who will be ready to lead the fight for the unification of all Serbs'.
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Press rumours to the effect that the Black Hand had drawn up a hit-list of politicians to be assassinated in the event of a coup against the current Radical government, nourished by the mysterious murders of two prominent opposition politicians in the autumn of 1911, were later discounted as false. It appeared, Gellinek reported on 22 November 1911, that the conspirators planned to use legal means to remove the ‘inner enemies of Serbdom', in order then to ‘turn with unified force against its external foes'.
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The Austrians initially viewed these developments with surprising equanimity. It was virtually impossible, Gellinek observed, to keep any organization in Serbia secret for long ‘because for every five conspirators, there is one informant'. Conspiracies were nothing new in Serbia, after all; the matter was therefore of little importance.
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But the attitude of the Austrian observers changed as they began to grasp the extent of the Black Hand's influence over parts of the state apparatus. In December 1911, the military attaché reported that the Serbian minister of war had called off an investigation into the movement ‘because there would otherwise be difficulties of far-reaching significance'. Early in February 1912, he observed that the network had acquired semi-official character; it appeared that the government was ‘fully informed on all members [of the Black Hand] and on their activity'; the fact that Minister of War Stepanović, a protector of the organization, remained in office was a sign of its growing political influence.
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A complex picture emerged that would shape Austrian behaviour in the summer of 1914. It was clear on the one hand that Unity or Death! was a subversive network genuinely opposed to and feared by the current civilian authorities in the Kingdom of Serbia. But it was also the case that the great-Serbian objectives of the network were widely condoned and supported, both by elements of the civilian leadership and by the broader public in Serbia. More importantly, there were times when the movement and the administration appeared to operate in tandem. In February 1912, Ugron warned that the Serbian authorities might collaborate with ‘an enthusiastic military-patriotic movement', provided its energies could be turned outwards against Serbia's external foes and away from subversive activity within the kingdom itself.
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The irredentist organ
Pijemont
openly espoused anti-Habsburg ultra-nationalist objectives – by defining itself thus in terms of ‘national' goals, Ugron noted, the Black Hand made it difficult for the Serbian civilian authorites to take action against it.
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In short, the Austrians grasped both the extent of Black Hand influence and the complexity of the constraints preventing the Pašić government from taking action to counter it.

The outlines of this analysis remained in place until the summer of 1914. The Austrians followed as closely as they could the dramatic growth of the network during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. In January 1914, attention focused on the trial of a regicide officer by the name of Vemić, who had been notorious in 1903 for carrying about with him in a suitcase a desiccated flap of flesh that he had cut from one of Queen Draga's breasts as a trophy of the night of 11 June. In October 1913, during the Second Balkan War, Vemić shot dead a Serbian recruit for being too slow to follow an order and was tried by a military tribunal. His acquittal by a court staffed entirely by senior officers triggered uproar in parts of the Belgrade press and Vemić was called for a retrial before the Serbian Supreme Court. But his sentence – a mere ten months of imprisonment – was cut short by a royal pardon, extracted by the military leadership from the king at the end of December 1913.
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The officer corps is ‘a politically decisive factor in today's Serbia', Gellinek noted in May 1914. This growth in the ‘praetorian element' in Serbian public life in turn represented an enhanced threat to Austria-Hungary, since ‘the officer corps is also the bastion of the great-Serbian, extreme Austrophobe tendency'.
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The most enigmatic ingredient in the mix was Nikola Pašić, the ‘uncrowned king of Serbia'. Pašić held his fire during the political storms of 1913–14 and refused to allow himself to be provoked into a direct confrontation with the officer corps. ‘With his customary agility', Gellinek observed on 21 May 1914, the prime minister sidestepped hostile interpellations in the Skupština by insisting that the Serbian government and the Serbian officer corps were in ‘the fullest agreement' on all important questions.
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In a report filed on 21 June – a week before the assassinations at Sarajevo – Gellinek summed up the situation in four points. The crown had fallen into the hands of the conspirators and was largely powerless. The army continued to pursue its own objectives in domestic and foreign policy. The Russian minister, Nikolai Hartwig, remained an exceptionally influential figure in Belgrade. But none of this meant that Pašić should be written off as a factor in Serbian politics; on the contrary, the founder and leader for three decades of the ‘extreme russophile' Radical Party still occupied, despite everything, an ‘omnipotent position'.
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Yet establishing direct communications with Nikola Pašić proved extraordinarily difficult. A curious episode from the autumn of 1913 illustrates the point. On 3 October, Pašić paid a pre-scheduled visit to Vienna. The trip was timely, because Vienna and Belgrade were locked in a confrontation over the Serbian occupation of parts of northern Albania. On 1 October, a letter warning Belgrade that the Serbs must quit Albania had elicited a noncommittal reply. Accompanied by his ambassador, Pašić attended meetings with various Austrian ministers, including a lunch with the Austrian foreign minister, Berchtold; the Hungarian prime minister, István Tisza; Forgách; Biliński and others. Yet at no point was there a thorough discussion of the issue at hand. Biliński, joint finance minister with special responsibility for Bosnia-Herzegovina, recalled in his memoirs that Pašić was an exceptionally evasive interlocutor. Full of ‘fire and phrases', he parried questions from his Austrian interlocutors with waffling assurances that ‘all would be well'. Biliński also faulted Berchtold for failing to press the Serbian statesman harder. ‘Small in appearance, with a flowing patriarchal beard, fanatical eyes and a modest bearing', Pašić perplexed the Austrian foreign minister with his combination of graceful joviality and wilful obfuscation.
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At the first meeting between them, before lunch, Berchtold was so disarmed by the warmth of Pašić's overtures that when they came next to the topic of Albania, he omitted to press home the gravity of Austria's objections to the Serbian occupation. Sometime during the afternoon following their meeting, Berchtold suddenly remembered that he had ‘forgotten' to inform Pašić of Vienna's strong views on the matter. It was agreed that he would broach the Albanian Question with the Serbian leader that evening when the two men were both expected to attend the opera. But when the foreign minister arrived a little late to take his seat in the royal box, he found that Pašić had already retired to his hotel, where he was supposedly in bed fast asleep. The Serbian prime minister left Vienna early next morning without any further meeting having taken place. Berchtold went back to his desk and spent the small hours writing a letter that was taken round to the hotel by courier so that it reached Pašić as he was leaving the city. But since it was scrawled in German script (not to mention Berchtold's notoriously inscrutable hand) Pašić was unable to read it. Even when the letter was deciphered in Belgrade, Pašić supposedly found it difficult to see what Berchtold was getting at.
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And the people at the Austrian Foreign Office had no idea either, because Berchtold had not thought to preserve a rough copy of the text. This comedy of errors – assuming that Biliński's recollection a decade later can be trusted – is no doubt in part an indictment of Austrian disarray, perhaps also of Berchtold's almost painfully courteous diffidence and reserve, but it also hints at Pašić's famous elusiveness.
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Above all, it conveys a sense of the paralysing awkwardness that had settled over Austro-Serbian relations by the eve of the First World War.

What emerged from Austrian Serbia-watching in the last years, months and weeks before the assassination was a fairly nuanced account of the destabilizing forces at work in the neighbouring state. This was a hostile and therefore a tendentious and one-sided picture, to be sure. Austrian observations of events in Serbia were embedded in a matrix of negative attitudes – rooted partly in experience and partly in long-standing stereotypes – about Serbian political culture and the prominent actors within it. Bad faith, deceitfulness, unreliability, evasiveness, violence and excitability were recurring themes in the envoy reports from Belgrade. Conspicuously absent was a thorough analysis of the operational relationship between the Austrophobe groups within Serbia and irredentist terrorism within the Habsburg lands. It is possible that the fiasco of the Agram–Friedjung trials put brakes on Austrian intelligence-gathering after 1909, just as the Iran-Contra scandals of the Ronald Reagan presidency in the 1980s led to a temporary scaling down of covert intelligence activity by US agencies.
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The Austrians recognized that Narodna Odbrana aimed at the subversion of Habsburg rule in Bosnia and ran networks of activists in the Habsburg lands. They presumed that the roots of all Serbian irredentist activity within the empire led back to the pan-Serbian propaganda of the Belgrade-based patriotic networks. But the precise nature of the links and the relationship between Narodna Odbrana and the Black Hand were poorly understood. Nevertheless: the key points of reference that would shape Austrian thought and action after the events at Sarajevo were all in place by the spring of 1914.