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Prologue
SARAJEVO

The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest. Rather than providing an authentic ‘cause’ for the First World War, the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was exploited to justify unleashing forces already in play. It is merely a trifling irony of history that a teenage terrorist killed a man who, alone among the leaders of the Hapsburg Empire, would probably have used his influence to try to prevent a cataclysm. But the events of that torrid day in Sarajevo exercise a fascination for posterity which must be indulged by any chronicler of 1914.

Franz Ferdinand was not much loved by anyone save his wife. A corpulent fifty-year-old, one of the Hapsburg Empire’s seventy archdukes, he became heir to the throne after his cousin Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself and his mistress at Mayerling in 1889. The Emperor Franz Joseph resented his nephew; others considered him an arrogant and opinionated martinet. Franz Ferdinand’s ruling passion was shooting: he accounted for some 250,000 wild creatures to his own gun, before ending his days in Gavrilo Princip’s threadbare little gamebag.

In 1900 the Archduke conferred his affections on a Bohemian aristocrat, Sophie Chotek. She was intelligent and assertive: at army manoeuvres she once scolded the presiding officers for the imprecision of their men’s marching. But lack of royal blood rendered her in the eyes of the imperial court ineligible to become empress. The monarch insisted that their marriage, when he grudgingly consented to it, should be morganatic. This placed them beyond the social pale of most of Austria’s haughty aristocracy. Though Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were blissfully happy with each other, their lives were marred by the petty humiliations heaped upon her, as an unroyal royal appendage. Franz Ferdinand named a favourite walk at his Bohemian castle of Konopiště ‘Oberer Kreuzweg’ – ‘the upper Stations of the Cross’. At court functions, he followed the Emperor in precedence – but without his wife; he nursed a loathing for the lord chamberlain, Alfred Prince Montenuovo, who orchestrated such insults.

Franz Ferdinand’s status as heir apparent nonetheless ensured that he and his wife entertained generals, politicians and foreign grandees. On 13 June 1914, Germany’s Kaiser visited them at Konopiště, accompanied by Grand-Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, a rose-fancier who was keen to see the castle’s famous borders. Wilhelm II was prone to social mishaps: on this occasion his dachshunds, Wadl and Hexl, disgraced themselves by killing one of Franz Ferdinand’s exotic pheasants. The Kaiser and the Archduke appear to have discussed trivia, rather than European or Balkan politics.

Next day, Sunday the 14th, Austria’s foreign minister and most important politician, Count Leopold Berchtold, visited Konopiště with his wife. The Berchtolds were fabulously rich, and lived the smart life to the full. They were enthusiastic racehorse-owners, and that spring one of their yearling fillies had won the prized Con Amore handicap at Freudenau. Nandine, the Countess, was a childhood friend of Sophie Hohenburg. The visitors arrived at the castle for breakfast, spent the day looking at the garden and paintings, of which the Count was considered a connoisseur, then caught an evening train back to Vienna, never to meet their hosts again.

The Archduke’s political and social views were conservative and vigorously expressed. After attending Edward VII’s 1910 funeral in London, he wrote home deploring the boorishness of most of his fellow sovereigns, and the alleged impertinence of some politicians present, notable among them ex-US president Theodore Roosevelt. It is sometimes suggested that Franz Ferdinand was an intelligent man. Even if this was so, like so many royal personages into modern times, he was corrupted by position, which empowered him to express opinions unenlightened even by contemporary standards.

He loathed Hungarians, telling the Kaiser: ‘the so-called noble, gentlemanly Magyar is a most infamous, anti-dynastic, lying, unreliable fellow’. He regarded southern Slavs as sub-humans, referring to the Serbians as ‘those pigs’. He hankered after recovering Lombardy and Venetia, lost to Italy in his lifetime, for the Hapsburg Empire. Visiting Russia in 1891, Franz Ferdinand declared that its autocracy offered ‘an admirable model’. Tsar Nicholas II recoiled from Franz Ferdinand’s intemperance, especially on racial matters. Both the Archduke and his wife were strongly Catholic, favouring Jesuits and professing hostility towards Freemasons, Jews and liberals. Such was Sophie’s religious fervour that in 1901 she led two hundred fashionable women on a Catholic march through Vienna.

The Archduke nonetheless cherished one prudent conviction: while many Austrians, notably including army chief of staff Gen. Conrad von Hötzendorf, detested Russia and welcomed the prospect of a battlefield showdown with the Tsar, Franz Ferdinand dissented. He was determined, he said repeatedly, to avoid a clash of arms. Desiring a ‘concord of emperors’, he wrote: ‘I shall never lead a war against Russia. I shall make sacrifices to avoid it. A war between Austria and Russia would end either with the overthrow of the Romanovs or with the overthrow of the Habsburgs – or perhaps the overthrow of both.’ He once wrote to Berchtold: ‘Excellency! Don’t let yourself be influenced by Conrad – ever! Not an iota of support for any of his yappings at the Emperor! Naturally he wants every possible war, every kind of hooray! rashness that will conquer Serbia and God knows what else … Through war he wants to make up for the mess that’s his responsibility at least in part. Therefore: let’s not play Balkan warriors ourselves. Let’s not stoop to this hooliganism. Let’s stay aloof and watch the scum bash in each other’s skulls. It’d be unforgivable, insane, to start something that would pit us against Russia.’

Franz Ferdinand, although as prone as Kaiser Wilhelm to outbursts of violent rhetoric, was a less reckless actor. Had the Archduke been alive when the decisive confrontation with Russia came, it is likely that his influence would have been wielded to avert war. As it was he was dead, because he insisted upon making an official visit to one of the most turbulent and perilous regions his uncle ruled. Every European monarchy shared a belief that ownership of large territories – empire – was a critical measure of virility and grandeur. While the colonies of Britain and France lay far away across oceans, those of the Hapsburgs and Romanovs were next door. Hungarian coins bore an abbreviation of the inscription ‘Francis Joseph by the Grace of God Emperor of Austria and Hungary, Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, Apostolic King’. In 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, rousing Russian fury. The twin provinces, former Ottoman possessions with mingled Serb and Muslim populations, had been Austrian-occupied since 1878, under a mandate conceded by the Congress of Berlin, but most Bosnians bitterly resented their subjection.

In 1913, a foreign diplomat exclaimed despairingly of the Austro-Hungarians: ‘Never have I seen people so determined to work against their own interests!’ It was an extraordinary folly, for an empire already groaning under the weight of its own contradictions and the frustrations of its oppressed minorities, wilfully to seize Bosnia-Herzegovina. But Franz Joseph still smarted beneath the humiliations of losing his northern Italian dominions soon after he inherited the throne, and of suffering military defeat by Prussia in 1866. The acquisition of new colonies in the Balkans seemed to offer a measure of compensation, as well as frustrating Serbia’s ambitions to incorporate them in a pan-Slav state.

Given the febrile mood in the provinces, it was rash to advertise the schedule for Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Bosnia as early as March. This prompted one of many groups of violent dissidents, the Young Bosnians, a secret society for students of peasant origins, to seize the opportunity to kill him. They reached this resolution perhaps on their own initiative, or perhaps at the behest of puppet-masters in Belgrade: in the absence of concrete evidence, either view is tenable. One of their number was nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip. Like many figures who have played such a role in history, Princip spent his short life striving to induce people to overcome their instinct to dismiss him because of his slight stature and colourless personality. In 1912, he volunteered to fight for Serbia in the First Balkan War, only to be rejected as too small. At his first interrogation after achieving notoriety in June 1914, he explained himself by saying, ‘Wherever I went, people took me for a weakling.’

In May, Princip and two fellow conspirators travelled to Belgrade. The city was capital of a young and volatile country, fully independent from the Ottoman Empire only since 1879, a constitutional monarchy that was heart and soul of the pan-Slav movement. Princip knew Serbia well, having lived there for two years. The ‘Young Bosnians’ were provided with four Browning semi-automatic pistols and six bombs by Maj. Vojin Tankosić of Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, a terrorist movement nicknamed ‘the Black Hand’, derived from German and Italian secret societies.

The group was led by the thirty-six-year-old head of military intelligence Col. Dragutin Dimitrijević, familiarly known as ‘Apis’, after the Egyptian bull god. He was the principal personality in one of three factions engaged in a struggle for Serbian domestic mastery. The other two elements were led respectively by Alexander, the Prince Regent – who hated the colonel because he refused to defer to the royal family – and Nikola Pašić, the prime minister. Apis looked the part of a revolutionary fanatic: pale, bald, heavy, enigmatic – like ‘a giant Mongolian’, in the words of a diplomat. He never married, devoting his life to the movement which boasted a hooded initiation ritual and a seal engraved with a skull-and-crossbones flag, a dagger, a bomb and poison. Murder was his business: he had been prominent among a group of young army officers who conducted the 1903 butchery of King Alexander of Serbia and Queen Draga in their own palace bedroom.

The Black Hand’s influence pervaded many Serbian institutions, notably including its army. Pašić, a sixty-nine-year-old of venerable appearance with his white hair and beard, was an inveterate enemy of Apis, some of whose associates in 1913 discussed murdering him. The prime minister and many of his colleagues regarded the colonel as a threat to his country’s stability and even existence; internal affairs minister Milan Protić spoke of the Black Hand to a visitor on 14 June as ‘a menace to democracy’. But in a society riven by competing interests, the civilian government lacked authority to remove or imprison Apis, who was protected by the patronage of the army chief of staff.

Beyond guns, bombs and cyanide suicide capsules, there is no hard evidence about what further support or direction Princip and his comrades received in Belgrade. The assassins went to their graves denying Serbia’s official complicity. It seems overwhelmingly probable that the Black Hand incited and instructed the Young Bosnians for the archducal murder; but all that is certain is that its agents provided them with means to commit terrorist acts in Hapsburg territory. Princip conducted pistol practice in a Belgrade park, then on 27 May enjoyed a farewell dinner with his two co-conspirators, Trifko Grabež and Nedeljko čabrinović, before starting what became an eight-day journey to Sarajevo. Part of Princip’s and Grabež’s route was covered on foot across open country, assisted by a frontier officer instructed by the Black Hand. Yet if Apis was wholly committed to the assassination plot, it is puzzling that the embryo assassin had to pawn his overcoat for a few dinars shortly before leaving Belgrade, to pay his expenses.

Who else knew what? Russia’s ambassador in Belgrade was a fanatical pan-Slavist and friend of the Black Hand, Nikolai Hartwig; it is possible that he was party to the plot. But claims that St Petersburg had prior knowledge of the assassination are unsupported by a shred of evidence, and are hard to credit. The Russian government was strongly hostile to Austria-Hungary because of its persecution of its Slav minorities, but the Tsar and his ministers had no plausible reason to want Franz Ferdinand dead.

The Bosnian peasant who guided Princip and Grabež back into Hapsburg territory – their other partner, čabrinović, travelled independently – was a Serbian government informer, who passed word about their movements, and about the bombs and pistols in their luggage, to the Interior Ministry in Belgrade. His report, which the prime minister read and summarised in his own hand, made no mention of a plot against Franz Ferdinand. Pašić commissioned an investigation, and gave orders that the movement of weapons from Serbia into Bosnia should be stopped; but he went no further. A Serbian minister later claimed that Pašić told the cabinet at the end of May or the beginning of June that some assassins were on their way to Sarajevo to kill Franz Ferdinand. Whether or not this is true – no minutes were taken of cabinet meetings – Pašić appears to have instructed Serbia’s envoy in Vienna to pass on to the Austrian authorities only a vague general warning, perhaps because he was unwilling to provide the Hapsburgs with a fresh and extremely serious grievance against his country.

Serbians played something of the same violent role on the margin of the Hapsburg Empire as did Irish factions in the affairs of Britain at several periods of the twentieth century, though the latter proved more resilient. Chronic Serb brutality towards their own minorities, especially Muslims, was a poor advertisement for the state. Some historians believe that its rulers were so intimately involved in terrorism, and explicitly in the conspiracy against Franz Ferdinand, that the country should be considered a rogue state. This view, once again, relies upon circumstantial evidence and speculation. Given the hostility between Apis and Pašić, it seems unlikely that they would have forged a common front to encompass the death of the Archduke.

Even without forewarning from Belgrade, the Austrian authorities had the strongest reasons to anticipate violent protest or some murderous attempt against Franz Ferdinand, who himself fully recognised the danger. Leaving his estate at Chlumetz on 23 June, he and his wife were obliged to begin their trip to Bosnia in a first-class compartment of the Vienna express, because the axles of his automobile were overheating. He said crossly: ‘Our journey starts with an extremely promising omen. Here our car burns, and down there they will throw bombs at us.’ The pre-1914 era was characterised by endemic acts of terrorism, especially in the Balkans, which were the butt of condescending British humour: a Punch joke had one anarchist asking another: ‘What time is it by your bomb?’ Saki penned a black-comic short story about an outrage – ‘The Easter Egg’. Both Joseph Conrad and Henry James wrote novels about terrorists.

For the Hapsburgs, such matters were commonplaces. Franz Joseph’s semi-estranged wife, the Empress Elisabeth, had been stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist while boarding a steamer at Geneva in 1898. Ten years later in Lemberg, a twenty-year-old Ukrainian student assassinated the governor of Galicia, Count Potocki, crying out, ‘This is your punishment for our sufferings.’ The judge at the trial of a Croat who shot at another Hapsburg grandee asked the terrorist, who had been born in Wisconsin, if he thought killing people was justified. The man replied: ‘In this case it is. It is the general opinion in America, and behind me are 500,000 American Croats. I am not the last among them … These actions against the lives of dignitaries are our only weapon.’ On 3 June 1908 Bogdan Žerajić, a young Bosnian, intended to shoot the Emperor in Mostar, but relented at the last moment. Instead he travelled to Sarajevo, fired several times at Gen. Marijan Varešanin, then – wrongly supposing that he had killed him – shot himself with his last bullet. It was later alleged, though never proven, that the Black Hand had provided the revolver. The Austrian police sawed off the terrorist’s head for preservation in their black museum.

In June 1912 a schoolboy shot at the governor of Croatia in Zagreb, missing his target but wounding a member of the imperial administration. In March 1914 the vicar-general of Transylvania was killed by a time-bomb sent through the post by Romanians. Yet Franz Ferdinand was capable of seeing the funny side of the threat: while watching military manoeuvres one day, his staff succumbed to panic when a dishevelled figure suddenly sprang from a bush clutching a large black object. The Archduke laughed heartily: ‘Oh, let him shoot me. That’s his job – he’s a court photographer. Let him make a living!’

There was nothing comic, however, about the obvious threat in Bosnia. The Austrian police had detected and frustrated several previous conspiracies. Gavrilo Princip was known to be associated with ‘anti-state activities’. Yet when he registered himself in Sarajevo as a new visitor, nothing was done to monitor his activities. Gen. Oskar Potiorek, governor of Bosnia, was responsible for security for the royal visit. The chief of his political department warned about the threat from the Young Bosnians, but Potiorek mocked the man ‘for having a fear of children’. Officials were later said to have devoted more energy to discussing dinner menus, and the correct temperature at which to serve the wines, than to the guest of honour’s safety. Official negligence alone gave Princip and his friends their chance.