Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

And there was that other arena, much less accessible to rumor, in which the Crown Prince did combat. Here the contest was waged through memos, usually top secret and livid; special couriers scurried from backstairs at the War Ministry to the "confidential door" of Franz Ferdinand's Military Chancellery at Belvedere Palace and back again. The temperatures sank in Vienna in the course of autumn. The thrust and parry heated up between Army Chief and Crown Prince, between Serbia's unappeasable foe and the volcanic apostle of restraint.

Earlier in the year the Archduke had mentioned that he might attend the Army's summer exercises planned for summer of 1914 at Sarajevo. Presently definite notice of his intention to participate was transmitted to the Chief of Staff by General Oscar Potiorek, Governor of Bosnia. The Crown Prince had chosen to convey "highest" information to the Chief of Staff through an officer of less senior rank. It was a pointed disregard of channels.

And the Chief of Staff, General Conrad, retaliated with some anti-Serb ammunition pointed directly at the Archduke's heart. Austrian intelligence in the United States had been watching Michael Pupin, the well-known professor of electromechanics at Columbia University and the head of Srpska Slega, an organization of Americans of Serbian descent. A student of Pupin's, one Dusan Trbuhovic, had left America for Serbia at the end of summer and during a farewell dinner for him at the Hotel La Salle in Chicago, the possibility of an attempt on Franz Ferdinand's life had been discussed in detail. This report Conrad sent on to the Archduke. It seems fair to assume that the purpose was not just to warn but to rattle His Highness, to shake him into a tougher stance toward the Serbs.

There is no evidence of a specific response on Franz Ferdinand's part. But that month he made devastatingly plain his position vis-a-vis Conrad.

For three days starting September 14, large-scale war games involving six divisions of the Austro-Hungarian Army were to unfold in Bohemia, on a terrain about fifty miles south of Prague. Conrad arrived on September 11 to prepare mock battles involving field telephone and telegraph as well as bomber aircraft. The exercises were to show how well the Empire could fight a twentieth-century war.

On the thirteenth, the Crown Prince's automobile roared up, followed by a huge detachment of horse. Instantly, brutally, he asserted his new rank of Inspector General, which gave him supreme command over all maneuvers. He cancelled a number of troop movements and changed the timing of all others-everything that Conrad had mapped out with such care. A three days' program was squeezed into little more than one, in order to make room for the Archduke's own plan.

Most of the second day went into a rehearsal over which the Crown Prince presided, frowning triumphantly astride his Lippizaner. On the sixteenth, he let his operation explode before the eyes of his wife and an assembly of Bohemian princes watching from a grandstand: Down the slope of Mount Tabor galloped tier upon tier of cavalry. It was a dust wreathed extravaganza of hussar bravado. In real war it would have been mowed down-drawn swords, flowing capes, plumed shakos, and all-by laconic bursts from a few machine gun batteries.

The impresario of this passe magnificence was not one of your backward-minded Viennese. On the contrary, Franz Ferdinand preferred a powerful motorcar over the fastest thoroughbred. And in ordnance beyond the Army Chief's immediate sphere-the Austrian Navy, for example-the Archduke urged the most modern armaments. Franz Ferdinand had turned these maneuvers into a historial joke not because he liked antiquated valor but because he hated the Chief of Staff. To undo Conradian policy, the Crown Prince must undo Conrad himself in every way.

The horse droppings left by the hussar commotion had not yet been scooped when the Crown Prince barked at the Chief of Staff: Why hadn't he attended field Mass? Five minutes later, he barked at him again, this time in front of other generals: Why had he permitted cars to park in the path of the cavalry attack?

Conrad listened mutely. His handsome mustache twitched with his tic. He saluted and excused himself. He boarded alone his command train back to Vienna. He did not want to share his humiliation with his brother officers. But to his beloved Frau von Reininghaus he could pour out his heart about". this battle-farce" the Archduke had put on, "… this ludicrous spectacle for amateurs and children" which"… the Archduke must have anticipated and intended because he must have known that I can accept all this no longer."

***

The day after his return from "the farce," on September 17, Conrad addressed to the Archduke a written request to accept his resignation, leaving it "to your Imperial and Royal Highness to most graciously decide what official form or reason should be assigned to my voluntary removal."

Franz Ferdinand had already picked out Conrad's successor-General Karl von Tersztyansky, head of the Budapest Army Corps. But at this juncture the Emperor himself intervened. At the moment the Balkan situation was still too unsettled, the military contingencies too unpredictable, for Austria to dispense with a seasoned commander like Conrad.

The Crown Prince was summoned to a discreet audience at the Hofburg. He returned to Konopiste where he exercised, furiously, his famed marksmanship on over a hundred heathcocks. Then he sat down to do something unusual, for him. Something quite Viennese: He smiled a fine smile over clenched teeth. "Dear General Conrad," he wrote on September 23, "Much as I understand your wish not to remain much longer in office, I do hope and trust that you shall be able to display in some other high position your inestimable abilities, your patriotic commitment and your generally admired qualities as a soldier for which we are much indebted to you. But for the moment I would like to ask you most earnestly, in the interest of a good cause and in my own name, not to change your command and to remain in your thorny office at least until spring, and thereby make a sacrifice to the Army and to all of us entrusted with its leadership."

The tone suggests anything but vintage Franz Ferdinand. These phrases are not only too humble, they are far humbler than the Emperor required. Strategy, not sincerity, produced the Archduke's compliments. If their intent was to tempt the General into overconfidence, they did their work well within a month.

Conrad, of course, withdrew his resignation. He had retained power with his dignity vindicated; his foe was beaten back, his opinion bolstered by the news of the day. Each week in October brought new reports of fighting along Albania's border with Serbia. Serbia claimed it was repelling an invasion. Albania, which consisted of tribal war lords shooting off Austrian rifles, accused Serbia of aggression. Conrad felt that the mounting chaos could only be resolved by a showdown with Belgrade. Since that might mean war with Russia, however, Austria needed to be backed by its own strong ally, Germany. Yet on just that point Berlin had been evasive, or worse.

On October 1, Wilhelm, writing to Franz Ferdinand, had been rather sympathetic to the Serbs; he had actually referred to "Albania's habit, incited by Turkey, of pouncing on Serbia. " This implied that the real inciter and protector of the Albanians, Austria, would ignite a needless conflagration from which Germany had a right to remain apart.

Conrad had been trying to enroll Berlin on Vienna's side. At an audience some months ago, he had-cautiously and respectfully-asked Franz Joseph to obtain some personal commitment from the Kaiser in case of a wider conflict. Franz Joseph's reply had been one short, brusque sentence. "It is the duty of kings to keep peace."

But that had been much earlier in the year, at a time less favorable to Conrad's cause, with Serb aggressiveness lying relatively low and the Crown Prince riding high as chief of the appeasers. Now, in October, it was the other way around. Now was the time to take by the horns that bull of bulls-Wilhelm II of Germany.

***

On October 18, 1913, the German monarch celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, where Prussian, Austrian, and Swedish troops had vanquished Napoleon. Wilhelm, who loved to wallow in borrowed glory, wallowed away. He decreed a great tattoo in Leipzig; ordered the boom of guns saluting, the blare of trumpet, fife, and drum; convened a titled assembly of gold braids, of fringed epaulettes, of tunics sashed, starred, and bemedalled.

Dignitaries of the three victor countries laid wreaths at the foot of the gigantic monument built for the occasion. As leaders of the Austrian delegation, Franz Ferdinand and General Conrad then sat down at a table (set at the Gewandhaus for four hundred and fifty) to rise again and again to heel-clicking toasts proposed by the German Emperor.

After the banquet Wilhelm held a cercle, that is, an informal reception. And Conrad made his move. By way of paying his respects, he expressed his humble gratitude to His Majesty for underlining with this festivity the importance and the might of the alliance between German and Austrian arms in the past and thereby emphasizing its continued importance in present or future circumstances.

This was not idle courtesy. It was an overture to draw Wilhelm into any potential fracas not only with Serbia but its big brother in St. Petersburg. Revved up by the martial trappings of the fete, the Kaiser answered that, indeed, the German-Austrian alliance remained unshakable, unbreakable, undeterrable. And-undeterred himself by the presence of a Russian general to his left or by the frown of the Austrian Crown Prince to his right-Wilhelm added that this moment made him feel so close to his Austrian comrades-in-arms that he wished to be introduced to all of the officers in the Austrian delegation.

Conrad answered that he would be most honored to do just that-and thereby pushed Franz Ferdinand beyond his boiling point.

"General!" the Crown Princely voice echoed across the hall. "Are you the Austrian of highest rank here? Isn't it the privilege of the Austrian of highest rank to introduce otherAustrians to His Majesty? And if that is so, why have you affronted me?"

It was, of course, the Chief of Staff who had been affronted before an international audience that would regale chancelleries and palaces throughout Europe with this scene. Nonetheless the General must apologize to the Crown Prince. He must bow, no doubt deep enough to hide his tic. And he must pack all his bitterness into yet another letter to Frau von Reininghaus.

But he could not, as he had done four weeks earlier after the maneuver contretemps, propose again to quit as Chief of Staff. Tendering his resignation must not become a monthly tragicomedy. On his return to Vienna, Conrad resolved to do the opposite. He would gather all the powers of his office into a demand for a final reckoning with Belgrade. Just now Serb violation of Albanian sovereignty had been compounded by border crossings and pillage of troops from Montenegro, Belgrade's ally. Conrad sent a summary of "these provocations" to Franz Joseph together with a briefing on the support expressed by Kaiser Wilhelm in Leipzig: on the basis of such developments, the Chief of Staff requested the instant punitive invasion of Serbia.

To no avail. Conrad's was not the only account of the events at Leipzig. Franz Ferdinand reported to Franz Joseph that the General had interfered once more in vital diplomatic matters that went far beyond his military jurisdiction. His meddling, long irksome, had now become altogether insupportable at Leipzig. By broaching the question of international alignments, he had usurped the authority of Franz Joseph's Foreign Minister, of the Crown Prince, indeed of Franz Joseph himself. Instead of Conrad's heedless firebreathing, the Archduke again urged prudence, enclosing a copy of his recent letter to the Foreign Minister: "Our country doesn't want war, as our countless difficulties with conscripts show… We can rid Albania of those Serbs by diplomatic means."

The Crown Prince won the day. Franz Joseph refrained from an invasion. He did activate some reserves. And he had his Foreign Ministry send Belgrade a note firmer than the Archduke wished but not immoderate in tone: Austria would have to "take proper measures" if foreign troops did not withdraw from Albania within eight days. A carefully coordinated demarche of similar nature was delivered by the Italian envoy in Belgrade on the same day, October 19. Italy's interest lay in foiling Serbian hegemony on the other side of the Adriatic; that interest was enlisted in the "diplomatic means" advocated by Franz Ferdinand.

On October 21, Serbia gave in. Its troops began to leave Albania. The Crown Prince could end his peace watch in Vienna. "My dear Berchtold," he wrote to the Foreign Minister on October 21, on his way to his country seat at Konopiste, glowing with relief, "I am so happy that war has been avoided… I've told you that if one approaches Kaiser Wilhelm with some deftness, avoiding Great Power Talk and other chicaneries… then he'll stand fully by us… and we won't need to resort to a single weapon or any Conradian Big Stick to make those [Serb] pigs hoof it back to their own borders. "

Indeed Kaiser Wilhelm stood so fully by Franz Ferdinand that he left Berlin two days later to visit the Archduke. Like all blusterers, Wilhelm was impressed by genuine intensity such as Franz Ferdinand's. The Archduke's ferocious peacemongering had ended, at least for a while, the Serbian crisis. Europe relaxed, and so did the two lords at Konopiste. The Archduke steered his guest's penchant for the grandiose into nonmilitary matters. His beaters saw to it that Kaiser Wilhelm shot eleven hundred pheasants during a two-day hunt. Then the Archduke led his companion through St. George's Hall in his castle, where he had collected no less than 3,750 representations of St. George slaying the dragon, from silk pennants to bronze statues to gothic carvings to jade cameos. During the tour the Austrian joked that Kaiser Wilhelm's navalarmaments race with Britain might not be necessary after all. Albion had already been bested right here: In St. George's Hall, this Austrian castle held more images of the patron saint of England than did Windsor.

The Kaiser laughed and went on to sniff specially bred late-blooming roses in the Archduke's park. For a while war would not yet be the principal sport of kings.

10

"ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1913," READS THE DIARY OF KING George V of England, "we got over a thousand pheasants and four hundred and fifty ducks."

It was a Tuesday at Windsor, marred by ugly winds and uncouth rain. Wednesday, much better behaved, brought a tally of "over seventeen hundred pheasants." Thursday, the King's party dispatched "about a thousand." Friday, "an awful day, blowing and pouring with rain, a regular deluge in the afternoon," nonetheless yielded a bag of "over eight hundred pheasants and nearly four hundred ducks."

Five very high-born huntsmen produced such mountains of cadavers: the King, three English dukes, and the guest of honor, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Each day the Archduke landed a disproportionately high number of birds. It was a feat much remarked on since the Austrian brought it off in the face of a difficulty. He was not used to English hunting habits. At the Windsor battue, beaters drove the birds into a much higher and faster flush than in Austria. As the Duke of Portland noted in his memoirs: "The Archduke proved himself first class and certainly the equal of most of my friends… Given enough practice in this country, he would have been the equal to any of our best shots."

Rough weather and fast pheasants weren't the only handicaps Franz Ferdinand overcame that week. One problem greeted him at the start, on Monday, November 17, when he and his Sophie arrived at the Windsor train station. There, ready to welcome them, they found King George in top hat and morning coat-alone. This fact, duly recorded in the Vienna Court Gazette, set off smiles of schadenfreude among the Archduke's foes, such as Prince Montenuovo, at the Habsburg court. To them the Queen's absence conveyed the absence of importance in Franz Ferdinand's morganatic wife.

If the asymmetrical reception reflected his Sophie's lessthan-royal birth, the Archduke did not show the slightest annoyance. Usually, as we have seen, he disdained playing the Viennese Prince Charming. He was not in the habit of hiding his temper and took offense energetically. But when necessary, he could turn snarl into purr. Then his jagged mustache and the bright hard blue of his huge eyes conjured a most beguiling Austrian cavalier. Then he modulated bows, handkisses, gallantries, enthusiasms, compliments, to a nuance just right for the occasion.

Queen Mary-whose nonattendance at the station had been a protocol cause celebre-was smitten. "The Archduke is most amiable," she wrote to her aunt. "He is delighted with everything and very appreciative of the beauties of this place, which of course appeals to me. He is making an excellent impression and is enjoying the informality of the visit. His wife, the Duchess, is very nice, agreeable, and quite easy to get on with, very tactful, which makes the position easier… In the Waterloo Gallery the Archduke was delighted at seeing portraits of his two grandfathers, Kaiser Franz and Archduke Karl, and we could scarcely drag him away. I was amused as I always feel the same way when I see any of the 'ancestors' pictures in a Palace abroad…"

Even a week after Franz Ferdinand's departure his appeal still glows in yet another letter of the Queen's: ". The Archduke was formerly very anti-English but that is quite changed now and her [morganatic Sophie's] influence has been and is good, they say, in every way. All the people staying with us who had known him before said how much he had changed for the better… "

True enough. Franz Ferdinand's earlier encounters with English culture had been collisions. The travel journals of his youth flay the arrogance of the English for "obliging everyone to follow their customs in every respect." But in 1913 it wasn't just his Sophie's "position" which made him honor those customs with such willingness and winningness. It was the darkening of the international horizon. It was the slowly hardening confrontation-over trouble in the Balkans and elsewhere-between the General Conrads in Britain, France, and Russia with the General Conrad in Austria and his colleague in Germany. To mitigate the confrontation, the Archduke mitigated his disposition, at least for a week at Windsor.

To that end he accommodated a habit he had once condemned in his journals as "being against the practice of all civilized countries"-namely the British way of toasting the sovereign of the host before toasting that of the guest of honor. With an especially suave smile Franz Ferdinand drank to the health of King George before he drank to Emperor Franz Joseph. On the chair opposite his at the dining room table of Windsor Castle sat Sir Edward Grey, England's Foreign Secretary, with whom he then chatted about subjects like Serbia and Albania without missing a beat of gemutlichkeit.

"Despite the private character of the visit," wrote the London Times, "it is quite clear that the Archduke's visit expresses good relations between the two ruling houses and that the good will shown by both sides includes the sympathies of the English nation."

The menu of the farewell dinner for the Austrian couple began with Consomme Britannia and ended with Charlotte Viennoise.

In Berlin, at almost the same time, the Tsar's Prime Minister visited his German counterpart, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. At a banquet the Russian had positive words for his country's ties to Germany; after an indulgent sigh over "Austria's sometime somewhat willful deportment in the Balkans," he raised his glass "to an improved mood between St. Petersburg and Vienna."

Meanwhile London papers estimated that the Windsor shoot had netted over four thousand five hundred pheasants and more than a thousand ducks. An awesome, awful number. Yet as long as Princes slaughtered birds together, their soldiers would not slaughter each other.

It was a fall that soothed various difficult moods in Austria. the Crown Prince returned from England with a face that was almost unrecognizably sunny. Leon Trotsky enjoyed moving with his family from his modest summer quarters in the Sie- vering district to the unheated and therefore almost rent-free villa in Htitteldorf. Its seignorial spaciousness appealed to him; so did its cavalier disregard of the rigors of winter. The house breathed the sort of dash Trotsky liked to cultivate. If that dash was missing among his all too sedate fellowsocialists in Vienna, he found it in the gambits sparking the chessboards of the Cafe Central. He always liked to come back to the capital's intellectual jousts. And to his surprise he discovered himself in agreement with some aspects of Austrian diplomacy.

Part of the summer he had spent covering the latest Balkan war for his Vienna Pravda. The front had given him "a feeling of impotence before fate, a burning compassion for the human locust." But there were some locusts that touched him even more deeply than others. In the 1913 war, he clearly favored Bulgaria, the loser, who was Serbia's enemy and hence Austria's ally. Trotsky's reportage eloquently describes the pillage and torment visited on the Bulgarian countryside.

Vienna shared his sympathy for Bulgaria, though it manifested the feeling differently. Toward the end of November, the King of Bulgaria came to town and was received by Franz Joseph. The Fremdenblatt (which often served as the government mouthpiece) limited its characterization of the meeting to three words: "Brief and cordial." After all, Bulgaria, though defeated, was still Serbia's smoldering enemy. And Serbia, though recently disciplined by Austria's ultimatum, smoldered more hotly than ever against Habsburg. In view of Balkan inflammabilities, official Vienna affected restraint.

Unofficial Vienna, on the other hand, could pull out all the stops for Bulgaria. And if there was one person who incarnated the capital unofficially, it was Frau Schratt.

In her mansion hard by Schonbrunn Palace, the Austrian Emperor's lady gave His Bulgarian Majesty a soiree that stood out among all others of the season. It shone not only with the politically significant but also with the Court Opera's stars, including Maria Jeritza and Selma Kurz. From liverdumpling soup to Sachertorte with raspberry whipped cream, La Schratt's damasked table knew nothing but delicacies. The hostess, obviously the Imperial surrogate, was at her bubbly and playful best; once more she proved why she had been Vienna's foremost comedienne. As for the Bulgarian monarch, the journal of the Court Theater's new director, Hugo Thimig, saw him "blooming, affable, elegant as always with a monocle, a lilac-colored waistcoast, a beautifully cut frock-coat, the Golden Fleece worn on a black cord under a snowy white cravat, the Bulgarian military cross in his buttonhole… in buoyant spirits, with an excellent appetite." Just a few months ago he had lost nearly all of Macedonia to the Greeks and the Serbs. With this superb show of a dinner in Frau Schratt's salon he appeared to have regained it.

In 1913, autumn flattered the city. After some bewilderments earlier in the year, it was recovering its soul, that is, its theatricality. That became evident in the centennial of the triumph over Napoleon-or rather in the difference between Germany's celebration and Austria's.

In Leipzig the Kaiser had screamed glory at a throng of spiked helmets. But in Vienna something of a nostalgic ballet unfolded. On the Schwarzenbergplatz crested palatines on horseback produced a kaleidoscope of the Habsburg past. Around them assembled ninety-seven platoons, each differently arrayed, each from a different regiment of a different crownland, each glowing with the opulence of its particular tradition: Hungarian hussars in leopard skin and silvered bandoliers; Bosnian infantry with fez, dagger, and sash; the Tyrolean Imperial Rifles in their pearl-gray tunic trimmed with pine-green, their caps aflutter with white cockfeathers; the blue and yellow of marines from Trieste, the long sabers of Polish cuirassiers, and the scrolled spurs of Bohemian cavalry.

Above them all waved a forest of flags, pennants, ensigns, as well as ancient, brocaded gonfalons. Heraldic eagles rode the wind. They seemed to peer far beyond anno Domini 1913 into that medieval morning when Rudolf, the first Habsburg king, had arrived in Vienna as a young dynast with halberd and visor to defend the Faith.

But the wizard of the day was the man whose arrival was signalled by a trumpet blow. Like a rococo dream, the coach of state, all white and gold, drawn by six snowy Lippizaners, loomed up and came to a halt. Franz Joseph stepped out: The whole forest of flags sank at his sight, as if leveled by a gale. Eleven bands played the Imperial anthem. Thirty generals drew swords and lowered them to the ground before the Emperor. Cannons boomed their salute, and the bands swung into the "Radetzky March," a polka-like frolic of drum and horn by Johann Strauss Senior.

Franz Joseph proceeded to inspect the rainbow homage of his troops. His white sideburns gleamed, his limbs moved briskly. He had been on the throne for over six decades, a ruler timeless as his ruling house. An adjutant handed him a laurel wreath. He strode toward the statue of Prince Schwarzenberg, the Austrian generalissimo who had led the Allied armies to triumph over Bonaparte at Leipzig.

To lean the wreath against the pedestal, the Emperor bent his eighty-three years into the arc of a dragoon lieutenant kissing a countess's hand. He presented one of his best performances at a military ceremonial. It was as if he knew it would be his last.

And it was as if Vienna knew that the holiday coming up next would be the last All Souls' Day of the dear old Franz Joseph era. Finality brought out the artist in the Viennese. Fittingly the city displayed its mortuary genius that autumn. On All Souls' Day, November 2, Catholic Vienna commemorated its departed. In 1913 the date fell on a Sunday. The Church recommended that observances be postponed to Monday to avoid conflict with Sunday services. Most Viennese paid no heed. On Sunday, neither office nor factory could keep them from forming a city-wide cortege.

In the morning the streets began to empty into the cemeteries. By the hundreds of thousands, citizens were on the move, dressed in black, black from hat to shoes. The rich came in automobiles whose hoods were draped in black. Black-clad crowds streamed from the tramways. Public as well as private transport was at such premium that many groups hired vans-flagged in black-to take them to outlying graveyards.

They all carried sprays of asters-white bloom vivid against the darkness of the clothes and the gray of the sky. The flowers added yet more brightness to the graves. The night before, nearly each resting place had been given its own glow. Most mourners had placed simple lanterns or glass-covered candles by their plots. Next to noble mausoleums stood footmen in black garb, holding torches. Honor guards with black trimmings held aloft flares by the arcaded crypts of generals.

Into this sea of lights and griefs the throngs were pouring. All Souls' Day was as eloquent a pageant of the devout in late fall as May Day had been a parade of workers in the spring. An endless phalanx of black figures and bright blossoms moved to the beat of some soundless dirge. The bereaved laid down bouquets, hung wreaths, affixed festoons. They prayed for the delivery of their loved ones from purgatory. The choir of their murmurs enveloped the hiss of torches, the crunch of countless feet shuffling along gravel. Incense mingled with the asters' fragrance, with perfume from black-veiled women, and with whiffs of roasted chestnuts from vendors waiting by the cemetery gates. When the Viennese were finished with their dramaturgy, they would be ready for a snack.

The next day, newspapers evaluated graveside accomplishments. What tombs led the field in the most finely nuanced floral designs? At the giant Central Cemetery, Vienna's late and very popular mayor Karl Lueger scored the highest plaudits. Beethoven did very well. Johann Strauss Junior fell a bit short this year: His widow had overdone the garlands. Schubert made a comeback. Some recently deceased industrialists had to be placed at the bottom of the list; they were the victims of vulgar excess.

The city still mastered the esthetics of death. A good sign. A measure of how well, after Redl, Vienna had recovered its poise as 1913 waned to a close. It was poise elegantly maintained despite, and because of, doubts about the Empire's future. Vienna still considered itself the capital of a sensibility that was all the more finely tuned for its precariousness. The legend of this sunset sensibility attracted talents from all continents. They came to visit, to shine and to be judged, together with local talent, by the stringencies of Viennese sophistication.

Enrico Caruso arrived for his engagement at the Court Opera as Rodolfo in La Boheme. Ovations greeted his cadenzas. Yet at least one reviewer thought that the ensemble effect would have benefited if the star had taken more time to rehearse with the cast, and that the same problem flawed the marvels of his Don Jose in Carmen.

Maria Jeritza made an incandescent Minnie in Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West-except for a few instances of overacting.

A child of twelve electrified the Musikvereinssaal. Brilliantly he sped his violin through the difficulties of Paganini's "Caprices." Critics admired little Jascha Heifetz's virtuosity. They also wondered about his delectable blond locks: Was this a boy or a girl prodigy?

George Bernard Shaw did not come to Vienna, but his Pygmalion had its world premiere here, in German, at the Court Theater, almost six months before the first London production. Reviewers smiled judiciously at Mr. Shaw, the grizzled enfant terrible. They admitted that in this play he did less ranting and more entertaining than usual, even if, as the Neue Freie Presse sighed, the comedian in Mr. Shaw almost succumbed to the ideologue at the end.

Also at the Court Theater, one of the most unpredictable younger directors, Max Reinhardt, staged the passion play Everyman with touches sometimes breathtaking, sometimes self-consciously ingenious.

Franz Lehar's new operetta, An Ideal Wife, disappointed not because it was bad but simply because the composer had once more failed to match his Merry Widow.

The writer Thomas Mann visited to read early chapters of his new novel-in-progress Felix Krull. He aroused anticipation not only as the author of the best-selling Buddenbrooks but also as brother of Heinrich Mann, the pre-eminent name in German fiction. Readers crowded into the Urania lecture hall and found an interesting, taut, slim figure at the lectern. Some literary correspondents, though, felt that the author's voice could not do justice to his prose. It was too stolid, too flat a vehicle for the picaresque handsprings of his Krull; instead of smiling at his excellent villain, Herr Mann seemed always on the point of a sneeze.

Only one performer met every expectation. For two weeks that fall he was the star attraction at the Apollo Theater, the town's leading variety house. He was so famous that each evening the Apollo arranged the coming of his physical presence in stages, quite as if he were the messiah: At first the hall darkened and there flashed on a screen photographic slides of his earlier career-showing for the most part his bulging arms raised over the sprawled body of an opponent; then came motion picture clips of him pummeling a sandbag or running half a marathon, then newsreels of his most famous triumphs in the ring. Then suddenly the screen was whisked away, and there under a spotlight, standing naked to the waist, in the gleaming, formidable blackness of his fleshthe Heavyweight Champion of the World, Jack Johnson. He bowed, he punched two punching bags at the same time, he juggled bar bells as if they were swagger sticks, he boxed an opponent with one hand tied behind his back… only to be swallowed by darkness in which nothing could be seen but from which surged the recorded sound of a New York fight arena-a mob braying at a knockout count, an ecstasy that roared and faded… and transmuted somehow into music that, in turn, regenerated the spotlight. And here was the champion again, but now in white tie and tails, a gallant arm around his petite white wife in her ball gown. To Johann Strauss's "Tales from the Vienna Woods," athlete and lady waltzed their way into the very hearts of the audience. Night after night they brought the house down. Night after night, said the ArbeiterZeitung, many of the poor came here to spend their bitterly earned kronen on the exploitation of tinseled brutality.

The Socialists brought to town a world champion of their own, this one from Germany. They invited Emanuel Lasker, the globe's best chess player, to appear at the chess club of the Arbeiterheim Cafe-the coffeehouse of the Workers' Center. Playing twenty-six games at once, he won twenty-two, drew four, and made a speech. The times were over, he said, when laborers had been poor, dumb, passive pawns. Now the worker was beginning to see himself as the central figure in the economy. He was no longer dumb, he had stopped being passive, and the time would come when he would no longer be poor. All he had to do was to use his mind fearlessly, and chess was a good way of sharpening his faculties.

England contributed a notable who also enlisted his talent in the cause of the underprivileged. The Volksbiihne (The People's Stage) produced a German translation of John Galsworthy's Justice. In November the author himself traveled to Vienna to supervise rehearsals. The play told of the misfortunes of a junior clerk trapped in a class-biased criminal justice system. When the curtain came down on opening night, cries of "Author! Author!" resounded together with ardent applause. Mr. Galsworthy turned out to be too shy a gentleman to take a bow on stage. However, he was reported to be very pleased by the printed accolade in the Arbeiter Zeitung some days later.

Emile Zola was not alive to sojourn in Vienna that fall, but through his work he was John Galsworthy's comrade-in-thearts. A film being shown in the working-class districts proved continuously popular. It was based on Germinal, Zola's harrowing, heart-breaking evocation of the coal miner's lot.

Not that Vienna's proletarians had to learn about wretchedness from a motion picture screen. Nor did they need the nasty Serbs to give them a sense of crisis. The prospect of winter was enough. How would they keep warm? Where find money for fuel? Bad times were getting worse. In Vienna manufacturing was on the decline. The ethnically fragmented Empire, with its many levels and styles of consumer demand, prevented the economies of standardized mass production practiced elsewhere in the West. Despite protective tariffs Austrian industry kept losing markets-inside and outside the borders-to competitors abroad. The machine shops, domi nant employers in the capital's industrial precincts like Hernals and Ottakring, had to shut their doors against thousands seeking work: Nearly a third of the city's metal workers had lost their jobs over the past two years. Most cotton mills were open only four days in the week now. And construction had dropped so drastically that the Developers' Association appealed to the government for subsidies and for the lifting of import duties on certain building materials.

In the slums, dinner was a matter of makeshift and makedo. Horsemeat edged out even the cheapest cuts of pork. The "stale" counter in bakeries drew more customers than that selling fresh bread. Before the exhaust gratings of the great army laundries gathered nightly crowds, silent, ragged, fearful: The cold was holding off, but in case it came they wanted the warmth of laundry fumes. Others took refuge in the municipal warming rooms where they could rest, if not sleep, sitting upright on wooden benches; or they could try to crowd into the city's three Homeless Asylums-concrete warrens that offered straw cots and horse blankets. In 1913, vagrants had received such shelter half a million times in the fairy-tale metropolis of two million.

Before the year ended, just under fifteen hundred Viennese had tried to end their lives. Over six hundred succeeded, including a thirteen-year-old boy who hanged himself and a seven-year-old boy who jumped out of a window. Of course, a high suicide rate was a venerable Viennese tradition. Just as traditional were the ways of masking that kind of death. Even if it was self-inflicted in a Catholic city, it must not be denied sanctified ground: The bereaved family would procure a doctor's certificate stating that the deed was done non compos mentis. And though the death be threadbare, the funeral must be nicely dressed: The family would obtain burial loans from a bank, arrange for time payments with the florist, the cas- ketmaker, the innkeeper. A last journey must brim with roses on a coffin of varnished wood with brass trimmings. And the wake must feature hearty wine and red meat in a well-heated inn.

For a long time, though, innkeepers did not need to light stoves for warmth. In 1913, fall refused to become winter. In fact, as if smitten by nostalgia, fall appeared to turn back to spring. Temperatures clung to the Fahrenheit fifties. At the start of December the thermometer even pushed past sixty.

There was no snow. Hence there was no call for snow removers. Thousands had hoped that their shoveling would earn them at least three kronen a day, a sum that would buy a stein of Pilsner for the shoveler and pig's knuckles with turnips for his family. To such people the mildness of the season simply meant more hunger.

On the other hand, they could go hungry in air better than in other cities. It was warm enough on many days in November, and even during the first weeks of December, to take an almost summery walk into the Vienna Woods. Here, in the foothills of the Alps, whose lovely slopes rose at the very point where the grim streets stopped, here the balm had tricked primroses, marguerites, dandelions, cyclamens into new bloom.

Since walking was free, whereas eating was not, a number of the jobless walked through the hills. Never mind that a little boy strolled along in shoes two sizes too big for him and laced with paper cord; or that his mother, bending down to search for some belated strawberry, wore a frock with a fire-sale stain. If you didn't look too closely, you saw a delightful Viennese tableau: citizens taking their weekday ease in an arcadia beyond time.

Mid-December brought a brief bite of frost. But that added yet another scenic touch. Rime spangled the Vienna Woods. Nature became marquetry. The tiniest branch of bush or tree turned into a decorative detail, outlined in grained pearl. No matter how empty their stomachs, hikers moved through a landscape of jeweled pavillions.

When the hikers returned to the city, the woods came with them. Each street had its grove of Christmas trees for sale. And each such grove had a pauper standing by to help more moneyed citizens carry home a strapping pine. The chore would get him a few coins. Could he be blamed if he helped himself to a tip in the form of a branch broken off on the sly? In his one-room flat, the branch did nicely as a Christmas tree. His children took turns at pressing their little noses against the wood's break-off point: It let them smell the yule scent of tree resin. For heat his family had the kitchen hearth and the window's dusty sun, so unseasonably strong this year; for gifts, perhaps overcoats, bargained out of the local usedclothes store, wrapped in bright paper Mother had saved from the Christmas presents of 1912.

And if all that gave insufficient sustenance, Midnight Mass would give more. No parish church, humble or grand, lacked a creche. The Christ Child in the stable glowed with consolation: poverty was the cradle of grace.

And then the city gathered itself up for the festive brink: New Year's Eve. December 31, though colder than most days preceding, was windless, crisply pleasant, luminous with stars. Following custom, a great crowd roistered toward the huge square in front of St. Stephen's Cathedral. The streets were parties on the go. Many merrymakers wore paper chains extravagantly colored, from which hung fantasy pendants. As they trooped toward St. Stephen's, men began to exchange hats with women-especially with those they did not yet know. The closer they came to the great church, the more ladies pranced along in top hats, the more men sashayed in frilly chapeaux. Onlookers from buildings along the way applauded, laughed, waved bright sheets from windows.

By eleven-thirty the square was full: It milled and whirled with dancing couples. At a quarter to twelve, they slowed. At five to the hour, they became quiet. All faced the Cathedral and looked up.

Up there, way up in the long looming of the gothic tower, hung Christendom's most formidable bell. Called "die Pummerin" (the Boomer), it had been forged in 1711 of the iron of one hundred and eighty Turkish cannon captured and melted down after the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa had abandoned his siege of Vienna in 1683. For nearly two centuries afterwards the Boomer's deep, monumental voice had rung in solemn occasions; the entire cathedral, from spire to nave to gargoyle, had shaken to the swinging of its tonnage. Walls had begun to show cracks, and the city fathers, forced to protect the church from its bell, had stilled the Boomer in 1867. At every New Year's Eve since then a rumor would go through the streets: the Cardinal had persuaded the Mayor to let the Boomer speak this one night.

And now the first tremendous peal struck through the moment of midnight at the stars. Was it die Pummerin after all? The roar of the True Faith? The clarion of ancient victory? No one in the crowd had time to judge. Within seconds, a thousand other church bells across the city clanged into a chorus. The sound overwhelmed the night sky and shivered constellations.

Gradually, after five minutes, the metal tongues stopped calling. Before the last echo died into the firmament, before the kissing and whooping started on the ground, there was a moment's silence.

A new presence had descended on the roofs.

The year 1914.

When thrust into a fresh expanse of future, the viennese sought comfort in omens. They had a long-established New Year's pastime. Into an ice bucket filled with cold champagne they would throw molten bits of lead, and then, with a pair of tongs, hold up each bit for interpretation. From the shape into which the lump congealed they would extract clues to things to come. It was a game of fascinating ambiguities. Never had it been played more intensely than during the wee hours of that newest January first.

Very soon an event auspicious beyond doubt pleased the Imperial House. The young Archduke Franz Joseph became father of a healthy baby girl. She was baptized Her Imperial and Royal Highness, the most serene Adelheid Maria Josepha Sixta Antonia Roberta Ottonia Zita Charlotte Luise Immaculata Pia Theresia Beatrix Franziska Isabella Henriette Max- imiliana Genoveva Ignatia Markus d'Aviano von Habsburg. Twenty-one names garlanded a six-pound infant. Twenty-one more to strengthen dynastic continuity.

Fifty-two Viennese killed themselves that month. Most of them were poor and quite a few of them must have been prompted by the weather. On January 7, the full rigors of winter fell on the city at last. A blizzard, huge and angry, smothered the streets. A series of icy gales followed, blasting away for days.

The snow did provide jobs for shovelers. But many more were put out of work because the unrelenting, unending arctic gusts forced the closing of construction sites. Nearly every day police blotters recorded the finding of frozen bodies of indigents: in an unused bowling alley; in a crude tent by the banks of the Danube; even in an abandoned mausoleum in the Central Cemetery.

All this did not dampen toasts to the baby Archduchess in loyalist taverns all over town. Nor did it diminish the flow of congratulations from the world's ruling families to the Hofburg. Even the King of Serbia sent a telegram. Three days later, though, a statement of a rather different nature issued from Belgrade. The Serbian Crown Prince Alexander and the Serbian Prime Minister Panic would go to St. Petersburg "to discuss the international situation."

In Vienna, the Chief of Staff General Conrad deemed the visit a further hardening of the Serb-Russian coalition against Austria. In his eyes the development fit a larger pattern. Conrad's French counterpart, General Joseph Joffre, was already in St. Petersburg to expedite a loan of 550 million French francs. Why? For the explicit purpose of modernizing Russia's western railroad system, so vital in speeding troops to any war between a Russian-French-English entente and the GermanAustrian alliance.

In his memos to the Emperor, General Conrad detailed his warnings together with two requests: (1) to strengthen garrisons along Austria's border with Russia, and (2) to obtain authority for the Ministry of War to draft more conscripts for a longer period of time, in order to match the recent French law lengthening service from two to three years.

This was how the head of the war party reacted to the first stirrings of the new year. But in his audiences with the Emperor, the Crown Prince refuted Conrad's points with his own, in his own pungent style: (1) Talk of impending war between the Great Powers was criminal nonsense; it so happened that the Duke and Duchess of Portland would be Franz Ferdinand's guests at Konopiste in March; at that time Duke and Crown Prince would plan details of a visit to Austria by King George of England in September to shoot roebuck with Franz Ferdinand-after a respectful courtesy call on Franz Joseph, of course. So much for Western hostility against Austria! (2) It was precisely the swelling of Austrian garrisons at the Russian border that gave idiot hotheads in Paris and St. Petersburg a pretext to heat up the military mood in their countries. That sort of cannon-waving was not policy-it was stupidity.

Franz Joseph listened to the arguments of both men. Then he acted-like Franz Joseph. His government did introduce a bill in parliament that would extend the present conscription law; he did not increase the permanent garrisons by the Russian border.

To the Viennese such news was routine hissing and scuffling in the corridors of power. Politics were not uppermost in the town's mind during that first arctic month of 1914. The very poor kept busy fighting their way through the daily crisis of survival-to stay warm, to stay fed. Others, more fortunate, prepared for the excitement of the carnival.

Of course a number of young men did have to pay attention to military matters. Anticipating the more comprehensive conscription bill (it would harvest 32,000 more recruits annually), General Conrad tightened draft implementation. The long hand of his apparatus reached an Austrian who had already thought himself safely escaped.

Shortly after New Year's, the War Ministry's Conscription Bureau succeeded at last in tracking down the whereabouts of Adolf Hietler [sic]. On the afternoon of January 18, a German detective entered Schleissheimerstrasse 34 in Munich and found on the third floor, in a room sublet by a tailor, the man he wanted. He arrested Hitler for violating the military service regulations of an allied state. The next day the fugitive was brought to the Austrian Consulate where he was ordered to report to the Army Induction Center of his native province, Upper Austria, in Linz.

Whereupon Hitler sat down to write one of his most voluble and mendacious letters. The real reason for evading the Austrian draft had been his revulsion against serving as "a pure German" in the multiracial Habsburg forces. Yet the petition he now addressed to the Linz Magistracy, Section II, ascribes his failure to register to the monetary and spiritual straits of a loyal, impoverished, high-minded youth with lofty artistic aspirations:

Here is a picture of deprivation raised by a man who unbeknownst to anyone around him-pocketed the comfortable income from two legacies. In style, his self-portrait to the authorities resembles the stilted landscapes Hitler was selling at the time in Munich (earning a bit of extra money he didn't need since he lived below his means). In emotionality this supplication recalls his rantings in Vienna's Mannerheim. But now he was using a well-calculated Austrian mixture of protocol and pathos, make-believe and baroque deference. It worked.

The Linz magistracy granted his request to appear at the Salzburg Induction Center since that venue was closer to Bavaria and "the journey therefore more affordable to the petitioner." And at Salzburg, following a physical examination on February 5, 1914, the Hitler file was closed with the conclusion: "Unfit for military or auxiliary service; too weak; incapable of bearing arms."

Safely back in Munich, Hitler continued doodling his way toward destiny. At the same time two young Bosnians joined him in an eerie partnership. The three never met. Hitler stayed in Bavaria. The other two lived in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo; yet during those early months of 1914 they took the first decisive steps toward triggering the first global war without which the man in Munich could never have started the second.

The zealotry of the two in Bosnia ran opposite to that of the one in Bavaria. His obsessive nationalism was German; theirs, Slav. Still, all three had trouble with the Vienna authorities, and all three were art-minded malcontents. Only the Bosnians' esthetics-in contrast to Hitler's-were anything but Victorian.

At twenty-three, the older of the Bosnian pair, Danilo Ilia seems to have been a rather complicated radical, alloying as he did his nationalism with Marxist and anarchist leanings. He supported himself as proofreader for the Serbian-language paper Srpska Rijee in Sarajevo. Tall, attenuated, neurasthenic, he always wore a black tie "as a constant reminder of death." His stomach ulcer kept him as conveniently out of General Conrad's army as "weakness" kept out Hitler. Ilia cultivated unorthodox modern literature. Early in 1914 he spent much of his spare time translating into Serbo-Croatian Maxim Gorki's The Burning Heart, Oscar Wilde's essays on art and criticism, Leonid Andreyev's The Dark Horizon, Mikhail Bakunin's The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State. At the same time others among the Young Bosnians, the secret society of which he was part, translated Kierkegaard, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself."

Ilia had been introduced to the works of Nietzsche by a fellow Young Bosnian barely eighteen years old named Gavrilo Princip. Princip, a slight youth with a high, furrowed forehead and eyes of a startling pale blue, was taciturn, restless, absorbed in books and given to actions baffling to his family. He had little patience for the banalities of the Commercial High School into which his parents had placed him. Like Ilia, he savored the darker writers. For his nickname he chose "Gavroche" after Victor Hugo's boy-hero in Les Miserables. Besides Nietzsche, he idolized the most pessimistic of Serb poets, Sima Pandurovic.

But Ilia and Princip did not gloom the day away in literary introspection. Like the other Young Bosnians they wanted to implement the rebel's view of society, as conjured in their favorite literature, with rebellious action. They aimed to free the Serbs of Bosnia from the dead hand of the Church, from stale tradition and primitive custom, from everything that stifled the unfolding of the individual and the emancipation of women. Above all, they wanted to tear away the shackles put on their people by the Austrian Empire. They burned to unite all Slavs now under the Habsburg's yoke and join them with their brethren in Serbia and Montenegro into one free and glorious South Slav state.

"The whole of our society is snoring ungracefully," a Young Bosnian wrote of the period. "Only the poets and revolutionaries are awake." Ilk and Princip were not only ardently awake but incandescently ascetic. Like most of the Young Bosnians, they did not drink or smoke or engage in sex (just like abstemious young Hitler). One member of the group, who had gotten to know Trotsky while a student in Vienna, wrote the Russian in 1914: "You must believe me when I tell you that all of us follow the rule of abstinence."

Ilia and Princip observed it passionately. The blood of their young manhood must surge only for the freedom of their fellow South Slavs.

At the news of the Second Balkan War in 1913, Ilic had walked from Sarajevo to Belgrade (to save money and to escape detection) and joined the Serb army as a volunteer. Hence his nickname "Hadzija" (after the Muslim pilgrim, the Hadji). The Balkan War had also drawn Princip to Belgrade where he had tried to enlist in the komite, the irregular Serb units operating in guerrilla style. But Princip had been rejected, being too young and small. Now, in the first months of 1914, he was back in Sarajevo, back in the tedious school from which he'd already been expelled once for joining an anti-Austrian demonstration. He hated blackboard and homework. He lived for his meetings with Ilic and the Young Bosnians. Inside him grew the need to do something worthy of his favorite verse, Nietzsche's lines:

I know whence I arrive Unsatisfied like the flame. I glow and writhe. Everything I embrace becomes light, Everything that I leave becomes coal. Flame am I, surely.

What or whom could this inexorable flame burn? With Ilia and his comrades he had discussed killing the Austrian Governor of Bosnia-Hercegovina, General Potiorek. Yet Potiorek, though the most visible oppressor in the land, was just a tool. It was the heart of Habsburg that must be struck. Toward the end of January, Princip received a letter from a Young Bosnian in France, saying that Franz Ferdinand would be visiting Paris under circumstances favorable to an assassination. By some accounts, Princip replied in his and Ilic's name that he wanted to use the chance to eliminate the tyrant but that he would first acquire weapons and training in Belgrade.

Of course Franz Ferdinand was not the anti-Serb ogre that seared Princip's mind. And of course the two never met in France. Yet their paths began to converge in February 1914.

Around the first of that month, Princip did leave Sarajevo, ostensibly to continue his high school education in Belgrade. His brother paid the fare for a detour on the way. Princip stopped over at his native village of Grahovo, in Western Bosnia. Here he was marooned for some weeks by the same giant blizzards that smothered Vienna. And most of that time, his mother was to recall, he spent brooding, staring at the snow.

***

Gavrilo Princip knew nothing of the actual politics or personality of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand. And Franz Ferdinand did not even know of Gavrilo Princip's existence. However, the Crown Prince had heard of another youth, equally modern in his malaise, down to a susceptibility to Nietzsche. He was one of the few Austrian artists who, like the Young Bosnians, saw a radical connection between art and society.

His name was Oskar Kokoschka, and at twenty-two he had come to the Archduke's attention through his play, produced at a modernist art-students' theater in Vienna in 1909. Also on the bill was a dramatization of The Birthday of the Infanta, a bitter fairy tale by a literary hero of the Young Bosnians, Oscar Wilde. Kokoschka's Murder, Hope of Women, consisted of a chaos of screams, stabbings, and poetic fragments about love practiced as a bloody trial of combat. It happened that the audience included some Imperial Army soldiers from Bosnia's Sarajevo who didn't share Young Bosnia's enthusiasm for the avant-garde. They helped start the lusty riots that followed. The Crown Prince read the newspaper reports the next day and reacted characteristically. "Every bone in that young man's body," he said about Kokoschka, "should be broken."

It pleased Kokoschka that his work had touched the higher spheres. How wonderful to epater le prince! He stuck to his ways, though painting rather than playwriting became the instrument of his notoriety. Encouraged by his mistress Alma Mahler (composer Gustav Mahler's widow), he had developed, in the early teens of the century, an expressionist imagery at once febrile and morbid, putrescent and electric. Considering Kokoschka's temper and considering Alma's responsiveness to any passing male of talent and virility, their affair was at first oddly stable. Often it produced what was for Kokoschka atypical bliss. But during the first months of 1914 this, like many other things in Austria, began to change.

The couple met in a villa in the Semmering, an idyllic Alpine hamlet near Vienna. One day Kokoschka opened the door to find their trysting chalet literally slimy with an orgy of toads. The warty creatures had escaped from a tank to sliver and hop, slaver and mate, all over the living room rug.

Recently Kokoschka had begun to suspect Alma of finessing an affair not only with the architect Walter Gropius but with Rudolf Kammerer, a prominent biologist experimenting with frogs. And here seemed to be viscous proof of the second liaison: bulge-eyed, twitching couplings before a window filled with snowy splendor.

The sight altered Kokoschka's angle of invention. For more than a year he had been at work on The Tempest, one of his central masterpieces. Wild swirls of color suggest a man and a woman resting in what could be either a bed afloat in clouds or a boat adrift in a stream. Some powerful force curls the two against each other-a force that apparently changed nature and color after Kokoschka's encounter with the toads early in 1914: he started to re-tint many of the picture's vibrant Bengal reds to a colder and more ominous blue-green. Ardor dissolved toward phosphorescence. Tenderness turns into trap. "The boat in which we two are being tossed about…" Kokoschka would later write to a friend, "is a house big enough for a whole world of pain which we have gone through together. And I am going to the war, secretly. After… [this painting] I should really go under." "The Tempest," wrote a critic much later still, "has been interpreted in our day as a potent metaphor of 'collapse, dissolution, finis Austriae, the end of time.' "

"Finis Austriae" is the wisdom of hindsight. In January 1914, the Hitlers, the Princips, the Kokoschkas were either disreputable or, worse, unknown. Vienna concerned itself not with the end of time but with the beginning of carnival. Countess Jenny von Haugwitz hosted the first highlight of the merry season. She gave a "streamlined" ball in the newly redecorated Directoire salon of the Hotel Imperial. The evening prescribed "an automotive theme" for costumes and saw many a shapely Rolls-Royce, Daimler, and Mercedes-Benz cruise across the parquet.

The Bank Employees' Club tried to top its Bankruptcy Ball of the previous year with a Banknote Forgers' Fest, and nearly succeeded. Even lower class celebrations set high standards. For example, the Public Bath Attendants' Ball at the Stahlehner Hall announced that persons in clown suits would not be admitted for that was much too common, unoriginal, and old-fashioned a disguise. And so a mob of goggled aviators and formidably hatted suffragettes converged on the door.

The Laundresses' Ball did introduce-though only brieflysome dissonance. The ball itself was fun: lively with authentic pinch-them! young laundresses in the striped stockings and ribbonned blouses of their trade. But most of the young Society bucks who had come to take the girls home "to have their trousers ironed" had to face the next day with their garments as creased as ever. The laundresses refused even the lordliest offers for private breakfast. Early in the morning they went straight from their ball to the Ringstrasse to join their unemployed sisters in a protest march.

For Vienna that was a somewhat too modern way of capping a carnival night. One week later the Ball at Court in the Imperial Palace[3] provided a lesson on how to pay one's respects to the future more delicately. The old Emperor himself played teacher. He inaugurated the dancing by turning the first few beats of the first waltz with the young, pretty Zita, wife of his grandnephew, the Archduke Karl, who was second in succession. This necessarily discomfited the Crown Prince since his morganatic spouse Sophie did not rate an Emperor's waltz on so formal a night. But after returning from the dance, the monarch resolved the embarrassment. He turned to Franz Ferdinand, standing very stiffly at his side. Would Sophie have the kindness, Franz Joseph asked, to join him at his table together with Karl, Zita, and, of course, Franz Ferdinand himself?

It was a finely balanced distribution of affabilities. Though he left intact every nuance of precedence and protocol, the old gentleman breathed a new feeling of mutual cordiality into three generations of the ruling family.

On a night shortly thereafter the Habsburgs held their own private family ball. As the carnival's most exclusive affair, it came to pass in the Imperial Palace Apartments of one of the younger Archdukes, Peter Ferdinand, and his Archduchess Marie Christine. Not even an orchestra intruded. Discreetly, a string quartet played Haydn behind a screen. Servants noted that despite its august character the gathering was unusually warm this year, with many Highest hugs and kisses.

The next day, Shrove Tuesday, brought the ultimate in public social glitter. The Duke and the Duchess of Cumberland, bearers (despite its Anglo-Saxon name) of a crest long eminent in Austrian blazonry, gave their annual matinee dan- sante, from 4 to 10 P.M. The scene was the Palais Cumberland, once summer chateau of Empress Maria Theresa. Guests danced in the great ballroom whose roundness conformed to their waltzing and whose frescoes amplified the merriment divinely, catching gods and goddesses at play. The buffet was served in the renowned "treasure suite" with its silvered furniture. Jewelry ministered to gastronomy. Footmen offered caviar on silver plate, pheasant on gold. Each guest departed with a box of chocolate truffles wrapped in silver and stamped with the Cumberland escutcheon.

Most left in happy haste. For on the same night the Princess Croy-Sternberg presided over an excitingly new-fashioned benefit ball for the Red Cross in the new Konzerthaus. There a thicket of potted orange trees and tromp l'oeil screens, ablossom with orchids and bougainvillea, created the tango tropics in an Austrian winter.

Then midnight turned into the morning of February 25Ash Wednesday. Lent started. Carnival was over. But in contrast to the previous year, the carnival spirit lingered. In 1914 Vienna seemed to be clinging to fun. The weather gave a hand. After the longest frost in years, March blew in with mild, moist, yeasty breezes. All over the Vienna Woods yellow-pink crocuses leaped out of the ground, tiny harlequins unabashed by melting mounds of snow. In the Danube lagoons, larks trilled and swooped above trees not yet in bud.

Spring was ambushing the austerity of winter with little guerrilla galas here and there. And the capital's diplomats marked the end of the ball season with yet another event. It was an official, political, real-life costume party that lasted much longer than one evening. It was called Albania.

Vienna's albanian fling had had a prelude of some four hundred years. For that long the Albanians had lived and seethed under Turkish rule. Partly Christian, mostly Moslem, each of them intractable, they were mountain tribes roaming the interior of the Balkan peninsula on the Southern end of the Adriatic. When the Turkish sultanate began to collapse at the turn of the century, Albania became booty. Italy wanted a part of it as its foothold in the Balkans. Greece craved a piece. Belgrade coveted its coast line for access to the sea. And just because Belgrade wanted a section, Vienna wanted all of it: all of it in the form of a Habsburg client state, to show that Balkan hegemony would not be shared with Serbs but belonged to but one realm-Austria.

Still, a bit of sharing had to be tolerated. In 1913 a London conference of Europe's leading countries (the Central Powers as well as the Western Allies) had awarded the Albanian Kosovo region to Serbia. Some snippets went to Greece. The rest of the territory, with the major part of its inhabitants and its anarchy, was to be an independent nation.

The nationhood of that nation did not exist. But Vienna guaranteed the integrity of the phantom. After all, Austria was the illusionist among the great powers. The London Conference made Italy co-guarantor, a partnership Vienna largely, and politely, ignored. It did not want interference and certainly did not need help.

Shortly before New Year of 1914, Austria had persuaded the Conference to appoint William, Prince of Wied, ruler of Albania. The Albanian term for that office was mbret. The Prince of Wied did not know how to pronounce mbret. He was, however, very good at enunciating Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the royal house of Rumania to which he was related. A tall, fair-skinned Teuton lordling, he had never laid eyes on any of the swarthy goatherds and maize-growers who were now to be his people. He did not speak a syllable of their language. He had never set foot on their land. He had no idea of Albanian customs, traditions, politics, vendettas, difficulties. Most people of "civilized" Europe shared his ignorance. Until it became an international controversy, Albania had been a terra incognita-a remote labyrinthine confusion of ragged chiefdoms. To "guarantee" such a country under such a mbret meant to conjure it out of a plumed hat.

And just that was a chore congenial to the fabulists by the Danube. During the first three months of 1914, official Vienna conjured away with the skill born of experience. After all, the Habsburg domain had managed to disencumber itself of most connections to drab reality. By 1914 the Austrian Empire was a chimera ancient, iridescent, and almost plausible through its perennial re-invention. Since the Empire's survival depended on it, such self-fabrication was a very serious business. Fabricating "Albania" was not-not quite. But the Albanian challenge tapped a talent the governing Viennese loved to exercise, and so they applied their gift to this game.

As the decorations for the last costume ball of carnival 1914 were dismantled, the city buckled down in earnest to the construction of the Albanian fantasy. Its hero, the Prince of Wied, planned to enter his fairyland in March. For his escort Vienna recruited an Albanian Volunteer Brigade for which a wonderfully imaginative uniform was devised; it combined hussar and dragoon motifs with the Balkan tang of a fez-like helmet. These colorful apparitions made a fetching background to another design, namely the monochrome elegance of the Prince's state dress: tunic, trousers, tassels, and braids shading from gray to black, setting off the blaze of medals on his breast, a few of which were also freshly concocted.

Vienna then proceeded to style special Albanian postage to welcome the new potentate. A stamp series displayed the Albanian double eagle (looking like a nephew of the Habsburg bird) superimposed on two dates: 1467 and 1914. The first designated the victory of Skanderbeg, Albania's legendary champion, who had vanquished the Turks back then; the second spoke of the national redeemer now, getting ready in his tassels of gray and black.

At the end of February 1914, the mbret still could not pronounce his title. On the other hand, he had a very successful last fitting. Therefore he was ready for statesmanship.

He began a triumphal progress south. The Austrian state yacht Taurus, guarded by three cruisers, floated him down the Adriatic. On March 7 he stepped onto a red-carpeted dock in the harbor of Durres; behind him, a retinue of sashes and cummerbunds that resembled a toy version of the Habsburg court.

At three that afternoon the mbret displayed himself on the balcony of the biggest local house that was still within the protective range of Austrian naval guns. A well-rehearsed crowd of Albanian folk-the men in starched white kilts, the women in very laundered babushkas-waved flags with the nephew-double-eagle and intoned Albanian hoorays. Flowers were tossed, white doves released, blessings uttered by mullahs and Greek Orthodox priests-all on cue. The chorus of Aida could not have done better.

After the enthusiasm subsided punctually, the mbret held his first State Council. It addressed three problems. (1) What were the best shoots in the most secure areas? (2) What game was there to shoot? (3) What European princes should be invited to the hunt?

Official Vienna smiled. Serbia was not amused. "I saw," said a skeptic among the witnesses, "the beginning of a tragic operetta."

A week after the Prince of Wied came to Albania, the Bosnian schoolboy Gavrilo Princip came to Belgrade. Wied's advent as mbret produced headlines all over Europe. Princip's arrival was noted only in the police registration form he filled out on March 13, 1914, in a cheap lodging house at 23 Carigradska Street. Very soon the Prince of Wied became forgotten news. Today, three quarters of a century later, Princip is celebrated as Yugoslavia's principal martyr; a bridge in the capital bears his name; a museum documents his life; his footprints preserve his memory in concrete.

But in March 1914, he professed to be just another student at the First Belgrade High School. He was preparing himself for his sixth-class examinations: that was the reason for his stay as stated on the police form. For that purpose his family paid his expenses. The weekly remittance they sent him was not a huge sum; still, it put a certain burden on what his father earned as village postman in Austrian Bosnia.

The postman had no idea that Gavrilo spent much of his money and his time at the Golden Sturgeon Cafe on Green Wreath Square, one of Belgrade's major marketplaces. The Golden Sturgeon served hot tea on rusty tables to a special breed of students; they sipped, huddled, whispered, and hardly ever bent over a copybook. Most were from Austrian Bosnia-beardless firebrands who had volunteered for Serbia during the Balkan wars. Now it would be dangerous to return. A sympathetic Serb government had extended scholarships to many of them-but school-bench sitting was dull for young men who had seen action. Study bored them. Politics consumed them.

They all hated the Austrian regime which they saw throttling their native land. They all pronounced "Habsburg" with a hiss. But Gavrilo Princip's hiss came from a depth remarkable in a body so thin and small. He did not talk much. But his pale blue eyes could flash a light that stopped the talk of others. There was a hypnotic edge to his low voice, his quiet, constant movements, even to his silence. The friends he made at the Golden Sturgeon became a following.

One of them was Nedeljko Cabrinovic, formerly a student, currently an employee of the Belgrade State Printing Office. In the last week of March, Cabrinovic received a letter from Bosnia with no message inside the envelope-only a newspa per clipping. He met Princip for lunch to show it to him. It had been cut out of a Sarajevo daily and contained the news that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be visiting that city in the course of the June maneuvers.

Gavrilo Princip read the story. He said nothing, for a while. Then he asked Cabrinovic to meet him at the Golden Sturgeon again, in the evening. Cabrinovic did. Again they shared a rusty table. Princip ordered mint tea, which he sipped wordlessly, shifting slowly in his chair. After a few minutes he motioned Cabrinovic to walk with him into the adjacent park. He led his friend to a remote bench in the dark. They sat down. Princip spoke at last. Softly he asked his friend whether he would help him kill the Crown Prince of Austria. Silence. Cabrinovic nodded. Silence. In Princip's blue eyes gleamed the light of a distant lantern. "I will find the weapons," Princip said. Silence. They shook hands. Together they walked back to the Golden Sturgeon Cafe.

This happened on March 27, 1914. Earlier on the same day, some three hundred miles west of that Belgrade park, the Crown Prince of Austria had a difficult encounter.

The setting seemed pleasant enough: a fine spring morning on the wave-slapped jetty of Miramare, a romantic seaside castle just outside Trieste. Franz Ferdinand was watching the giant snow-white German yacht Hohenzollern steam toward him across the bay. It flew the Kaiser's personal ensign with the motto "Gott mit uns!" A flotilla of German cruisers foamed the waters in its wake. As the Hohenzollern came closer, Wilhelm II became discernible, grasping the rail valorously at the prow. "My God," the Archduke burst out at his adjutant. "He's got that damned carving knife on! I forgot mine!"

The "carving knife" was a naval dagger with an anchorshaped hilt that Wilhelm had invented as an accessory to his All-Highest naval uniform; he had gifted Franz Ferdinand with a copy. "Fetch it for me!" Franz Ferdinand said to his adjutant. "He'll expect me to wear it! Get that blasted thingright now!"

The Archduke often let his ill temper fly but hardly ever at the expense of Wilhelm II. If he did now, it was because too many vexations beset him in March of 1914. Some were old and familiar: those little, jeweled, poisoned arrows shot at him by the Vienna court. The very ground on which he stood that moment, the Castle Miramare, had been used against him. As a personal possession of Franz Joseph, Miramare lay under the jurisdiction of Prince Montenuovo, First Lord Chamberlain of the Emperor and foremost enemy of the Crown Prince. Montenuovo could not forbid Franz Ferdinand to use the castle for a spring sojourn or for a setting in which to entertain the German monarch. The Crown Prince's wife, on the other hand, was not the Crown Princess, nor were the couple's children archdukes. According to Montenuovo's malevolently stringent interpretation of Habsburg house rules, Franz Ferdinand's morganatic loved ones did not have the right of residence in one of the dynasty's own manors. After all, their Highnesses were not Imperial but only Serene.

Naturally the First Lord Chamberlain's spite always came sugared in courtier phrasing. His letter to the Crown Prince had expressed "regret to be unable to make Miramare arrangements for their Serene Highnesses without an express All-Highest command which the undersigned [Montenuovo] devoutly hopes your Imperial and Royal Highness [Franz Ferdinand] will obtain."

In other words Franz Ferdinand must do once more what he had been forced to do on previous occasions: go to the hum bling length of appealing personally to his All-Highest Uncle Franz Joseph. Only then could his Sophie, his daughter, and his two sons sleep under the same roof with him in Miramare.

Still, Miramare was a fitting mise-en-scene in which to welcome the most grandiose of all Prussians during this stopover on his Adriatic cruise. The Hohenzollern had docked. A 21-gun salute boomed from the Austrian dreadnought Viribus Unitis. Wilhelm strutted down his gangplank, a naval peacock in white and gold. Braids, froggings, epaulettes, medals, and "carving knife" invoked every variety of overgorgeousness.

And yet: The same witnesses reporting Franz Ferdinand's earlier frown also speak of the cordiality that marked this dockside meeting just as it did most other encounters of the two men. Franz Ferdinand often referred to Wilhelm as "Europas grosster Mordskerl" (Europe's No. 1 devil of a fellow). Never mind lapses of taste or questions of judgment-the sheer spectacle of the German's bravado impressed the Archduke, a bravado unchecked by any authority above the Kaiser's head or by an astute brain inside it. Franz Ferdinand's mind was saddled with both. He was wary of Wilhelm's sovereign excesses. He also envied and admired them.

At any rate it was politic to greet fulsomely this fulsome personage. Franz Ferdinand, being chronically embroiled with the Vienna court, needed support from the Berlin Emperor who was Vienna's preeminent ally. And that morning, in the brilliant sunshine on the jetty (with Franz Ferdinand's "carving knife" fetched just in time), there was something else to be gained from the German: The stature of the Archduke's wife benefited from Wilhelm's vanity. The Kaiser fancied himself as graceful a hand-kisser as any Austrian. He loved to prove it on Austrian territory. As he lowered his All-Highest mustache over Sophie's less-than-archducal fingers, she partook of Imperial cachet: Another skirmish had been won against the Montenuovo camarilla.

But at Miramare loomed other issues of greater relevance to the world at large. The Crown Prince broached them at lunch in the castle's marble dining hall. He was, he confided to Wilhelm, unhappy about all that mbret ado in Albania. His own choice for the Albanian throne, the Duke Wilhelm von Urach, a much more capable candidate, had been turned down by Vienna. This weak, silly mbret worried the Crown Prince because of Serbian repercussions. If the Austrian-backed ruler tottered, the Serbs would try to grab more Albanian territory, even to the point of a confrontation with Austria. And, Ferdinand added, it wasn't just the Albanian situation, it was also the Hungarian attitude that made the Serbs pugnacious. The Hungarians provoked not just Belgrade Serbs but Serbs inside the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia; there a Magyar civil administration imposed Hungarian as a teaching language on many schools with a majority of Serbo-Croat students; in other ways, too, the Hungarian hand lay heavy on the land. And to be frank, the Archduke said, taking a deep breath, it was right here that the Kaiser could be of vital help. After all, Wilhelm wielded great influence with Count Stephan Tisza, the Hungarian Prime Minister. Any move to make the Hungarians see a tiny bit of reason would be of tremendous value. Would His Majesty be kind enough to take it under consideration?

By then guest and host had reached post-prandial liqueurs. The Kaiser savored his brandy. Well, yes, to be sure, he said, those Hungarians could be rascals. And Tisza, whom he had received in audience while coming through Vienna the other day, indeed Tisza was a rascal, too, but an absolutely first class rascal, clever and fast as you had to be in your dealings with all those Balkan bandits, Bulgaria, Serbia, and what not; yes, Tisza was really a true statesman worthy of Franz Ferdinand's trust-in fact, come to think of it, at the German fall maneuvers to which Franz Ferdinand must come as his, the Kaiser's guest, maybe Tisza should be invited, too; the King of Italy had just accepted-what a jolly foursome! It would iron out all sorts of differences. Also show how Germany, AustriaHungary and Italy stood together-England and France better not plan any stupidities against the Central powers. A fall maneuvers foursome-capital idea! Meanwhile, how about enjoying cigars out on the terrace?

On the terrace the two princes lit Cubans and reclined in wicker chairs. They blew smoke rings across the blue-gold Adriatic. The Kaiser had chosen to bypass Franz Ferdinand's request for help against the Hungarians. Franz Ferdinand was not in a position to press his case. His august caller disliked arguments that clouded good scenery or spoiled the pleasures of tobacco. It would not do to risk a crucial friendship.

Cigars finished, the Crown Prince accompanied the Kaiser on an inspection tour of an Austrian battleship. Time for the Hohenzollern to steam on to Corfu. Wilhelm kissed Sophie's hand good-bye. Austrian cannon boomed their salute while Wilhelm was piped aboard his yacht. Then Franz Ferdinand could rid himself of his German Grand Admiral's uniform. He could toss away the "carving knife." He could not shed his frustration.

In Vienna's Hofburg a few days later Franz Ferdinand briefed his monarch on what he called, unsmiling, "an interesting meeting, more fruitful on some difficulties than on others, such as the awful Hungarian problem." Franz Joseph's answer was a cough. He had a cold. He did not ask for amplifications. He did not consider Hungary a more awful problem now than it had been for, say, the last forty years. His nephew was always throwing at him "problems," "difficulties," "awfulnesses." It was one thing for Franz Ferdinand to keep preaching peace with Serbia. That was serviceable. It offset the war cries of General Conrad. But must he preach peace so turbulently? Problematizing Hungary? Exaggerating Serb complications? Discomfiting Franz Joseph's old age? His nephew always rushed at him with one direness or another, no matter how kind Franz Joseph tried to be. Right now he had been kind again: Despite Montenuovo's advice, he had invited the Crown Prince's morganatic family to stay at the Imperial Palace.

They did not stay there long. At first they planned to remain until the opening of the racing season on Easter Sunday. But within forty-eight hours the Crown Prince had had enough of Vienna; enough of the impassivity of its Emperor; enough of the myopia of its government; enough of the snideness of its court. He summoned his Lord Chamberlain who in turn mobilized his footmen and chauffeurs. Then the Crown Princely caravan of automobiles roared off to Konopiste. They left behind nothing but a dark fierce cloud of dust.

Vienna's first turf gala of 1914 proceeded without the heir Apparent glooming in the Imperial Box at Freudenau. That in itself added to the verve of the occasion. What's more, the weather smiled. April 12 turned out to be an idyllic Easter Sunday. Not one cloud flawed a sky that was only a nuance paler than the dominant fashion color that spring: Capri blue. The Princess Montenuovo, wife of His Majesty's First Lord Chamberlain, displayed the hue delightfully in her ensemble: a blue gown trimmed with white moire and tango-yellow ribbons, topped by a collar of snowy lace. Many thought it brave of her to subject her generous figure to the narrow cut mandated by Paris.

Of course the younger, slimmer crowd could better accom modate French couture. But quite a few of them were missing from the aristocrats' boxes or the haut bourgeois grandstands. They'd been seduced by another attraction of newer vogue. At Aspern Airfield an "Aeronautical Parade" had drawn so many of the jeunesse doree that their Rolls-Royces, Austro- Daimlers, Graf & Stifts, and Mercedes-Benzes overflowed the parking space. They all watched the heavens that had become a stage. A fighter plane of the Imperial and Royal Air Force looped the loop, a double-decker towed a flock of gliders, a giant eight-passenger "bus-plane" disgorged parachutists whose green-and-scarlet umbrellas floated down the sunshine.

The same Easter Sunday in Vienna also featured a third spectacle. It was a dual demonstration on the Ringstrasse against two kinds of unemployment. Some six thousand workers who had recently lost their jobs were marching with placards demanding work. Another crowd protested the dissolution of Parliament. Bickering between German and Czech deputies had slowed down legislative business. This had given Count Karl von StUrgkh, Prime Minister of the Austrian half the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the excuse to invoke the notorious Paragraph Fourteen of the realm's constitution. It allowed him to declare the parliamentarians unable to exercise their function and to suspend the Vienna (as distinct from the Budapest) parliament. Until new elections would be calledin the indefinite future-the Sturgkh administration would be answerable only to the Emperor.

Paragraph Fourteen had been invoked before. It had caused ructions before that had been shrugged off before, but never with the concision of the remark reportedly made on Easter Sunday at the Freudenau track. It was attributed to the Prime Minister himself and might be just flippant enough to be his. Count von Sturgkh had to watch the early races alone in his box; when the friend he had invited finally appeared, he blamed the lateness on a traffic back-up caused by demonstrators on the Ring. "I suppose," the Prime Minister was much quoted as saying, "I gave them spring fever."

Once Minister of Education, Count von Sturgkh had started his career as an academic, a frequent resort for impoverished nobility. He was rather pedantic by nature and perhaps for that reason often forced the sort of humor that would make him competitive with the cynical wit of his colleague, Count von Berchtold.

On that Easter Sunday at the track, Berchtold was spooning coffee ice cream a few boxes away in the Jockey Club enclosure. As we know, Count von Swrgkh was Prime Minister only of Austria while Count von Berchtold's office of Foreign Minister encompassed all of Austria-Hungary, with interests far beyond the yawps of complainers on the Ringstrasse. Perhaps it was a sign of how uncouth the times had become that professional concerns should intrude on his Sunday leisure.

Friends kept dropping by between races, always on some agreeable pretext. Ladies offered the Berchtolds chocolate truffles from silk-lined boxes; gentlemen kissed the Countess's hand and complimented her on the Capri blue feathers of her hat. And all along they touched on certain questions. The rumors, for example, about the Tsar's daughter being betrothed to the son of the Rumanian king. Would that align Rumania into Russia's pan-Slavic stance against Austria? And the stories about impending Russo-British naval exercises off German ports-was that to develop the encirclement of the Central Powers? And could one include in that category the 250 million francs France recently loaned Serbia for arma ments? And how serious was the Serb-fomented mutiny that had broken out against the mbret, Austria's friend on the Albanian throne? And was it true about a clash between Austrian and Italian advisers on the mbret's Inner Council? And speaking of Italy, in a confrontation between the Triple Entente (Russia, France, Britain) and the Triple Alliance (Austria, Germany, Italy), how reliable would Italy be?

"And who," Count von Berchtold answered, "will win the Prezednit handicap this afternoon?"

His friends laughed. His ice-cream-spooning sang-froid reassured them. The Foreign Minister leaned back in his box seat, in black top hat and gray topcoat, one slim knee crossed over another. A grandee with stables of his own, he knew how to document his racing judgment. Sacher (named after the torte) figured as winner of the handicap. The Foreign Minister, who always weighed the latest intelligence, had learned of a slight problem with the favorite's right foreleg. He bet on Radoteur.

Radoteur came in first. The Foreign Minister ate a chocolate truffle.

The next day, Monday, April 13, Count von Berchtold boarded his salon car in Panama hat and spats. He was off to a sub-tropical clime: Abbazia, the palm-dotted Habsburg resort on the Adriatic, not too far from Miramare where the Crown Prince had, unsuccessfuly, smoked a cigar with the Kaiser.

In Abbazia the Foreign Minister would be holding a more felicitous meeting-a conference with his Italian counterpart. A few little points needed to be discussed. One of them concerned Albania: Italy wished to participate in the industrial progress of that brand-new country but found Vienna a shade insensitive to its economic interests there. For its part, Vienna felt occasionally baffled by exaggerations in the Italian press about the "oppression" of Italians in South Tyrol.

Count von Berchtold did not entirely succeed in smiling away all differences between himself and his colleague, the Marchese Antonio de San Giuliano. But the Count, an impeccable host, did treat the Marchese to a dirigible lunch that offered poached salmon, cold champagne, and the view of a long stretch of Illyrian coastline from the gondola of a Zeppelin cruising fifteen hundred feet high. The Count also gave a great garden party in the Marchese's honor, at a seaside villa hung with Chinese lanterns and filled with the music of strolling violins. To top it all off, he motored with the Marchese to the Imperial and Royal stud farm at Lippiza where the famed white Lippizaner horses performed the subtle arts of dressage for his Italian Excellency. After five days of gastronomy, scenery, and politesse, the Austrian Foreign Ministry could announce with satisfaction that Italy remained as firm a member of the Triple Alliance as ever. Then Count von Berchtold returned to Vienna on April 19, in time for another Sunday demonstration on the Ring.

But what country in Europe did not suffer such bouts of "spring fever"? Austria's potential adversaries were hardly immune. In Serbia, the opposition withdrew all its deputies from the Belgrade parliament, alleging unconstitutional practices by the government in budget matters. In Russia, four thousand workers walked out of the Treugolnik rubber factory in St. Petersburg. They were joined by thousands more at the Siemens electric plant. Comrades in industrial installations in Moscow and Riga followed suit until the strikers numbered nearly one hundred thousand. In France, the elections set for May produced daily clashes between supporters of President Raymond Poincare, who wanted to keep the three-year conscription period, and the followers of the Socialist leader Jean Jaures who insisted on reducing it. Even England was losing the last of its Victorian seemliness in 1914. In April dozens of special Save Ulster! trains rolled almost daily into London. They brought demonstrators who flooded through the streets with shouts of "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right!" The Protestants' orange banners cursed the Catholic Irish for wanting to reduce Ireland to the Pope's footstool. In Dublin green cadres of the Feinians marched for self-government. By the Thames, Parliament shook with debates over the Home Rule Bill. The issue convulsed the British Isles.

By comparison, the disturbances in Vienna seemed almost minor. Most played out on the Ringstrasse where the architecture absorbed much of what tumult there was into the histrionics of the facades.

Spring absorbed the rest. Even the most bilious townsman couldn't help knowing that the Vienna Woods undulated only a few streetcar stops away. And here the lilacs exhaled their sweetness, the baby leaf waved its miracle green, and the zither called from the vintner's garden. Together they seduced politics into pleasure.

Soon the only enduring controversies appeared to be deliciously traditional: Was this year's wine as good as last season's? Had the Court Opera been right in turning down Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos? Could a soprano like Maria Jeritza, who made her mark as Elsa in Lohengrin, sing Adele in Die Fledermaus?

How pleasant, the answers. Yes, the new year's wine promised to match its predecessor. Yes, La Jeritza did prove to be a marvelous Adele. And something in Viennese logic justified the rejection of Ariadne. This logic concluded that the city's talent was not modernist like Richard Strauss; that the phrase "Wien bleibt Wien" (Vienna remains Vienna) summed up the city's virtuosity; that timelessness, not timeliness, expressed its soul.

Princess Pauline Metternich seemed to prove the point. This grand dame was the ancient but ever-buoyant daughter-inlaw of the Chancellor who had been Napoleon's nemesis. At the end of April she gave an Alt-Wiener Jause, that is, an Old Viennese High Tea where select company in Biedermeier dress enjoyed delicacies and three-quarter time offered in the style of a century ago.

That was how the haut monde perpetuated Alt Wien. For the people at large another Alt Wein rose up in the Kaisergar- ten. The Emperor's garden was the Imperial Palace pleasance, and for the occasion His Majesty admitted the public to its lawns. Here they found highlights of a time that was no more, sculpted of papier-mache, meticulously reproduced in scaleddown size after old paintings or illustrations in yellowed books: razed landmarks like the original Court Theater, romanesque churches perished in wars, early baroque mansions consumed by fires. Reborn here, all their turrets, pediments, gargoyles presented themselves once again to the gaze of a twentieth-century public.

Wien bleibt Wien. More than ever Vienna remained itself at the end of April 1914. And just then it learned something that was not quite imaginable.

The First Lord Chamberlain issued an announcement. His Majesty's cold, having turned into bronchitis, had now developed into pneumonia. Leading specialists were in attendance. His Imperial and Royal Highness, the Crown Prince, had been summoned from Konopiste to the capital.

Franz Joseph had reigned for sixty-six years. Firmly, if secretly, the notion had established itself, somewhere deep back in the mind of the town, that he would reign for another six hundred. Now Vienna must deal with the absurd possibility that he might not.

16

NEVER HAD THE HUGE GATES OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE GROUNDS IN SCHONbrunn opened to so many humble vehicles-to quite ordinary taxis. From their doors emerged the physicians who were trying to keep the monarch alive. Grand automobiles of dignitaries also rolled into the broad graveled driveway. Sentinels presented arms as their passengers emerged: Count von Berchtold, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Count von Krobatin, Minister of War; Count von Sturgkh, the Premier. But unlike the doctors they were not admitted to the All-Highest bedside. His Majesty was too ill. They could only leave their reports, their respects, their wishes, and their prayers.

Often the serious-faced Excellencies would then direct their chauffeurs to drive from Schonbrunn, in Vienna's southwest, to Castle Belvedere in the southeast. Here the Heir Apparent resided and waited-but not for them. Other visitors' cars remained parked far longer at the Belvedere. They belonged to members of the Crown Prince's shadow cabinet about to move into the sun.

Who were these, and what did their comings, goings, stayings, portend? In the late April days of 1914 such questions dominated a third meeting ground, namely the restaurant Meissl & Schadn. Its facade on the Karntnerstrasse pictured all five continents, reflecting the concerns of its clientele: key officials of sub-cabinet rank of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of War. They would be the caretaker team between monarchs. In a special back room of Meissl & Schadn-the Extra Stuberl-they enjoyed the establishment's vaunted Tafelspitz while caucusing on the problems of transition in the Palace.

It was bound to be dramatic. They'd already heard that almost the entire court planned to stand down the moment last rites were administered at the All-Highest bed. The First Lord Chamberlain, Prince Montenuovo, had in hand letters of resignation written in advance by himself as well as by equerries, adjutants, lords-in-waiting. These instruments would be signed and dated minutes before the old Emperor's death. That would prevent the new ruler from cashiering the retinue en masse with a consequent loss of their pensions.

But the prospect of Franz Ferdinand striding toward the throne also raised an issue far graver than retirement benefits of cup-bearers. The back room at Meissl & Schadn worried over nothing less than civil war.

At Castle Belevedere a post-accession plan had been drawn up. To anyone in the upper circles of government its content held few secrets. It would implement the Crown Prince's absolute determination to remove the Hungarian Prime Minister Tisza and to change Hungary's suffrage laws by which Tisza maintained power. At present the electoral system was heavily skewed in favor of the landed gentry-Tisza's political base. The new Emperor would grant equal votes to all Magyars. Agricultural workers, landless and therefore voteless until now, would be able to ballot their bosses out of office. Three million Croats, semi-enslaved within Hungarian borders, would gain a strong voice against their suppressors. Beyond that, Franz Ferdinand intended to radically revise the constitution of the entire Habsburg realm. Under him "Austria-Hungary" would be superseded by a "United States of Austria." With the Empire federalized, many present bedevilments would vanish.

Other nationalities would not starve while Hungarian barons feasted. Vienna's central control would apply to military and some financial matters. Outside of these, the Crown would respect and enforce the autonomy (cultural or otherwise) of Bohemia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galicia, Transylvania, Illyria, Dalmatia, and-neither last nor first-Hungary. To all such domains the Emperor of Austria would serve as equitable King. He would give his Slavic subjects the parity which had long been their due.

Of course none of the Meissl & Schadn habitues had ever heard of an article an obscure Bolshevik had compiled in Vienna the year before. Had they read Stalin's "Marxism and the National Question," they would have been astonished by its structural resemblance to Franz Ferdinand's scheme. At any rate, most of the sub-Excellencies at Meissl & Schadn admitted that the post-accession plan made sense; perhaps urgent, one-minute-before-midnight sense. And just because it made sense it would make trouble.

Hungary's bearded, formidable Prime Minister Tisza no doubt anticipated Franz Ferdinand's intentions. He was not the man to put up with them. The Meissl & Schadn consensus believed that Tisza might not hesitate to mobilize the Hungarian militia against the new Emperor. He had practically said so. "If Franz Ferdinand wants to use the army against me," Tisza had been quoted even before the present crisis in the old Emperor's health, "I will have the last word." And this is what the Crown Prince had said loudly, to the head of his Military Chancellery shortly after the Emperor had fallen ill: "Twenty-four hours after I am in, Tisza will be out."

The Meissl & Schadn crowd had even gotten word on who was to put Tisza out. The car of Joseph von Kristoffy, a former Hungarian Minister of the Interior, could be found more often in Vienna than in Budapest these days-usually at a side entrance of the Castle Belvedere. He was Franz Ferdinand's choice for Premier of Hungary. By that same entrance, just as often stood the automobile of General Karl von Terstyanski, the Crown Prince's favorite to succeed General Conrad as Chief of Staff. He was already commander of the Budapest garrison. His assignment: to make Tisza reliquish his office, if necessary by force.

Tisza, however, had an iron grip. It seemed inevitable that after Franz Joseph's death the implacable new sovereign would collide with the immovable Hungarian. Would the monarchy become a battlefield? Through what constitutional juggling or political stratagem could one contrive a compromise? Or did the problem no longer permit a peaceful option? The sub-Excellencies at Meissl & Schadn sighed. To bring their parleys to a Viennese conclusion they liked to order Linzer torte, another specialite de la maison. But when they walked out of the restaurant into the May evening, it was not the taste of the torte that lingered. It was the sigh.

***

The All-Highest illness weighed on the city. Pacers in the corridors of power failed to enjoy a fine spring. So did Vienna's lesser folk. They couldn't afford to probe the Empire's future over bone china and Bohemian crystal. Instead, they gathered on plain benches of the vineyard inns in the Vienna Woods. The moon dappled the beech leaves, the wine gladdened the tongue, but the idyll was laced with apprehension. People stared into their goblets. They shook their heads over the latest medical bulletins from the Palace. Those doctors had become so terse. It wasn't right that the kindly, ageless legend of Franz Joseph should terminate in "severe pulmonary complications." The phrase seemed too blunt and newfangledsomething like the frown on Franz Ferdinand's portraits.

The plain people on the plain benches knew hardly anything pleasant about their future ruler. His long absences from the capital implied little fondness for Vienna. His official stare revealed nothing. And so the people tried to fill that sullen void. They talked about an article series featured in the tabloid Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt just then. Its subject, though dating back almost twenty years, was timely. It concerned another Habsburg sickbed; Franz Ferdinand himself had lain in that one, in 1895, when tuberculosis had been eroding his lungs.

Then, too, the bulletins had grown terse. But the Archduke's fierce will had prevailed not only over the disease but over its exploitation by his enemies at Court. Quickly and quite publicly the camarilla had written him off as successor. Ceremonials and privileges of an heir apparent had been transferred to Franz Ferdinand's younger and much flightier brother, the Archduke Otto. Until then Otto had been famous chiefly for the champagne-happy night during which he had strolled through the Sacher Hotel lobby naked except for the badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece hanging from his neck. That had not kept the Emperor's First Lord Chamberlain from asking Otto to inaugurate theaters, open bridges, visit new hospitals. From 1894 to 1895 the Court Gazette had treated Otto as the de facto Crown Prince. And even after Franz Ferdinand had regained enough fitness for a longer journey, he had not been included in the great state visit of 1896. Archduke Otto had accompanied Emperor Franz Joseph to St. Petersburg for a meeting with the Tsar.

Of course the Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt could only hint at the high-altitude malice of those years. But now, in late April of 1914, the stories around it ran as vintage gossip through Vienna's inns: Perhaps the bitterness of his young, sick years had put the scowl on Franz Ferdinand's face? Perhaps the aggravations of his morganatic marriage had deepened it? In the inns, people wondered, conjectured, drank. For a while they felt a bit better. How good to merge Franz Ferdinand tales into Habsburg legendry, to fit him into a traditional scheme! Encouraged, the vineyard drinkers sang a song written just a few months earlier. It came from the pen of a municipal bureaucrat yet it had grown to be the rage all over Europe; it had even spread to England and America. The whole world was hymning something fragile and sweet:

Actually "Wien, Wien" was just the latest and by far the most famous example of the genre Wiener Lieder. Over a hundred WienerLieder had been composed in the last eighty years. All were songs of lyric wistfulness. They sighed of a love not for a woman or a man but for Vienna; for that rainbow of a town fraying away exquisitely between vineyard and Danube; for streets in which the girls were beautiful because the houses were old; for a world whose doom was its enchantment.

In April 1914 the people on the wooden benches sang "Wien, Wien," to serenade their sick, dear Emperor. Actually he had become dear only after he had become ancient. But he had been ancient for so long, he seemed to have been dear forever. For generations those silver sideburns had generated fond stories, wonderful rumors, reverent speculations. Austrian patriotism centered on this ikon of infinite anecdotes and wrinkles. Still, the day must come when six horses draped in black would bear him away; when the most unsentimental of Archdukes would roar up in his motorcar to take possession of the Imperial Palace. What then?

Neither the firmament's glimmer above nor the reflections in the Danube below answered the question brooding over the vineyard hills. And so the people in the leafy inns resorted to their only ready remedy: to drink; to gossip antique Habsburg gossip again; and, again and again, to sing "Wien, Wien…"

Another tune attained enormous popularity in Vienna's springtime of 1914-the first international hit of a young American composer, Irving Berlin. It was frequently featured by modish restaurant orchestras like the one in the Ring- strasse's Grand Hotel. But during late April and early May the music there played to an unusual number of empty tables. Franz Joseph's pneumonia was taking its toll in these plush precincts, too. The succession, with its perils and uncertainties, loomed ahead. A sudden decline had shaken the stock market. Many of the more loose-pursed tycoons were retrenching and that included patrons of the Grand Hotel restaurant. Nevertheless, some habitues kept coming to enjoy Stuffed Whitefish a la Radziwill (a renowned virtuosity of the chef's) and to keep au courant with Mister Irving Berlin. Among prominent diners figured Hermann von Reininghaus, the young brewery grand seigneur, and his dusky wife Gina as well as the third element of the triangle, General Conrad, the Chief of Staff.

The presence of the beloved-even when encumbered by her husband-always cheered the General. What's more, the good weather promised him, a passionate mountaineer, some fine Alpine tours. But as Gina noted in her memoirs, his smile looked rigid in those days. With reason. The General shared all of Vienna's fear for the old Emperor. In addition, he must face the probability that the new monarch would dismiss him in disgrace, would send him packing summarily, together with the Hungarian Prime Minister Tisza even as the coffin of Franz Joseph was carried into the crypt of the Capuchin Church.

Of course an exit in May would only accelerate somewhat the General's timetable. In the spring of 1914 he had resolved to wait for the Sarajevo maneuvers at the end of June, and then to resign. It was enough. He had been harassed too often by Franz Ferdinand, rebuffed too often each time he requested the punishment of Serbia-which was fomenting a rebellion in Albania right now. Too often had he been frustrated for the sake of "this foul peace which drags on and on," as he had put it in one of his secret letters to Gina von Reininghaus. The same letter vibrated with impatience for a "war from which I could return crowned with success that would allow me to break through all the barriers between us, Gina, and claim you as my own dearest wife. [a war that] would bring the satisfactions in my career and private life which fate has so far denied me."

He would be denied them forever when Franz Ferdinand mounted the throne. Still, at the Grand Hotel restaurant he could bear with fate a little better because here it was cushioned with Gina's closeness. When the orchestra struck up that rousing new air from America, the General rose to his feet, bowed, requested Herr von Reininghaus's permission to ask Frau von Reininghaus for the honor of this dance.

It was granted. General and lady walked to the parquet floor. They began to sway in each others arms. The vocalist sang, in Viennese English, the song most popular throughout the Western world that spring of 1914:

Repercussions of Franz Joseph's pneumonia spread southward to the Serbian capital. Before the news reached him there, Gavrilo Princip had been focusing steadily, unblinking, on a climax that drew nearer each day: the June war games of the Austrian Army near Sarajevo, captained by the man who must be killed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

To help him in the deed, Princip had recruited Nedeljko Cabrinovic in Belgrade. In Sarajevo itself Princip's old confederate Danilo Ilia was waiting. But by April Princip decided that the assassination of the Habsburg Crown Prince was an enterprise requiring yet another partner. He picked Trifko Graben, a fellow lodger in his rooming house at 23 Carigradska Street in Belgrade.

Graben, too, had been a former high school student in Austrian Bosnia who had crossed the border into Serbia and now lounged about Belgrade coffeehouses between odd jobs. But Grabez's exile differed from Princip's. It lacked politics. In a dispute over grades, Graben had punched his teacher in the nose before running away. Vagabonding, adventuring, womanizing, appealed to Graben much more than ideology. Yet Princip liked the lad's pluck and brawn. And so thin little Princip began to talk to Graben, whose muscular frame towered over him. He kept talking softly, steadily, in the seclusion of his room. Unblinking, he talked with a voice barely audible yet of an overwhelming intensity. When he finished, the big fellow had become the little one's obedient disciple. In two days, juvenile delinquent had changed to zealot. Grabei was ready to do anything at his leader's command.

Princip had now collected the manpower for his kill. He still needed arms and the training to use them. The Young Bosnia organization, whose members met on coffeehouse terraces, would be of limited use. Young Bosnia's program included action to flesh out its anti-Habsburg slogans. But too much of its energy went into the production of patriotic verse.

Princip turned to a far tougher group. Its name never saw print. But it was led by a man whose photograph sometimes appeared in Belgrade newspapers that spring: an enormous Serbian Army officer, as heavy as he was tall, monolithically bald, with a brute black mustache jutting from a Mongolian face. The caption under his picture identified him as Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, Director of the Intelligence Bureau of the Serbian General Staff. But at Belgrade's political cafes one knew much more than that about him. There, whispers referred to him as Apis-the sacred bull of ancient Egypt.

Like his namesake he was a myth to his adherents. No ordinary earthly concerns tethered him: no wife, no lover, no family, no children, neither hobby nor recreation. He was not the liver of a life but the demon of an idea. At night he slept a few hours at his brother-in-law's. The rest of his time he spent in the Belgrade Ministry of War, in an office whirring with telephone wires, telegraph keys, decoding devices, couriers arriving and departing. Restaurants and theaters did not exist for him. He was beyond normal frivolities. All his waking hours served one unmerciful passion: to carve Greater Serbia out of the rotting body of the Habsburg Empire.

Eleven years earlier, in 1903, Apis had been among a band of officers who had dynamited the doors of Belgrade's Royal Palace, hunted for the Austrian toady, King Alexander, cornered him in a closet with his Queen, perforated the couple with revolver bullets, hacked their bodies up with sabers, and thrown them out the window.

The assassination had placed on the Serb throne the present, much more anti-Viennese Karageorgevic dynasty. A few years later Apis had become leader of Ujedinjeje ili Smrt (Union or Death)-a society known in the coffeehouses by a murmured nickname: The Black Hand. Though its membership included some cabinet ministers and General Staff officers, it had no official sanction or recognition. Its nationalism was far more radical than that of the Serbian government itself. Initiates said that Prime Minister Pasic had appointed Apis Intelligence Chief in order to keep track of the man, to co-opt and control him. Nevertheless, Apis's Black Hand had killed King George I of Greece the previous year, in 1913, for repressing Slav minorities. No doubt the Black Hand had other plans along this line, very clandestine ones. In the coffeehouses the classified section of the Belgrade daily Trgovinski Glasnik received close scrutiny. Here the Society placed innocuously phrased items in the Situations Wanted column; properly deciphered, they were Black Hand messages to its various cells.

Part rumor, part fact, such things sifted through the mists shrouding the group. In April 1914, Gavrilo Princip knew one thing for sure. He must reach Apis or at least one of his men. They would help him achieve his purpose.

Just before the month ended, he made contact. Through an intermediary he met an authentic agent of the Black Hand, the Serbian Army Major, Voislav Tankosic. The encounter began awkwardly on the terrace of the Acorn Garland. As soon as the two shook hands, they recognized each other. Twenty months earlier, during the First Balkan War, Princip had come to Belgrade to volunteer for the Major's guerrilla force operating against the Turks. Tankosic had turned down the sixteenyear-old schoolboy for being too young, too short, and too frail. Now Princip was eighteen; despite the adult mustache he had grown, he was as short as ever and looked even thinner. But his light blue eyes did not blink as he explained, softly and calmly, that he would need guns and bombs to blast away the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo.

This time Major Tankosic did not reject the stripling out of hand. He told him to stand by. "Someone" would have to be consulted.

"Someone"-obviously Apis-took his time. A week passed. Princip relayed his impatience to the Major. Tankosic sent back a message: "the boy" should read the newspapers; Franz Joseph had fallen mortally sick, and Franz Ferdinand, as the new monarch, would have better things to do than bother with summer maneuvers in Sarajevo. The whole thing was off.

"The boy," Princip, sent back a note: He did not give a fig about the Emperor's illness. He would kill Franz Ferdinand whether he wore the crown or not, whether he came to Sarajevo or not. Nothing was off. Now, what about the weapons?

Shortly thereafter a runner came with a second message to Princip's room: "You and your friends, go to Topcider Park now." Princip rounded up Graben and Cabrinovic, shepherded them to Topcider, one of Belgrade's more deserted parks. The three were easy to spot-a thin little youth, flanked by two older, taller companions. As the trio approached the park's main entrance, a man waiting there raised his hand slightly.

He led them to a remote spot in the greenery. He gave them a wooden box containing three revolvers and a cardboard box filled with ammunition. He pointed to the stump of an oak tree shaped rather like a human body. He showed them how to load; how to aim; how to fire.

He showed them day after day. The sun shone, the pistols blazed, the Park echoed, the oak stump splintered. When the two weeks' course was over, Princip emerged as the best student. From a standing position "the boy" scored six hits out of ten shots at a distance of more than 200 yards. At a distance of 60 yards he scored eight absolutely perfect hits. And he was almost as sharp a marksman while running. Graben and Cabrinovic did not match his skill but had become fair shots.

After their last class the three went to the Golden Sturgeon cafe for a discreet celebration. Since Princip enforced abstinence, they ordered mineral water. His blue eyes did not blink and he did not smile when he asked his friends to raise their glasses to the health of the old Emperor of Austria. His Majesty's recovery would bring Franz Ferdinand into convenient range. At least on one coffeehouse terrace in Belgrade, it was an exciting spring.

In Sarajevo, Danilo Ilic nursed the same murderous hope for Franz Joseph's recuperation. Ilk, Gavrilo Princip's earliest co-conspirator, was awaiting his fellow-assassins' arrival in the Bosnian capital.

Meanwhile he began to write for Zvono, a new Socialist paper with avant-garde leanings. Though only a very junior comrade, he lost no time in attacking the Socialist Party leadership in Bosnia. "It is strange," he wrote, "that the words of our Party bosses should accord with those of the Austrian Foreign Minister who favors independence for Albania while denying the same right to the South Slavs… The consequence of such foolish Socialist leadership is a diminishing Socialist consciousness.

Now, the bosses of Bosnia's small Socialist Party received their cues from headquarters of the much larger movement in Vienna. Which is to say, they were guided by Viktor Adler, doyen of working-class opposition throughout the Habsburg Empire. In assailing "the bosses," Ilk really assailed Adlernot quite fairly.

Adler's ArbeiterZeitung often did mock the farce of Albanian independence. It often did deplore the suppression of South Slav autonomy. But in 1914, Austrian Socialism also felt the need to combat the spread of unemployment, the pauperization of the employed in their slums, the acceleration of armament production everywhere. In this press of problems, Adler's support of Slav rights was incidental rather than insistent. Ilia felt it was inexcusably casual.

There were other differences between Ilk and Adler; between the Sarajevo Socialist itching to get an Archduke into his gun sights, and the Vienna Party chief championing, but not forcing Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. Ilk was the son of a cobbler; Adler, the scion of a stockbroker. Ilk was twenty-four; at sixty-two Adler was the Emperor's junior by more than twenty years and yet, in Ilk's eyes, also a worn dynast ruling his domain too long. Ilia, always in white shirt and black tie, was an unrelentingly neat rebel. Adler, on the other hand, with his gray mane uncombed, his thick glasses loose on his nose, his perpetually strained voice (whose cracked eloquence struck Trotsky)-Adler must have seemed to Ilk like the Herr Professor of a passe revolution.

Yet Ilia and Adler had surprisingly much in common. Nationalism with a Nietzschean twist had launched them both into politics. Ilia had joined Young Bosnia, the student group of teetotalers. Their South Slav "Will to Power," fueled by Nietzsche, troubled Austrian authorities in 1914. Nearly forty years earlier Austrian authorities had been troubled by Adler's friends for similar reasons. In Vienna, police agents had monitored a student organization that mixed vegetarianism, populism, and a pan-German weltanschauung into a radical brew. At its meetings young Gustav Mahler had pounded out "Deutschland, Deutschland fiber Alles" on the piano, young Viktor Adler had declaimed insurrectionary verse, but its lodestar-like Young Bosnia's decades later-had been Friedrich Nietzsche, then still alive and unwell, seething brilliantly among his sleeping potions and headache pills. Indeed on Nietzsche's birthday, October 18, 1877, Viktor Adler had signed a letter to the master, acclaiming him as "our luminous and transporting guide."

What had inspired Adler's group in the 1870s appealed to Princip and Ilia in 1914-Nietzsche's pronunciamento that for the fulfilled life man needed to be doubly divine: divine like Dionysus, god of the orgiastic joy harvested from the heroic deed (a deity often represented by an Apis-like bull!); divine also like Apollo, god of the serenity harvested from contemplative reason.

Now, in the spring of 1914, Ilic's friend Princip acted out the Dionysian principle of his favorite Nietzsche poem:

Everything that I have becomes coal.

Flame am I, surely…

Dionysian bullets were singing through a man-shaped tree stump in a Belgrade Park. In Munich, Adolf Hitler-another young temperance fanatic-was burning to lead a Dionysian master race. (Hitler's last birthday gift to Mussolini in 1943: The Collected Works of Nietzsche.) In Vienna during the Great War, Viktor Adler's son Friedrich-named after Friedrich Nietzsche-would commit a Dionysian crime; he would shoot and kill the Austrian Prime Minister von Stdrgkh at the restaurant Meissl & Schadn. Adler Senior, however, as befits an elderly asthmatic revolutionary of middle-class origins, had fallen back on Nietzsche's more sedate Apollonian aspects. By 1914, he no longer saw the superman as the hero of some magically wild folk poem but as a rational social being, no longer as the superb Teuton but as the emancipated proletarian. To help the worker liberate his brethren, the Party must give him an education.

The new proletarian didn't need to storm the Bastille. But he had to master a syllabus. Only by unshackling his mind could the worker free himself of injustice. "The revolution of consciousness," Adler had written, "must progress along with the revolution in economics."

By 1914, Viktor Adler had been spearheading that revolution for twenty-five years. Since he had led it in Vienna, he'd had to lead it against Vienna. He had to fight the genius loci that let the poor waltz through their poverty. He had to take on the elan with which the city painted carnival across squalor; fight the handkissing done in rags; fight the wine songs sung by starvelings; fight the heraldic fairy tales framing lives of grime.

"One thing is needful," Nietzsche had said, "namely, giving style to one's character." Victor Adler made the worker acquire character by cultivating a new style. Instead of whining sentimental ditties about Alt-Wien, Socialist choirs rehearsed songs about union organizers. Instead of all that tavern reminiscing about Empress Elizabeth, the people rediscovered the revolution of 1848 through slide shows at the Party's Adult Education Centers. Instead of dissipating their leisure with alcohol or gambling or prostitutes, they joined the Party's Gymnasts' or Alpinists' or Bikers' clubs. The Party organized and sanitized the workers' lives, and thus vitalized their resistance against exploitation.

Through all that, Austro-Marxism had produced "the world's most educated proletarians." Furthermore it elected a plurality envied by its competitors. At the Austrian Parliament dissolved in 1914, the Socialists commanded 84 out of 504 members. This stood out as an impressive number in a legislature that was a crazy quilt of many little ideological patches.

Yet the nature of the Party's strength also produced its insulation. It was a quasi-Nietzschean elite operating in a most un-Nietzschean ambiance. To become strong, it had purged its members of their Austrian indulgences. Adler had fashioned a political masterpiece against the Viennese grain; therefore its strength stood isolated. Other parties might have connected with it in terms of common strategy, if not program. But in character the Socialists were too alien for coalitions or even negotiations. Austro-Marxism lacked the leverage of brother movements in other countries.

In 1914 even more than in previous years, Viktor Adler knew that his Party must not be a weak link of the international workers' alliance. Shadows had begun to jut across Europe's borders. Governments of major powers speechified louder than ever about national interests, patriotic valor, and automated battleships. France heard German sabers rattling. Germany protested its encirclement by England, France, and Russia. Russia denounced Austria's pushiness in the Balkans. And Austria countered sharply; statements from Count von Berchtold's Foreign Ministry on the Ballhausplatz, editorials in the Ballhausplatz-inspired press, all used an especially martial tone to prove that Habsburg was not crippled by the illness of the Emperor.

Yet at the same time the masses had grown more sensitive to the menace of war. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg had just been tried for inciting troops to mutiny: If Germans were asked to murder Frenchmen-she had said in publicGermans would refuse. A court had sent her to jail for a year, but the sentence did not dim the pacifism of German Socialists or the popularity of their party. In the Berlin parliament their plurality topped their comrades' in Vienna. No less than 35 percent of all Reichstag deputies wore the red ribbon in their lapels. In France, the people would go to the polls on May 10; all signs pointed to a Socialist triumph bound to reduce the three-year conscription. In Russia the Tsar must face strikes spreading to armament factories.

Socialist advances elsewhere would soon stare AustroMarxism in the face. It was in Vienna that the leaders of Europe's proletariats were to convene for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Socialist International. Their meeting was scheduled to begin on August 23 at the Grosser Musikvereinssaal, with Viktor Adler as host.

The prospect charged Adler's agenda in the spring of 1914. It was time to overcome the insulation of his Party; to show comrades abroad and at home that Austrian Socialism could contribute crucially to the International's chorus: "More Bread, Fewer Guns, No War!"

For such a purpose, May Day of 1914 would be an exhilarating reveille. Most of Viktor Adler's politics appealed to the intellect. But May Day spoke to the body's sensuousness. Therefore it was only appropriate that Viktor Adler had invented the May Day March in the apartment later occupied by Sigmund Freud at Berggasse 19: May Day stoked the Socialist libido. The great march ritualized and rhapsodized ideals presented by the Party much more soberly during the rest of the year. In brief, May Day's Apollonian orderliness had always carried Dionysian voltage. No wonder that the sight of the march had overwhelmed Hitler at twenty-three, or that its memory in Hitler's brain would later set brown-shirted ecstatics goose-stepping behind the swastika. No wonder May Day had electrified Gustav Mahler, Viktor Adler's cohort in their Nietzschean salad days. As Socialist leader, Viktor Adler defined May Day as a "waking call." As mature composer, Mahler intended to title his Third Symphony The Gay Science (in tribute to Nietzsche's book of the same name) and began its first movement with a "Weckruf" (waking call) to rouse the dormant Nietzschean life force. No wonder that Richard Strauss was to remark that whenever he conducted Mahler's Third he would always imagine, during the First Movement, "uncountable battalions of workers marching to the May Day celebration in Vienna's Prater." No wonder that Mahler at the end of his career, by then the aging apolitical Director of the Vienna Opera, had suddenly recaptured the ardor of his youth on a May First. Leaving an opera rehearsal, he had run into the workers' procession by accident, joined it on impulse, stuck with it to the very end, and came home at night "vibrant with brotherliness."

That had been in 1905. Now it was 1914. Mahler was dead. Viktor Adler was old, suffering from cardiac edema. Yet he remained as determined a workers' leader as ever. This year of all years, the May Day march needed juice, resolve, will. Yet just this year the march faced unusual jeopardy. At any moment the Emperor might die. His successor Franz Ferdinand might cancel all celebrations. True, so far Franz Joseph had survived a fever that would have killed most other octogenarians. Yet his very lingering posed a problem for May First. In many an Austrian Socialist there lurked a covert monarchist. Would there be a reluctance to join the Red festival while the father of the country fought for breath?

***

At most of the twenty-five May Days so far, the sky had been clear and comradely in Vienna. This year weather forecasters were wary. Still, May 1, 1914, dawned with a plenitude of sun. What's more, the Emperor's pneumonia did not dampen class consciousness. Workers poured out of the slums. By the hundreds they gathered as craft groups at many different assembly points: tailors, bakers, mechanics, glove-makers. By the thousands the groups merged on the Ringstrasse, adding multitudes as they went. By the tens of thousands they crossed the Danube Canal bridges. As a host of hundreds of thousands they converged on the Prater. There in the park they were the First Movement of Mahler's Third become flesh, ready for the crescendo.

At that point it was just past noon. Above a moving sea of heads the heavens had turned from blue to gray. But clouds had become irrelevant. There was such brightness surging through the streets: band after band intoning the "Internationale" or playing workers' songs; banners calling for an eighthour day; banners demanding apartments with plumbing; banners condemning alcohol as the capitalists' confederate; banners exhorting the government to recall Parliament, to spend less money on guns, to ease conscription, to keep peace.

Arms locked, the marchers chanted their grievances and sang out their hopes. And this May Viktor Adler had added a new touch-"Red Cavalry," made up of battalions of bicyclists. Their legs pistoning in unison, their bike wheels festooned with red carnations, they held trumpets to their mouths and made the town echo with fanfares that galvanized onlookers into cheers. Topping it all were delegations from abroad as heralds of the International's Congress to come: carpenters from Germany in their guild dress of top hats, black scarves, and gray bell-bottom trousers; French steel workers in blue aprons and metal caps; booted Italian miners waving lit lanterns.

The entire, enormous crowd came to a halt on the largest Prater meadow, just as the first drops fell. Thunder overrode the greetings of the intial speaker. Within a minute rain flooded down. Hail peppered the deluge. The throng fled into the Prater's inns, restaurants, and coffeehouses. Here labor's holiday continued in jam-packed solidarity but also in an unscheduled key. Had the weather held, the workers would have listened in orderly rows as orators outside exhorted them to valor and temperance and discipline for the ongoing struggle. Now, munching sausage, sitting on each other's laps or even on banners condemning liquor, they toasted their comradeship with bottles of Gumpoldskirchner. Of course at the Inn to the Brown Stag where Viktor Adler himself had taken refuge, one drank only coffee or orange soda. Still, Adler must have known that this May Day had come to an end more Viennese than planned.

Spring was taking a precarious turn for all three of Vienna's grand old men. The downpour spoiled Victor Adler's fete; it exacerbated his asthma for the next few days. Helpless stethoscopes surrounded Franz Joseph's bed. And the patriarch of psychosomatic medicine found his health in straits just as his Emperor's pneumonia reached a crisis. The coincidence may not have been coincidental.

During the winter of 1914 Freud had been suffering intermittently from colitis. In mid-April his symptoms persisted to a worrisome degree. He began to suspect a tumor of the colon.

Things were greening and sprouting in the Vienna Woods, but this spring the doctor lost his taste for mushroom hunts. He felt too tired for noontime walks around the Ring. What energy he had, he gave to his work and to the fisticuffs disguised as monographs within the International PsychoAnalytical Association.

Especially to the last. The association's politics, like those of the Balkans, had been steadily tensing. Until the end of 1913 Freud had hoped if not for peace, at least for a truce with his Swiss adversary, Carl Jung. In the course of the year Freud's allies had rallied around him in lectures and papers; they'd directed a scholarly scorn at the "dogmas from Zurich" (particularly at Jung's de-sexualization of the libido into general psychic energy). Freud himself, however, had refrained from all personal sallies. As if to fortify his restraint he kept refining his "Moses of Michelangelo," that essay in praise of conciliation. Yet at the same time he took a certain partisan pleasure in the response to his recent Totem and Taboo. The psychoanalytic intellegentsia took note that Totem scintillated on the symbology of primitive man, the very field Jung claimed as his own.

In early 1914 Freud had begun to take a more decided role in the campaign. He used a paper begun during his Roman summer of 1913. Then, between trips to the Moses statue in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, he had blocked out "On Narcissism: an Introduction." Later, in Vienna, polishing the essay during the spring of 1914, he fashioned it into something of a stiletto: He included a very pointed though still civil revision of Jung's ideas on the subject.

Meanwhile the enemy was not sitting still. Jung was preparing to pluck once more at the prophet's beard through upcoming lectures in Scotland. Rumors to that effect filtered fast to Vienna. As if to confirm them, Jung publicly protested against Freud-inspired "aspersions on my bona fides" and resigned as editor of the Psycho-Analytic Yearbook.

For Freud this was a signal to stop all appeasement. He had long repressed the militancy of his resentment. The speed with which it surfaced now can be gauged from two sentences from two different letters. "I have no desire for separation," he had written about Jung on June 1, 1913, ". perhaps my Totem paper will bring on the breach against my will." On January 12, 1914, he wrote, working on another paper, ". I expect that this statement of mine will put an end to all compromises and bring about the desired rupture."

General Conrad could not have expressed better his impatience with formal ties to a foe. After all, Belgrade still maintained diplomatic relations with Vienna, just as Jung was still President of Freud's International Psycho-Analytical Association. In contrast to the General, however, Freud wore the crown of his realm and could fire off ultimatums at will. "This statement" that would cause "the desired rupture" was a manuscript he had started just before New Year's when he also labored on "Narcissism" and "Moses of Michelangelo." For Freud it was a season of astonishingly diverse industriousness that continued as the months grew warmer and his colitis worse. Yet regardless of other worries or chores, Freud kept working on this "statement" designed to kill all "compromises" with the Jungians. He wanted to publish it in the next issue of the Psycho-Analytic Yearbook from which Jung had just resigned.

The "statement" was a "polemic" as Freud himself more closely defined it. Its title: "On the History of Psycho-Analysis." Despite the neutral tag, it articulated (in the words of the editor of Freud's Standard Edition) "the fundamental postulates and hypotheses of psycho-analysis to show that the theories of… Jung were totally incompatible with them."

***

Advance word of the Freud offensive reached Jung in the early months of 1914. Soon afterward the Freud-controlled Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psycho-Analyse loosed a barrage of hostile comment at Jung-influenced monographs. The strategy took. On April 20 Jung completed the breach. He resigned from the Presidency of the International Psycho-Analytical Association.

"I am tired of leniency and kindness." Freud made that confession in a letter of May 17, three months after finishing the Moses essay in which he had embraced leniency and kindness. How well tuned he was to the world's mood in 1914. How quickly his Apollo had changed to Dionysus. And how mortal he remained, just like the world's other Dionysians. In midMay his intestinal symptoms, ever worsening, forced him to comply with his physician's demand. He submitted to a detailed examination by a specialist on cancer of the colon.

On may 12, 1914, two men in civilian clothes, yet attended by orderlies, had tea in the sitting room of a hotel suite in Carlsbad. One of them had obviously come to the spa for a purpose other than a cure. At sixty-two General Conrad was trim and fit, still a terrier primed to pounce. The tic of his left eye punctuated his energy, the crispness and speed of his motions. His handsome face, topped by the mane of gold and gray, glowed with a tan earned on horseback during spring maneuvers.

His German counterpart slumped in an armchair as though he were much more than only four years older. General Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of Staff of the Kaiser's armed forces, needed the healing waters badly. Ungainly, flabby, bald, he was not at all well in stomach or kidney. Nor fortunate with certain wrinkles in his disposition. To offset these he read Nietzsche as the Muse of Power and he often talked about Thomas Carlyle's books showing that history was made by heroes. Still, he couldn't help proclivities odd for the principal warrior of the Junkers. He was a cello-playing Christian Scientist with a penchant for esoteric cults. At night, when nobody was watching, he translated Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande from the French. He suggested a frayed, bruised poet, possibly androgynous, definitely overweight.

The Kaiser called Moltke "der traurige Julius" (sad Julius). High-echelon wags in Berlin claimed that he was not sad, just hurting with bruises from his falls from the saddle. As a source of many a grin, the horsemanship of the Chief of Staff contributed to the lighter side of official life in Berlin. One of his celebrated tumbles had been in front of the equestrian statue of his uncle, the Helmuth von Moltke, the great Field Marshal von Moltke, victor over Napoleon III in the war of 1870.

The comparison afflicted the lesser von Moltke all his life. So did the conflict between his duty, which must be remorseless, and his intelligence, which was considerable. "The next war," he had told the Kaiser a few years earlier, "will be a national war. It will not be settled by one decisive battle but will be a long wearisome struggle with an enemy who will not be overcome until his whole national force is broken… a war which will utterly exhaust our own people even if we are victorious." Yet here he sat, in May 1914, discussing the next war. It was von Moltke's job to map out the catastrophe of victory.

Of course General Conrad suffered from none of his colleague's pangs or qualms. He had journeyed to Carlsbad ostensibly to underline in person what he had written Berlin in several memoranda; namely that Serbia's provocations in Albania and elsewhere could no longer go unanswered. Bel grade, he told the German Chief of Staff, was presuming too much on the patience of Conrad's imperial masters (an allusion to Crown Prince Ferdinand's pacifism and the caution of Franz Joseph, now so sick). A day of reckoning was at hand. It would put the German-Austrian alliance to a test. Conrad said he wanted to make sure that he and his Berlin confrere agreed on all the mechanics of the partnership.

Conrad, in other words, was fishing for reassurance. If Russia and France rushed to Serbia's aid, could Austria count on instant, unconditional German support? Conrad did not ask the question outright. But it hung in the air. Obviously it was the reason for his visit.

In his response von Moltke had to take into account his Imperial master's philosophy. The Kaiser preferred easy braggadocio to nasty hard work like conducting a major war. And so von Moltke said that he hoped the world's peace would not be hostage to some petty Balkan adventurism. But he also said-swallowing a liver pill with a bitter grimace-that Kaiser Wilhelm was not the kind of leader who ever let his guard down. Germany could not ignore recent developments like those huge French loans to Russia and Serbia that were so plainly meant to finance armaments; or Russia's feverish overhaul of her transportation system to speed troop movements to the German border. The Triple Entente-von Moltke shrugged a weary shoulder as he referred to the camp consisting of Russia, France, and Great Britain-always carried on about German aggressiveness. These countries didn't realize that Kaiser Wilhelm would never raise his mailed fist except in defense of his or his ally's legitimate interests. All the hysteria in the Russian press, for example, about the naval implications of the recent widening of the Kiel Canal. True, German battleships could now steam directly from the North Sea to the Baltic. But that was a safeguard necessary in view of moves made by the Triple Entente-like the joint BritishRussian fleet maneuvers planned in the Baltic Sea.

Conrad nodded with a vengeance: just what he was always emphasizing in Vienna-the Central Powers were only catching up-in fact, not catching up fast enough, wouldn't His Excellency agree?

Von Moltke's counternod lacked his colleague's vim. Still, it was a nod. Yes, von Moltke said. Russia in particular was moving swiftly toward readiness. The later the showdown, the worse. "Before I took my leave," Conrad would write in his memoirs, "I again asked General von Moltke how long, in his view, the double war against Russia and France would last before Germany could turn with a strong force on Russia alone. Moltke: 'We hope to be finished with France six weeks after the commencement of operations, or at least finished to a degree that we can transfer our main strength to the East.' "

Colonel Edward House, Woodrow Wilson's adviser, did not eavesdrop on this scene. But he happened to be touring Europe at that time on a mission for the American President. He was to collect information for a plan by which Wilson might calm down the continent. And the American did catch the mood producing conversations such as the one in Carlsbad. "The situation is extraordinary," he reported on May 29, 1914, from Berlin to the White House. "It is militarism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about a different understanding, there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred. Too many jealousies."

It turned out that the White House must tend to belligerence much closer to home. American nationals had been abused in Mexico. In April, Marines had seized Vera Cruz. By May the United States stood on the brink of war with its Southern neighbor. Woodrow Wilson faced too much New World trouble to straighten out the Old.

Lenin in 1914. Culver Pictures, Inc.

Stalin ca. 1914. Culver Pictures, Inc.

Hitler amid the crowd acclaiming the German declaration of war on Russia. Date: August 1, 1914. Place: Odeonplatz, Munich. Culver Pictures, Inc.

Dapper Leon Trotsky's passport photograph, 1914.

Viktor Adler, leader of Austria's Socialist Party. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

A married couple in love: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

General Conrad von Hotzendorf, Chief of Staff of Austria's Armed Forces. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

Emperor Franz Joseph strolling with his lady love, the actress Katharina Schratt, in Bad Ischl. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

Sigmund Freud with his daughter Anna on summer holiday in the Dolomites shortly before his confrontation with Jung at the International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Munich in September 1913. Mary Evans-Sigmund Freud Copyrights, Colchester

Chess players and kibitzers at the Cafe Central. Werner J. Schweiger

Ball at the Imperial Palace in Vienna. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

Caricature of Karl Kraus, Vienna's preeminent satirist, peddling his periodical, Die Fackel. Die Muskete

Emperor Franz Joseph in his hunting costume in Bad Ischl. Ost. Staatsarchiv-Kriegsarchiv

The assassin Gavrilo Princip (right) with his co-conspirator Trifko Graben (left) and a friend on a bench in Belgrade's Kalmedgan Park, May 1914. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

Count Leopold von Berchtold, Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

June 12, 1914, sixteen days before the assassination: The Kaiser visits Franz Ferdinand at Konopiste. From left to right: The Archduke in the uniform of the 10th Prussian Uhlan Regiment; his wife, the Duchess Hohenberg; the Kaiser in hunting costume, having his hand kissed by one of the Archduke's sons. Archiv Gunther Ossmann, Wien

The Chief of Serbia's Intelligence Bureau, Colonel Dragutin C. Dimitrijevic, flanked by aides. Also known by the code name "Apis," he was the head of the Serbian terrorist organization The Black Hand, which funded the assassins. B ildarch iv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

Konopiste. The esplanade leading to the rose garden at Archduke Franz Ferdinand's castle. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

June 28, 1914, ten minutes before the assassination: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife leave Sarajevo City Hall. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

The death car: Franz Ferdinand and his wife in the back seat with Count Harrach standing on the running board. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek

The assassin Princip just after his arrest. Culver Pictures, Inc.

But the arithmetic of the militarism alarming Colonel House was indeed awesome. Despite Socialist resistance, the Berlin parliament had raised the peacetime strength of the German military establishment from 660,000 to nearly 800,000. The three-year conscription period added enormous striking power to the French army. Within four years Russia's preparedness program had increased her forces by 500,000 men to 1,300,000, and her forces were growing still. In a similar span Austria had expanded her army from 400,000 to half a million. "We spend half as much on armaments as Germany," wrote the Socialist ArbeiterZeitung soon after the Generals' High Tea at Carlsbad, "yet Austria's gross product is only one-sixth of Germany's. In other words, we spend proportionately three times as much on war as Kaiser Wilhelm. Must we play Big Power at the cost of poverty and hunger?"

As these words were published on May 29, a cold spell shivered through the Vienna Woods. Twenty-four hours later the sun returned. Again lilacs flashed, cuckoos called, kites soared above apple blossoms in the hills wreathing the city. At almost the same time the First Lord Chamberlain made a smiling announcement at Schonbrunn Palace. The congestion in His Majesty's lungs had cleared. Most signs of pneumonia were gone and so was the fever. The august patient was making a strong recovery. In fact, His Majesty's physicians had reason to hope that he would be able to return to a normal schedule in about two weeks.

***

The legend of Franz Joseph could continue, perhaps, forever, in the flesh. And from the trivial to the crucial, everything seemed to change for the better along the Danube. Nevetle, a yearling from the stable of Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold, came in first at the Freudenau races in Vienna. This brightened the wit of upper officials supping at Meissl & Schadn. They were familiar with certain perfumed coaches often waiting at a side entrance of the Minister's offices at the Ballhausplatz. To them the fact that his filly had won the Con Amore handicap signified that-with the Emperor improved-the Count's continued tenure would also continue his luck in the conduct of affairs, be they foreign or female.

Indeed, private sport aside, the Foreign Minister could point with satisfaction to news important to the world at large. At a meeting with legislative leaders he quoted a statement just made by the French Prime Minister: It expressed deep admiration for the wisdom with which Franz Joseph-so recently restored-guided the destiny of the realm. Count von Berchtold also mentioned that the King of England had confirmed his intention to hunt with Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in Austria come fall. For Serbia the Count had words of hope and moderation. (Of Albanian complexities he said nothing, possibly because they were simply too complex: On the one hand, the insurrection against the mbret had caused half his government to resign and himself to seek refuge on the Italian warship Misurata; on the other hand, the mbret had created yet another decoration, the Order of the White Star of Skanderbeg, whose glitter on the breasts of some disorderly majors re-ordered things to the point where the mbret could slink back to his capital again.) On the whole the Austrian Foreign Minister was happy to conclude that Cassandra wails about the imminence of war were as unfounded as earlier evil rumors about the imminence of the monarch's death.

Berchtold was not the only one to exude optimism. Early in June his Berlin colleague Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg sent the German ambassador in London a note whose cheer contrasts with the grimness of the generals at Carlsbad just a couple of weeks before. The German Chancellor said that he could not blame Russia for wanting a stronger voice in the Balkans and that "I do not believe that Russia is planning an early war against us. Whether it will come to a general European conflagration will depend entirely on the attitude of Germany and England. If we two stand united as guarantors of European peace… then war can be averted."

A few days later, on June 24 (three days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand's arrival in Sarajevo), the German ambassador reported a most amiable chat with Sir Edward Grey, the English Foreign Secretary: "The Secretary said that it was his endeavour to go hand in hand with us [Germans] into the future and to remain in close contact over all the questions that might arise… As regards Russia, he had not the slightest reason to doubt the peaceful intentions of the Russian government. Nothing could take place that would give this relationship [between Russia and England] an aggressive point against Germany. He believed moreover that lately a less apprehensive frame of mind on the question had been gaining ground with us in Germany. " The Foreign Ministers kept soothing, the chimneys of gun factories kept smoking.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Vladimir Lenin did not anticipate war. When the Socialist International had called an Emergency Conference in Basel in 1912 on the threat of a worldwide conflict, he had not bothered to attend. Soon afterward he'd written to Gorki: "A war between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the revolution in all of Eastern Europe, but it is not likely that Franz Joseph and [Tsar] Nikolosha will give us that pleasure."

Now, in May 1914, Lenin had no eye for international clouds. It was not war between nations that was on his mind but the battle between factions within Socialism. He spent his huge energies on carving out an ever stronger Bolshevik position vis-a-vis the milksop Mensheviks and all other rivals contending for leadership of the revolutionary movement. From Poronin in the Galician mountains, on the Habsburg side of the Austrian-Russian frontier, Lenin's letters and couriers kept streaming into the Tsar's territory. They carried instructions on how to increase still further the circulation gains of the St. Petersburg Pravda that had put the Menshevik paper Luch out of business; how to spread Bolshevik control of the Metal Workers' Brotherhood so that Bolsheviks would dominate related trade unions as well; how to encourage a trio of Moscow millionaires-who hoped to liberalize the Tsar by encouraging pressure from the savage left-in the financing of Bolshevik activities. Lenin's chief purpose that spring: to present an array of Bolshevik voices as powerful as possible at the Unity Conference of all Russian Socialist Party segments set for July 1914 in Brussels, and then to march fully mobilized into the Congress of the Socialist International to open in Vienna on August 26.

Meanwhile Dr. Sigmund Freud girded for intramural grapeshot at his Congress-that of the International PsychoAnalytical Association scheduled for September 1914 at Dresden. Now, three months earlier, it was apple-blossom time in Vienna and at Berggasse headquarters "war" meant "Jung."

After all, relentless pressure from Freud's forces had just pushed the Swiss psychiatrist out of the presidency of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. Some sort of counterblow from Zurich must be expected. Yet June started the way May ended-quite clemently.

For one thing, evaluation had been completed of the tests Freud had undergone-with excellent news. There was no sign whatsoever of any intestinal tumor. Soon afterward Freud's symptoms subsided. His fear of cancer vanished together with his Emperor's pneumonia. As for the Freud-Jung front, the first salvo from the enemy was subtle rather than searing. Jung fired it by way of his address to the British Medical Association in Aberdeen: "The Unconscious in Psycho-Pathology." The speech abolished psychoanalysis, at least in Jung's vocabulary: He didn't so much as mention the word. But except through omission he didn't attack Freud's movement either; at one point he even credited his former mentor with calling attention to the importance of dreams.

Of course that sort of gesture furthered the aims of ill will by a show of good manners. At the same time it produced a sort of lull. Freud could-almost-return to normal business. He devoted himself to the famous Wolf Man case. Here Freud traced a phobia of wolves to the patient's glimpse, at a very young age, of his parents copulating a tergo. In truth, one aspect of the paper was yet another chapter of the anti-Jung argument. Jung held that such primal scenes were usually a neurotic fantasy. Freud maintained they were real. But in the Wolf Man paper he softened the collision between dogmas by admitting that the difference might not be "a matter of very great importance."

The war with Jung was on, but at this point it did not require any very ugly waging. Freud looked forward to his summer cure at Carlsbad in a mood much brighter than that of the two chiefs of staff who had taken the waters there some weeks earlier.

Vienna perked up during the last weeks of spring. At one of Princess Metternich's famed "mixed dinners," industrialists heard from courtiers proof of Franz Joseph's complete recovery: Once more His Majesty was taking walks in the Schonbrunn Palace gardens with his one and only Frau Schratt. This unofficial but adorable bulletin lifted the stock market to the level from which it had dropped at the onset of the All-Highest illness.

The weather was genial. It had the good taste to rain only at night. The sun seemed to have melted away most angry demonstrations along the Ringstrasse. Those controversies still left in town showed a luscious Viennese sheen. At the Cafe Central, Havanas were puffed, mochas were sipped, chocolate eclairs were being forked as the disputants faced the issues: Was Gustav Mahler's adaptation of Hugo Wolf's Der Corregidor really as calamitous as some reviews complained? Or did its problem reside not in the music but in the flawed presentation? And was the culprit of that flaw an opera management known for its anti-Mahler bias after the great maestro had passed? And for how long would that same straitlaced management keep Richard Strauss's voluptuous Salome out of its repertoire? And, still speaking of the Court Opera, did diva Selma Kurz deserve ten curtain calls for her Lucia di Lam- mermoor? Shifting to ballet, what about Pavlova's Directoire dress-wasn't that a bit out of key when she danced the gavotte, no matter how dazzling her entrechats? And had Frank Wedekind enhanced his own play Samson by not only directing it but also taking on the role of Og, King of the Philistines? Or was it time for that rather weathered eroticist to let go of the greasepaint?

Outside Austria thornier themes drew grimmer contestants. In Great Britain, it was Irish against English as well as English women against English men. Suffragettes threatened to kidnap members of the royal family who would then be ransomed for the right to vote. The King could no longer take his morning ride through Hyde Park. Shouting ladies kept waylaying his horse. In France, the Socialist victory at the May elections showed popular resentment of the three-year conscription term while at the same time hardening President Poincare's insistence on it; the conflict produced daily melees between people and police. Russian strikes stopped factory wheels from Moscow to Tiflis. The Duma at St. Petersburg had become so rowdy that even the nicely cravated Alexander Kerensky of the usually well-behaved Labor Party had to be escorted from the chamber for causing a disruption.

But it was Serbia-Russia's protege, Austria's bane-that shook with the most severe domestic turmoil. In Serbia the opposition between the two most powerful political camps sharpened toward a showdown. Prime Minister Pasic led one side; his Radical Party stood for measured nationalism. As nationalist, Pasic proclaimed Serbia's right to defend her interests (and pocketed, some said, commissions from the French firm Schneider-Creuzot, which was producing arms for Serbia's defense). But as a man of measure, Pasic feared that excessive action against Austria would risk a crisis before Serbia was ready. He suspected that zealots, mostly officers, would use war to usurp the government.

Pasic's chief opponent was the chief zealot: Colonel Apis, officially head of Army Intelligence, secretly leader of the Black Hand. Apis would accept nothing less than the most drastic fulfillment of the Serb cause, above all the breaking of Habsburg chains that bound Slav brethren in Austrian Bosnia.

In the spring of 1914, Belgrade simmered with the incompatibility between Pasic and Apis. The Prime Minister dismissed Apis's main supporter in the cabinet, Minister of War Milos Bozanovic. Apis's side retaliated through the periodical Pijemont. "A gang of men without conscience," it said about Pasic's party in May 1914, "… this government cannot be tolerated for a moment or rebellion will break out in our country." Apis had no public connection to the paper publishing the attack. Yet Belgrade recognized him as the target of the counterattack when the Minister of the Interior banned Pije- mont. Gendarmes summoned from the countryside patrolled Belgrade's streets: Serbia's other armed force had been alerted against an army coup.

Vienna took note of Serb frictions but not of their deeper implications. Just at the end of May, the Chief of Austrian Intelligence-the one man in Vienna most likely to know Belgrade behind the scenes-retired abruptly. Apis's Habsburg counterpart, Colonel "Ostrymiecz" von Urbanski, was pensioned off. (The War Ministry did not deny rumors that he had been caught selling to a film producer memorabilia of his late associate Colonel Redl, the famous and now posthumously cinemagenic traitor.) The loss of its director disoriented Austria's information gathering service. Yet even at its best it would not have sniffed out an event in Belgrade of which not even the Serbian Prime Minister had an inkling.

Underground, in the cellar of a shabby house, three young men went through a ceremony whose consequences would explode over millions of square miles of the world above.

On the night of May 27, 1914, Gavrilo Princip and his two disciples walked down seven steps on Krakjice Natalije Street into a small room in the basement. They were met by a figure robed and hooded in black.

"Who among you three speaks for the others?"

"I do," said Princip, the youngest and smallest.

"Do you know one important reason why you are going to execute this mission?"

"Because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is the oppressor of our people."

"Do you know when you are going to execute this mission?"

"When the oppressor comes to Sarajevo."

"When will that be?"

"On June 28. That is another important reason-that day. He dares to come there on St. Vitus Day."

"And what is a third important reason?"

Princip hesitated. He knew that on St. Vitus Day, June 28 of the year 1389, a Serb hero had penetrated the lines of the conquering Turkish army to stab its generalissimo Sultan Murad to death, thereby establishing the date for the Serbian national holiday. He knew that the appearance of a Habsburg prince on South Slav soil on just that day was a sneer at Serb pride and a second important reason for vengeance. But Princip could not think of still another important reason.

"There are many reasons," he said.

"We do not expect you to know that other special reason," the black hood said. "Very few people know it. Colonel Apis knows it. The Archduke has a special weapon. He will use it if we let him come to power. He will use the lie of moderation to steal our people's sympathy. Then he will oppress us doubly. You did not know that?"

"No," Princip said.

"Even in our country the Prime Minister uses the lie of moderation to keep himself in power. Did you know that?"

"I have heard of it."

"Are you ready to fight such liars with all means?"

"Yes."

"Are the three of you ready?"

"Yes."

Pause.

"You may go into the next room."

The next room was lit by a single candle on a table draped in black, against walls also draped in black. The candle flickered at three men sitting behind the table in black robes and black hoods. Before them, arranged in a circle around the flame, lay an unsheathed dagger, a skull, a crucifix, a revolver, a bottle with a death's head label. This was the altar of Smrt ili Zivot, the Bosnian arm of Colonel Apis's Black Hand.

The black hood in the middle motioned the three youths to step forward. Line by line he began to recite the oath, which they repeated after him, line by line:

"I swear by the holiness of the cross…"

"I swear by the preciousness of liberty…"

"I swear by the sun that warms me. "

"And the earth that nourishes me…"

`7 swear by God in heaven. "

"By my ancestors' blood…"

"By my honor and my life…"

"As true as I am a Serb and a man. "

"That from this day on until the moment of my death…"

"I shall remain faithful to every law of this organization…"

" I shall be ever r e a d y to s a c r i f i c e f o r it…"

"To suffer for it. "

" T o die f o r it…"

"And I swear to take all its secrets with me to the grave…"

The hooded men rose to their feet. Each man reached into the pocket of his black robe. Each pulled out a little cardboard box. Each box contained a capsule of cyanide. The three hooded men handed the three little boxes to the three youths. Each of the hooded three embraced each of the youths. Not another word was spoken. The candle was blown out. The three hooded men remained in the dark. The three youths groped toward the door.

The next morning, on Thursday, May 28, 1914, Princip and his two companions boarded a steamer anchored at a Bel grade dock. They carried small suitcases and wore loose overcoats. Under his coat, each of the three had two bombs tied around his waist. Each also carried a revolver in one trouser pocket, ammunition in a second pocket, and in a third, instantly handy, the capsule of cyanide.

It was a misty, sleepy day. Slowly the ship began to plow upstream on the river Sava, westward toward Sarajevo.

Eight days later, on June 5, his excellency Jovan Jovanovic, the Serbian envoy to Vienna, bowed himself into the gold-onwhite rococo of the office of the Habsburg Minister of Finance Leon von Bilinski. For intricate Viennese reasons Bilinski doubled as Minister in charge of the Austrian province of Bosnia-Hercegovina; in that capacity he ushered his visitor to a chair. Bosnia abutted on Serbia, and the visitor had come on a queasy errand.

After an exchange of courtesies all the more elaborate for the tension between the two countries, Jovanovic ceremonially cleared his throat. It was his duty, he said, to express a certain concern of the Royal Serb Government, namely the forthcoming participation of His Imperial Highness the Arch duke Franz Ferdinand at Austrian Army exercises to be held in the Sarajevo area. Since these exercises were to take place in territory adjacent to Serbia and since they coincided with Serbia's National Day, they might provoke some regrettable actions.

"Regrettable actions?" the Austrian asked.

Yes, very regrettable, the Serbian envoy said. Under the circumstances an Austrian Army soldier of the Serb race might be misled into loading his rifle with real bullets to aim it at His Imperial Highness. Therefore the Serbian government earnestly hoped that the Austrian government would want to shift both the time and the place of the maneuvers.

It was Count von Bilinski's turn to do some throat-clearing. He replied that, first of all, the police reported peace and quiet in Bosnia, including the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. Furthermore the army exercises would take place nowhere near the Serbian border. Lastly, he had no doubt whatsoever that His Imperial Highness, the Archduke Crown Prince, enjoyed the full loyalty of the entire Austrian Armed Forces. Or did his Excellency have specific information to the contrary?

The Serbian envoy said, no, he could offer nothing specific. The concern of the Serbian Government simply reflected the general mood of the Serbian people.

Count von Bilinski gave a civil nod. His Excellency's remarks, he said, would receive the consideration they deserved. Meanwhile he was grateful to His Excellency for taking the trouble to visit him on such a lovely day. The Serbian envoy, on his part, thanked the Minister for extending him so gracious a reception. And the mendacities of etiquette continued until the gold-on-white doors closed on the encounter.

***

Of course the envoy's visit had been prompted by some quite specific information. It had been relayed to Serbia's premier Panic by his Minister of the Interior: A contact at the frontier had reported that on the night from June 1 to June 2 three young men, heavily armed, had been spirited across the river Drina which separated Serbia from Austrian Bosnia.

The purpose and identity of the youths were not known. Known to the Prime Minister, however, were the ways of the Black Hand. Known, too, was the Archduke's forthcoming presence in Sarajevo as well as the Black Hand's motives for turning him into a corpse. Decked out in Serb patriotism, they aimed at sedition against the Serb government. A murder of that enormity would cause an imbroglio convenient for the Black Hand-a chance to seize power.

Prime Minister Pagic could not idly turn his back while such a scheme moved forward, could not let killers, dispatched by Apis across the Drina River, continue toward the Archduke. He must warn Austria. But the warning must be masked. After all, Apis was still Chief of Serbian Army Intelligence. Pagic had not been able to dislodge that bald monster. By giving Austria specifics about a possible assassination, he might be giving away clues leading to the complicity of a high Serbian official and so incriminate the whole country. Hence a compromise: Panic instructed his envoy to alert Austria but to omit any genuine details.

In Vienna Bilinski did as he was done to. He was just as cunning about not telling the truth just as careful. He told neither the Archduke nor the police nor the army nor Austrian Intelligence about that visit to his office. He, too, had politic reasons.

Bilinski disliked General Potiorek, the Austrian Military Governor of Bosnia, a Serb-eating hotspur of the General Conrad stripe. If Bilinski passed on these vague, probably meaningless whispers of the Serb envoy, they would eventually benefit Potiorek. Despite their unreality, Potiorek would use them to vindicate his bias, strengthen his position. This, in turn, would heighten his insolence toward Bilinski who was his nominal superior as Minister in charge of Bosnia. And Potiorek was already insolent enough.

Potiorek had appropriated a privilege belonging to Bilinski. He, not Bilinski, had made the arrangements for the Archduke's sojourn in Bosnia; worse yet, he had then sent the Archduke's program to all ministries except Bilinski's. On top of that, Bilinski had not even received an invitation to the state dinner! Why should Bilinski play Potiorek's intelligenceassistant and feed Potiorek every scrap of information that might or might not be authentic, that might or might not help Potiorek to do his job?

Bilinski retaliated with his silence. And General Potiorek did his job by his-uninformed-lights. Of the 22,000 troops deployed near Sarajevo for maneuvers, he detailed only an honor guard for the Archduke's route in the city itself. This was to show that under Potiorek's govenorship Belgrade's propaganda had been unable to shake the allegiance of the population to the Crown: His Imperial Highness required no extra protection in Sarajevo.

But in areas other than security Potiorek launched preparations aplenty. Throughout June telegraph keys kept clicking between Potiorek's office and the archducal chancellery at Belvedere Palace in Vienna. What wines would His Imperial Highness prefer at various dinners? Would Highness like to approve the seating at all the tables? Did Highness wish to specify menus? As for the horse His Imperial Highness would grace, what would be the best saddle and which the most comfortable stirrup length? And what was Highness's exact weight, so as to select the proper mount?

There was a moment, peculiarly enough, when all these questions seemed to be asked in vain.

That moment had come the day before the Serbian envoy's visit to Bilinski. On June 4, Franz Joseph received his Heir Apparent in audience. It was the first meeting between uncle and nephew since the older man had recovered from his illness. In contrast to some previous encounters, this one seemed to proceed quite cordially. But after expressing his pleasure at seeing the Emperor so well, the Archduke made a rather unexpected reference to his own health. He had not felt very fit lately, he said. The weather down in Bosnia was bound to be hot in mid-summer. He had been asking himself whether he was in a condition to undertake the journey.

Franz Joseph looked at Franz Ferdinand. The Archduke appeared to be as robust as ever. A bit curtly the Emperor asked if the purpose of this conversation was to inform him that Franz Ferdinand did not wish to go to the Sarajevo exercises.

Oh, he did wish to go, Franz Ferdinand said. But he would be grateful if he could bring Sophie along; his wife was always a boost to his constitution.

The Emperor confessed himself puzzled. After all, he said, Sophie usually came along on maneuvers-Franz Ferdinand needed no special permission for that purpose. Yes, the Archduke said, but what he meant was that with His Majesty's gracious approval he, Franz Ferdinand, would like to have Sophie with him during the subsequent state visit to Sarajevo itself. Her presence would certainly lighten the burden.

Franz Joseph was ancient but not slow. He understood what Franz Ferdinand really meant: to make Sophie the Crown Princess at least while the two were in Sarajevo. At her husband's side she would share all the homage shown to the Crown Prince.

A tiresome issue, a tiresome audience. "Very well," Franz Joseph said. "If you go, let her go with you everywhere. Now do as you like."

That ended Franz Ferdinand's reluctance about Sarajevo, which had been no reluctance at all but rather a basis for negotiations now successfully concluded. Never mind the old man's gruffness-it was his consent that mattered. As the Archduke took his leave he kissed the Emperor's hand heartily as never before.

Never before-certainly not on Habsburg soil-had Sophie received the ceremonial respect she would soon be shown at Sarajevo. And never before had the Archduke been quite so confident of himself and of his future. The tubercle bacillus was the only assassin he truly feared. Some years earlier he'd asked his personal physician for a hand-written note: " I, Dr. Viktor Eisenmenger, hereby certify that His Imperial and Royal Highness the Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been entirely cured of tuberculosis and that he will never suffer a relapse again." When anxious, he would reach for the pocket where he always carried "my life certificate."

His staff saw him reach for it much less often in the spring of 1914. His hypochondria was receding. As for bullets or bombs, he had always been a fatalist. "Precautions?" he'd once said to his secretary. "Bodyguards? I put up with them, but that's all rubbish. We are at all times in God's hands. Worry paralyzes life."

Of course, he was not nearly as philosophical about chal lenges thrust at him by sworn enemies-the likes of General Conrad or the Emperor's First Lord Chamberlain Prince Montenuovo. Yet in June the Archduke scented victory even in that arena. He discerned it in the Emperor's consent on Sophie. He saw it-ever since the Emperor's illness-in the quality of bows and curtsies greeting him. They seemed less rigid, more spontaneous. He didn't crave acclaim as the Kaiser did, nor encourage it even indirectly like Franz Joseph. Playacting the Lord Affable was not his forte. He disliked indulging the people unnecessarily because he hated indulging himself (even his hunting mania was a pursuit as relentless on his comfort as it was on the lives of ducks and deer). But now he sensed, if not popularity, a readier acceptance of his imperial destiny.

23

FOR THE ARCHDUKE IT WAS A EUPHORIC MONTH. ON SUNDAY, JUNE 7, three days after his audience at the Palace, he attended the Vienna Derby. Last year he'd stayed away. In 1913 the occasion had still been blighted by the Redl spy case. This year the young military elite was back with its dash restored.

The grandstands swaggered with hussars and dragoons, with kepis and capes, with slim captains blowing smoke rings at baronesses whose smiles were half-shadowed by their saucy hats. Perhaps Redl had never happened. Perhaps the Empire would last. Perhaps it would not rain.

The day began quite cloudy. But when the future, in the form of the Crown Prince and his consort, entered the Imperial Box, the sun pushed through and the stands burst into ap plause. Not an overwhelming ovation, it was still a salute livelier than the kind usually tendered to Franz Ferdinand. And who must join it, willy-nilly? Prince Montenuovo in the neighboring box.

Still more satisfying was the press next morning. It revealed a certain burgeoning of the Archduke's image. In the coverage of ladies' fashion at the track, the Duchess of Hohenberg- Franz Ferdinand's Sophie-took up more space than the Archduchesses. Most reports went on and on about Sophie's white voile frock with the black sash, her long black jacket brimming with white lace, her black hat with the white visor, topped by black feathers in-regal! — tiara style…

For once, the two left Vienna with pleased faces. Arrived at their Bohemian estate at Konopiste, the Archduke toured his gardens. It was here that he would make a gesture to the populace-his very first. He had decided on it hesitantly some weeks ago. Now he briskly proceeded with its implementation.

For fifteen years he had been developing at Konopiste the greatest rose garden in Central Europe. This spring he would open its gates to the public at the very height of the blossoming. The people had begun to welcome him as their sovereignto-be. In return he would welcome them into his pleasance on June 15, from morning to night.

First, though, he must do some summit politicking over the weekend of June 12. The Kaiser was coming to Konopiste. With this visit, the display of horticulture mattered less than the cultivation of peace.

Since the occasion centered on Wilhelm, nothing about it was quite calculable, not even his choice in excess of dress. Expecting something martial, the Archduke appeared at the railroad station in the uniform of a Colonel of the 10th Prussian Uhlan Regiment. However, the Kaiser stepped out of the train in a hunting costume he'd overcoutured himself-brassbuttoned green jacket; shining black leather boots aglitter and ajingle with spurs; and the Order of St. Hubertus, patron saint of the chase, hanging from his neck. In Wilhelm's wake followed Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the creator of Germany's huge new navy, as well as Wadl and Hexl, two ferocious dachshunds.

Tirpitz's appearance made Vienna's leading newspaper comment, "How quickly the ravishing floral scent [of the Konopiste garden] can change into the smell of gun powder." As for Wadl and Hexl, they rushed off into the bushes and emerged dragging between them the body of a beautiful golden pheasant. Their kill was the only such bird in the estate, meant to be admired, not hunted.

Franz Ferdinand had to shrug off the loss. The point was to concentrate on bigger game, namely detente in Europe. He resolved not to be deterred by von Tirpitz, bristling braid, forked beard, and all. Fortunately no military retinue accompanied Kaiser or admiral. Indeed Wilhelm said that he had brought along "the sailor boy" because, like Franz Ferdinand, Tirpitz was a breeder of roses. And Franz Ferdinand took Wilhelm very firmly at his word: He sent the rose-loving Grand Admiral away on a walk into the vasts of the garden. Then he led Wilhelm to his automobile.

During long drives through his domain, tete-a-tete in the back seat, Franz Ferdinand presented his case. The argument he'd made in vain three months earlier at Miramare-here he repeated it much more forcibly: that an accommodation was possible, an accommodation was necessary between Vienna and the Serbs; but that it was constantly sabotaged by Buda pest. He really must correct, he told his guest, the good impression the Hungarian Premier Tisza had managed to make on the Kaiser. Tisza did not want the Kaiser's sharp eyes to see how Magyar chauvinism endangered not only Austria but Germany. After all, the Hungarians were a minority even in the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary. Yet under Tisza they oppressed the Slav majority there, restricted the voting rights of Serbs and Croats, provided only skimpy schooling in the Serbo-Croat tongue. And through Tisza's influence the Habsburg government refused Serbia access to the Adriatic, refused them even some flea-bitten fishing village of no naval significance. With that, Tisza played right into the hands of the stormy petrels in Belgrade that were always screeching against Austria-and against Germany. Nor was that all. Tisza had begun to tyrannize the Rumanian minority in Hungary. The result? Rumania was being driven away from the Central Powers, away from Austria and Germany, into an alliance with Russia and France. Tisza just kept inflicting absolutely criminal damage. Under normal circumstances he would be disciplined by his King, who was also the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph. But there was Franz Joseph's advanced age and his fragile condition. Firmness like that could no longer be expected from Schonbrunn Palace. But it could be hoped for from Europe's most dynamic monarch; it could come from the Kaiser, Austria's trusty ally. Couldn't Wilhelm knock some sense into Tisza's head?

The Archduke signalled to the chauffeur. His car slowed to a stop. It stood surrounded by the thousands of roses Franz Ferdinand had conjured from the earth. Their perfume came down on the Kaiser together with the light-blue stare of Franz Ferdinand's eyes. In sight and smell the Kaiser now bore the full brunt of the Archduke's passion. A daunting experience for a poseur like Wilhelm, able to use an empire as prop for his poses but unable-in contrast to Franz Ferdinand-to command a vision or a cogent policy all his own.

Well, the Kaiser said. Well, he was glad to receive such a… such a candid briefing on the difficulty. Yes, the Hungarians did seem to be a bit of a problem, especially when it came to Rumania, which Budapest must not alienate. Yes, he would instruct von Tschirsky (his ambassador to Austria-Hungary) accordingly. He would direct von Tschirsky to tell Tisza, "Sir, be mindful of Rumania!"

As to Serbia, the Kaiser made a less specific commitment, yet couldn't help but voice sympathy with the views the Archduke had so dramatically presented. On the whole Franz Ferdinand's automobile diplomacy at Konopiste appeared to work much better than all his luncheon pleading at Miramare earlier in the spring.

Socially, Wilhelm's visit proved even more auspicious. It ended on Saturday, June 13, with nine courses of a farewell dinner. Franz Ferdinand's Sophie walked into Konopiste Castle's dining hall to sit down at the Kaiser's right. On her head shimmered a tiara of evening feathers. This time the royal connotations came into their own.

At half past eight in the evening the archducal family bade their guest good-bye. Franz Ferdinand accompanied Wilhelm to the train station in a car gliding at slow, stately speed. The military band that had serenaded the diners followed behind with a medley of the Kaiser's favorite marches. As the escutcheoned locomotive of Wilhelm's private train got up steam, he promised to return in the fall; most roses would be gone by then, but the woodcock shooting would be wonderful. Franz Ferdinand applauded the idea, adding that Wilhelm's stay should be coordinated with the hunting visit of the English King, also planned for autumn. "Capital!" roared the Kaiser. Franz Ferdinand smiled: Let German Emperor and British monarch stand side by side, blasting away at game, thereby muzzling the cannons of their armies.

Two days later, at 7 A.M. Monday, June 15, five hundred gendarmes marched by a side entrance into the Konopiste estate. It was the first day of the Archduke's final week at Konopiste, the week before he left on the first leg of his trip to Sarajevo.

The gendarmes distributed themselves according to a prearranged pattern. Soon they were so scattered on the enormous terrain as to be barely noticeable. Yet they could intervene fast when needed.

No need arose. At 9 A.M. the great gates swung open. For the first time ever the public streamed in. Many were peasants in boots and black Sunday suits who had trudged to the castle from neighboring villages. Many were burghers with watchchained waistcoats, who had arrived by rail or bus or private car. All of them shuffled through this exalted wonderland, hushed, awed, quiet.

They gawked at the endless flamboyance of the roses, at the infinite varieties of their hue from gold to scarlet to white to black, at a horizon brimming with aromas and blossoms. They shook heads over stone vases two stories tall from which cactus flowered or holly sprouted. They admired the obelisks, the marble amoretti, satyrs, and Greek gods, the baroque fountains casting up pillars of water.

The men had removed their hats, as if in church. The women looked for petals dropped to the gravel. Young girls would slip them into their bodices; matrons would press them between pages of Bibles brought for that purpose. Amidst the crowds passing the castle itself, voices were raised here and there.

Long live the Archduke!

Their shouts sounded frail against the massive seventeenth century turrets. No answer came. Kaiser Wilhelm would have mounted a parapet and strutted in his spurs. Franz Joseph would have appeared and performed his kindly little wave. Not Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He showed himself only during a brief ride down the main path. After that he did not emerge from behind the stone walls.

Though unseen, he saw. He watched from behind a window, holding his Sophie's hand. It is not impossible that he smiled.

On Saturday, June 20, the couple went to Chlumetz, Franz Ferdinand's other, more intimate Bohemian castle. Here they spent a cozy family weekend with their brood, bowling, playing checkers, roaming the woods. And here, on the early morning of Wednesday, June 24, they said good-bye to their daughter and their two sons until a reunion planned for a week later. Then the Archduke and his Duchess began their journey to Sarajevo.

They traveled together only until Vienna. There Sophie took the express going east to Budapest. Their destination lay south, yet this somewhat indirect path was the only one available by train: rail connections from the Austrian part of the Empire to Bosnia had been constructed as detours via Budapest, at Hungarian insistence. The Archduke refused to let Magyar impudence dictate his route. He'd rather complicate it his own way-by sea. At the same time, being an ever considerate husband, he did not want to subject his Sophie to the extra strain of his complication. For himself, of course, thumbing his nose at Budapest would be well worth the discomfort. It would help him keep his cheer.

That he kept it so well seems remarkable in view of his temper and how it was tested throughout the trip. When he went on alone from Vienna to Trieste, the electric lights of his salon car went out. The Archduke grinned. "How interesting," he said, as footmen scurried to light candles. "Don't we look like a crypt?"

After such a small calamity came a long laboriousness in the summer heat. At Trieste harbor he was piped aboard the Austrian dreadnought Viribus Unitis, which carried him down the humid Illyrian coastline to the mouth of the Narenta river, where he was transferred to the yacht Dalmat, which in turn sailed upstream to the Hercegovian town of Metkovic, where the archducal party entrained once more, this time heading for Bad Ilidze, a spa just outside the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

On the steamy, rainy afternoon of June 25, Franz Ferdinand reached Ilidze at the end of almost forty hours of ceaseless traveling. He bounded out of his rail car and past the honor guard, remarkably unfatigued.

So far the trip had been refreshing hard work. His advisers had primed him on the St. Vitus Day problem. Just during the weekend ahead, Serbs in Serbia as well as on the Austrian side of the border would celebrate their great ethnic holiday. To defuse resentment he had taken a good deal of trouble learning some Serbo-Croat sentences that said how pleased he was to acquaint himself first hand with the history, traditions, and festive occasions of this important region.

He was no linguist. His tongue struggled with those Slavic consonants. A public smile did not come easily to him. Yet he produced the consonants and the smile before any crowd organized for him along the way. Each time, people were surprised by such cordiality from the Archduke notorious for his frown. He, in turn, was exhilarated by their enthusiasm.

He was exhilarated again at Bad Ilidze, a pleasant suburb of Sarajevo. Despite a downpour, a sizable throng awaited him, shouting their "Zivio!" ("Long may he live!") and waving their umbrellas. That was nice. Nicer still, the embrace of his wife who had arrived earlier on her much less labyrinthine journey. General Conrad also presented himself, saluting with a grimness that carried, here at least, no power. To avoid the contretemps of previous army exercises, the Chief of Staff had asked to attend this time as a purely passive observer.

Under the Archduke's sole command, then, the simulated war between the "North Camp" (the 15th Austrian Army Corps) and the "South Camp" (the 16th Army Corps) began. For two shower-splattered days it thundered up and down the craggy hills west of Sarajevo, some cautious eighty kilometers away from the Serb border. At the Archduke's order the field pack of each man was ten pounds lighter than the weight set by General Conrad. This prevented exhaustion and enhanced the spirit of the troops. Franz Ferdinand was impressed by the dispatch with which the men handled the most modern equipment. He liked the way the heavy howitzers moved so fast through mud deepening with every squall.

Nothing could dampen the Archduke's uncharacteristic good mood. Usually his aides must try to restore his calm. Now he reversed the process. Once as he observed a "battle" from a hummock, a man suddenly broke out of the underbrush with a black instrument. Nervous bodyguards jumped the suspect. Franz Ferdinand chortled: "Oh, let him shoot me. That's his job! That's just a camera in his hand-he's a court photographer. Let him make a living!"

***

On Saturday, June 27, at 10 A.M. the Archduke's signal ended the maneuvers. Shortly thereafter he sent a telegram to Bad Ischl where the Emperor had begun his summer sojourn on the same day.

This, his last report to the Emperor, the Archduke scrawled vigorously in his own hand, using not the Gothic script he preferred but Roman characters as demanded by Army regulation for military cables. And Franz Ferdinand also conformed to another, more hurtful rule. His message said "Tomorrow I visit Sarajevo…" Morganatic restriction forbade "Tomorrow we visit Sarajevo…" We would include his wife on an equal basis. The long arm of Vienna's protocol reached even into this remote corner of the Empire.

It reached-and struck-the Archduke again, a few hours later, when he showed his First Lord Chamberlain Baron Rumerskirch the toast he had drafted for the evening gala. The Baron sighed and said he was compelled to suggest that the first three words of the phrase "my wife and I" should be omitted. The toast would not only enter the official minutes but no doubt be widely published in Vienna. It should be framed with care so that the court cabal could not use it against His Imperial Highness.