Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

His Imperial Highness re-framed it with care.

That shadow apart, the day was splendid, ending sumptuously. On the night of June 27 the Archduke hosted a banquet (the very one to which Finance Minister von Bilinski had received no invitation) at his personal headquarters in Ilidze, the Hotel Bosna. General Potiorek attended the dinner together with the region's luminaries. Everybody enjoyed the potage regence, souffles delicieux, blanquette de truite a la gelee, followed by main entrees of chicken, lamb and beef, followed by creme aux ananas en surprise and cheeses, ice cream, candies. Sommeliers poured an array of wines from Madeiras to Tokays and including, as a bow to local taste, Bosnian 2ilavka.

Graciously the Archduke raised a goblet even to General Conrad, then gave a smooth, morganatic, wifeless toast. After all, his Sophie sat quite unmorganatically between two Archbishops. And tomorrow he would make sure that all Imperial obeisance shown him would be hers as well at Sarajevo.

Mist smothered the Bosnian sunrise on Sunday, June 28, 1914. The Archduke and the Duchess began the day on their knees. They prayed at an early Mass in a room specially converted to a chapel at the spa hotel. Afterwards he retired to his bedroom to practice, over and over again, the Serbo-Croation paragraph ending the speech he was to make at Sarajevo's City Hall. Those Slav consonants hadn't gotten any easier, but when he finished work, Sophie rewarded him with a happy bulletin just telephoned from Vienna. Their older son Max had done very well in his examinations at the Schotten Academy. The parents congratulated the boy with a cable anticipating the family reunion set for the day after tomorrow.

By then it was just past 9 A.M. Their train awaited them for the brief ride to Sarajevo. It steamed into the terminal there at 9:20 A.M. On the platform a band of the 15th Army Corps cymballed the Imperial Anthem. Red-carpet formalities over, Franz Ferdinand helped his wife climb into the high, huge Graf & Stift convertible. That moment the weather changed as dramatically as during their entrance at the Vienna Derby three weeks earlier. The mist lifted like a curtain. Brightness fell on a resplendent pair. The Archduke, tall and rugged, shone in the ceremonial uniform of an Austrian Cavalry General-sky-blue tunic, gold collar with three silver stars, black trousers with red stripes; the green peacock feathers of his helmet bounced above the pale-blue gleam of his eyes, the black spear tips of his upturned hussar's mustache. His Duchess was a stately vision in white: white picture hat with a gossamer white veil, long white silk dress with a red and white bouquet of roses tucked into her red sash, ermine stole draped over her shoulders.

After a long siege of rain, the sun shed on them the radiance of a doubly special day. This Sunday marked not only St. Vitus Day for the Serbs but also the anniversary of a marriage sorely tried yet victorious. Exactly fourteen years ago, on June 28, 1900, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and the Countess Sophie Chotek had taken their vows in stealth, in disgrace, in the pointed absence of the Emperor and the entire Imperial clan. For fourteen years the Crown Prince had had to announce his own wife's inferiority of blood. During all court functions of all those years she had had to enter alone after the Emperor; he had had to wait for Sophie to creep in at the tail end of protocol, after the youngest Archduchess toddled by in diapers.

Today would atone for much of that. This morning's dazzle at Sarajevo would be his revenge and her redress.

At the first stop, inspecting the honor guard at Filippovic Barracks, he undid a good deal of those fourteen years. To Sophie's glory he upended military proprieties. Today the colors dipped for the Duchess no less than for the Archduke. At his instruction she stood not behind him, but at his side. When he walked past the reverence of rifles presented at attention, his hand rested not on the hilt of his saber but on the handle of her parasol as his Sophie strode with him, shoulder to shoulder. Today, instead of denying her existence, he celebrated it. He exalted it. He, Crown Prince of the realm, was her servitor. He carried her parasol at a most public occasion.

And therefore the cannons starting their roar while the Imperial party re-boarded their six automobiles-the cannons booming their twenty-four-fold salute-boomed in her honor as well as his. They boomed while the motorcade rolled along slowly at Franz Ferdinand's orders; he wanted his Sophie to savor her triumph in leisure, and he wanted her to see at least some of Sarajevo's one hundred mosques and ninety churches. The cannons boomed from the hilltop fortress specially repainted for the occasion-its Habsburg yellow matched the black-yellow flag fluttering from Franz Ferdinand's car. The cannons boomed as the procession passed Cemaszula Street just renamed Franz Ferdinand Boulevard. They boomed as the huge cars turned into Appel Quay along the Miljacka river. They boomed across spires, domes, minarets, whitewashed houses on one side of the street; they boomed across poplars and cypresses greening the hills against the sky on the other. They boomed above gold-crested police helmets behind whose thin line stood a somewhat thicker crowd of people crying "Zivio!" They boomed over portraits of the Archduke placed on many window sills-hundreds of stern Franz Ferdinands glaring down from picture frames at the Prince's now more amiable live face, gliding by in the seat next to his wife.

The last boom reverberated away. A peculiar echo followed it. One of the cars behind the Archduke's seemed to have blown a tire. The Duchess reached for the back of her neck where she thought a gnat had stung her. At the same time, confused shouting spread along the quay. Gendarmes started running toward some sort of scuffle that was tumbling down the river embankment.

The Archduke's raised hand signaled the procession to a halt. A member of his retinue, Count Franz von Harrach, jumped out to reconnoiter.

Two minutes later he was back, breathless: A bomb had been thrown at the car behind them. It had injured some bystanders as well as Lieutenant Colonel Erich von Merizzi of the Archduke's escort. But Merizzi had only been hit in the hand, by a splinter. The perpetrator had just been arrested as he'd tried to escape across the river.

Pale but composed, the Duchess said that a splinter must have touched her, too, in the back of her neck. Instantly the Archduke examined her. He found the barest evidence of a tiny scratch; the skin had not been broken.

"Madness!" the Archduke said. "But let's go on."

They went on. Count von Harrach did not resume his seat by the chauffeur. He stood on the running board to shield the Archduke. Shortly after 10 A.M. the motorcade reached City Hall. It was just a few minutes late, as though nothing had happened.

And nobody at City Hall thought anything had. Under the red-gold moorish loggias, on top of a white staircase, bowed an array of Bosnian notables. Turbaned mullahs, bishops in miters and gilt vestments, rabbis in kaftans, municipal personages with sash and decorations. The mayor Fehim Effendi Curcio, in fez and tailcoat, had heard a bang; to him and to the others it had sounded like some additional salute from a smaller cannon. Blithely the mayor launched into his own fulsome greeting: "Your Imperial and Royal Highness, our exalted Crown Prince! Your Serene Highness, our Crown Prince's most esteemed wife! At this most happy moment our hearts are overflowing with gratitude for the most gracious visit bestowed-"

"Mr. Mayor!" The Archduke's gravel voice cut through the air. "What kind of gratitude! A bomb has been thrown at us! Outrageous!"

The mayor gagged. Fezzes, turbans, kaftans trembled and huddled. The Duchess whispered briefly into the Archduke's ear. The glare in his eyes softened. "Very well," the Archduke said. "Very well. Mr. Mayor, get on with your speech."

The Duchess's intervention allowed everything to continue with remarkable smoothness. The mayor went through the rest of his oration. For a moment it seemed as if Franz Ferdinand would not be able to answer because the text of his response (with its Slavic finale) had been left in the car disabled by the bomb. Just then an equerry came running with white pages blotched red from the wounded officer.

Franz Ferdinand ripped the script out of the man's hand. The Duchess put one finger on her husband's arm. Once more her touch composed him. Evenly he wiped the blood away with a handkerchief offered by the equerry. Evenly he began to read his speech, improvising only one deft change. "I consider," he said, "the welcome extended to my wife and me as expressions of joy that the attempt on our lives has been foiled."

All dignitaries clapped hands in relief. The Archduke went into his Serbo-Croat peroration: "Standing in this beautiful capital city, I assure you, our Slav and Mohammedan citizens, of our august Emperor's continued interest in your well-being and of my own unchanging friendship."

"Zivio!" from the dignitaries. Much applause. A courier roared up on a motorcycle. Good tidings from the garrison hospital to which the injured officer had been brought. Doctors confirmed that he had only a slight flesh wound.

Now the ceremonies resumed their planned course. The Duchess went upstairs to the second floor of City Hall where Muslim ladies wanted to tender their respects to her unveiled. Franz Ferdinand recovered his mordant humor. "Did you hear?" he said to an aide. "The bomb thrower wanted to swallow cyanide? Idiot! Doesn't he know our Austrian criminal justice system? They'll give the man a decoration!" Thinlipped smiles from the retinue. "And maybe they'll have to give out more than one decoration. Maybe we'll have some more Kugerln coming our way." The Archduke was speaking in Viennese dialect, relishing its sardonic diminutives. "Kugerln" meant "bulletlets."

More thin-lipped smiles all around. With a mocking bow the Archduke turned to General Potiorek, Bosnia's Military Governor. "What do you think, General? Any more Kugerln in your valued judgment?"

"Your Imperial Highness, it was an isolated lunatic," Potiorek said. "I think Your Imperial Highness can go on at ease.

"The program, then, as scheduled," Franz Ferdinand said. "But first I'll visit Merizzi in the hospital."

"Your Imperial Highness, the wound is nothing," Potiorek said. "Merizzi will be released within an hour-"

"This man is my fellow officer," the Archduke broke in. "He is bleeding for me. You'll have the goodness to understand that. You'll have the further goodness to order another car to take my wife back to her hotel-"

Now it was the Archduke who was being interrupted. The Duchess had returned from the upper floor. She stopped his sentence not with words, but with a silent headshake. She stepped closer to her husband. A small step, but irrefutable. She was not going to the hotel in a different car. Not under any circumstances. She was staying by his side.

The Archduke gave a mellowed nod; revoked his order for another automobile. As they walked out of City Hall he took her parasol again. Just outside the entrance, he gripped her hand. They stood in the blinding sunshine on top of the stairs, a clear target for any sharpshooter in the multitude below.

The multitude did nothing but cheer. "Zivio!.. Zivio!"

From Sarajevo's church towers the clocks struck half past ten in the morning. To the notables at City Hall the clangor ended a crisis.

The same church bells tolled a very different message to the ears of a teenage schoolboy with a bomb and a pistol under his jacket. "All is over, all is over," they tolled for Gavrilo Princip. It was all over. It had all been for nothing. For nothing, all the training, the planning, the efforts, the hardship of the last four weeks.

Exactly a month ago, on May 28, he had left Belgrade with his two cohorts, Graben and Cabrinovic. Sarajevo lay a little more than a hundred miles away, but it had taken the three youths eight days to cover the distance. Through part of the journey within Serbia they trudged across forest and bush to avoid police checking out transients. Princip didn't mind. He was the youngest, smallest, frailest of the trio. He was also the commander of the mission. With the Black Hand in Belgrade he had mapped out a route, tortuous but safe, called the "Apis Tunnel."

The Tunnel worked. At the town of Sabac, the first station of their trip, Princip found a Serbian Army Captain playing the right exotic card game at the right coffee-house terrace (that of the Cafe Amerika) at the right time of day. The captain, a Black Hand agent, excused himself "to go for a walk with my nephew." When Princip rejoined his mission-mates half an hour later, he carried in his pocket papers identifying the group as "customs officers" with Princip as "the sergeant in charge."

They were now ready to cross the border into Austria. And just then Princip found himself badly beset by a problem he thought he had eliminated at the outset.

While still in Belgrade he had made his partners take a vow as solemn as their Black Hand oath: to exercise utmost caution and discretion; to avoid all social contacts save those required by common courtesy; to leave politics out of all conversations with outsiders; and, of course, to tell no one the truth of where they were ultimately going or why. The rule applied to all encounters, be they Austrian, Croat or Serb, no matter how friendly. Even a Serb might be an undercover minion of the Serb Prime Minister who was Apis's foe. "What your enemy should not know, you must not tell your friend."

Grabel, a juvenile delinquent until his politicization by Princip, honored this pledge. The unpleasant surprise was Cabrinovic. Cabrinovic had been an activist even before he'd met Princip. He'd seemed cool and dedicated during target practice in Belgrade. That changed when they embarked on the awesome adventure itself; when they'd marched up the gangplank of the steamer with weaponry and cyanide under their coats, committed to slaughter or suicide or both.

At that point Cabrinovic had begun to be nervously garrulous. It was as if he wanted to save his life by "accidentally" giving away the mission. While still on the ship he struck up a prolonged conversation-with a gendarme, of all people. Luckily an impassive, incurious gendarme.

Princip admonished him afterwards, to little effect. In a town close to the Austrian border, Cabrinovic ran into an acquaintance, a fellow volunteer for Serbia in the Balkan War of the previous year. With him, Cabrinovic's talk became so unnaturally animated that his coat fell open to reveal the bombs. Princip dragged him away just in time.

More folly at Koviljaca, a spa near their entry spot into Habsburg terrain. Here Princip decided that they should act like ordinary tourists, engaged in tourist activities like buying postcards. Princip addressed his own card to a cousin in Belgrade, with the message that he was on his way to a monastery where he would prepare himself for high school finals. But Cabrinovic? He wrote to friends in Sarajevo and Trieste, inside the Austrian Empire where mail was likely to be monitored at the border. Worse yet, Cabrinovic scribbled on one such chancy card the Serb nationalist saying "A good man and a horse will always find a way to break through."

That was too much for Princip, who always reviewed his crew's correspondence. He tore up the card, took Cabrinovic to a toilet stall in a cafe where he confiscated Cabrinovic's bombs and pistol. He informed Cabrinovic that he must make the rest of the journey alone; alone, he was less likely to endanger his companions or the task they must fulfill. He was to enter Austria separately, at one of the alternate crossing points designated by the Black Hand. If all went well, they would reunite in Sarajevo.

***

And reunite they did at the Bosnian capital on June 4, with Cabrinovic arriving, obediently, by a different path. Princip had chastised him into prudence, at least for a while. But at Sarajevo Princip met trouble from another source. It was also unexpected: Ilia.

Ilia, the fourth of the quartet of conspirators, had been among Princip's earliest companions in the cause, while Princip had lived in Sarajevo. Ilic had remained there with the Black Hand's knowledge and encouragement. His job: to scout security measures taken in the city, along with other details of the Archduke's coming. Ilk had served as the Sarajevo pillar of the developing plot. Princip found the pillar turning into putty.

Ilic's first words were that he had recruited three more youths "as auxiliaries" in the planned assassination.

"You've tripled the chances of betrayal!" Princip said.

Ilic protested. These three, he said, were all proven idealists. In fact, they would be valuable as part of the core of a new party that might be formed and whose formation might perhaps be a better tactic than the planned action-

Better than the action against the Archduke? Princip couldn't believe his ears.

Well, he had been thinking about it, Ilia said. Better in the sense that-that killing the Archduke at this point might perhaps turn people against the Black Hand, but perhaps if a political party were started first, why, it would give the cause a more legitimate base, make it more widely popular, and then, perhaps, there would be very strong popular support for a radical act later, so that's why he, Ilia, had founded a legal political weekly just three weeks ago, it was called Zvono ("The Bell") and it would help create a more revolutionary climate with the ideas of Friedrich Engels, Bakunin, Trotsky buttressing the Serb cause-

"No," Princip said.

The anxiety that had spilled crudely out of Cabrinovic was now pouring, more intellectualized, out of Ilia. Nothing but anxiety lay behind all this stuttering.

Princip's small hand came down hard on Ilic's shoulder. No, he told Ilia. There was no "perhaps." There was no "better tactic." There was only the deed it was their duty to do. They had not come together in Sarajevo as Socialists or journalists or intellectual politicians. They were warriors for Serb freedom. They had sworn to act. Now they must prepare to perform the action.

Princip's words did not cure Ilia of dread. But Princip's unblinking blue eyes and unrelenting low voice subdued Ilk's resistance. For the next three weeks Ilia kept nursing his misgivings obliquely in the pages of Zvono. In the June 15 issue he discussed "Seven Who Were Hanged," a story by the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev, praising it as "a significant contribution to the argument against capital punishment." Ilia printed Andreyev's own comment that"… it is my intention with this tale to point out the horror and impermissibility of capital punishment. The death penalty confuses the conscience of even resolute men…"

But even as Ilic's essay impugned capital punishment, he himself helped Princip trigger the death sentence to be visited on the Habsburg heir apparent.

Ilk arranged for Princip's lodging at his mother's house. Ilia retrieved the conspirators' arsenal. Princip, ever vigilant, had avoided the risk of entering Sarajevo armed; the bombs and pistols had been deposited with a "safe" cinema proprietor in Tuzla, a town close to Sarajevo. Ilk, who knew the pattern of local police surveillance, brought the weapons into the city. On the day he published his brief against capital punishment, Ilia obediently placed the instruments of execution under Princip's bed.

Together Princip and Ilia combed Sarajevo newspapers for the Archduke's specific whereabouts during his forthcoming visit. The big Jesuit-controlled daily Hrvatski Dnevnik spoke the loyalist sympathies of Catholic Bosnia (as opposed to the much more Belgrade-minded Greek Orthodox element). Hrvatski Dnevnik looked forward to the Archduke with headlines like HAIL, OUR HOPE! but with no information interesting to people who wanted to get that hope into their gunsights. The German-language Die Bosnische Post was more helpful. In Princip's band only Ilia fully had mastered the oppressors' tongue, and on June 18 he found in Die Bosnische Post the Archduke's exact itinerary through the city. He mapped it out for Princip long before it appeared on posters calling on the populace to line their Crown Prince's path with cheers.

Every day before the Archduke's arrival, fear and doubt flickered through Ilk. Every day he helped Princip inch closer to the thing he feared and doubted. After a while Princip ran out of the money handed him by the Black Hand in Belgrade. Ilk gave him "a loan" of twenty kronen. When that ran out, Princip ordered Ilia to procure gainful employment for himself and Cabrinovic. Ilk found Princip office work at a welfare society. He got Cabrinovic a job at a printing plant.

Ilk also acted as navigator, evading police patrols, when the band visited Graben who lived with a girl friend in the village of Pale, 15 miles southeast of Sarajevo. As the band strolled through Pale's remote meadows, Princip would pull out his gun to practice his marksmanship on starlings and finches, then order the others to follow suit.

In Sarajevo itself, Princip drew on Ilic's expertise in devising a surface of innocuous urban adolescence. Princip was a celibate, nonsmoking, nondrinking, murder-intoxicated teenager. He and his friends spent their evenings as normal youths who chased pleasure through the lovely summer nights. They hung about a wine shop popular with the lads and lasses in the street just renamed for Franz Ferdinand. Princip pretended to flirt with girls. For the first and last time in his life he drank Zilavka.

Prirrcip had the plot poised, primed, and camouflagedwhen it was threatened once more, again by Ilia. Very early one morning he knocked on Princip's door. The assassination, he breathed, must be postponed-word from the Black Hand in Belgrade, whose emissary he had just met in the nearby town of Bled. Princip said that he, as mission leader, had heard nothing. He demanded proof. Ilia said that written orders were too great a risk, but here was printed evidence of the reason behind the decision-and waved a Bosnian newspaper with reports of turmoil in Serbia between militants of the Black Hand stripe and supporters of the more moderate Prime Minister. Princip read the reports. He dropped the paper and said, "All the more reason to go forward with the plot." The plot went forward.

Two days later Ilia waved newspapers with the bulletin that King Petar of Serbia had retired from active rule; his son Alexander was the Prince Regent. This, Ilia said, might change everything, including their business in Sarajevo. Princip answered that no order about any change had reached him; pistol practice as usual in Grabez's meadow.

These words he said aloud. Silently he determined that when the time came, Ilk should not be entrusted with a weapon.

The time came. On the late afternoon of June 27, that rainy day before the Archduke's visit, the bombs and pistols were distributed to all conspirators except Ilia. Princip instructed his team to hide the arms. They were to fool and josh the evening away at the usual wine shop-after all, it was Saturday night. But before sleep they were to spend some minutesalways singly, one by one, never together-at the grave of a Black Hand martyr in Kosovo Cemetery. Here they were to meditate; to dedicate and to consecrate themselves for the grim service they would render to Serbia tomorrow.

And at the Kosovo Cemetery they all did just that-one by one, in the misty late-night hours of June 27, 1914.

At 8:15 the next morning, while the archduke and his wife prepared to entrain for Sarajevo, Princip summoned his band for the last time. They met in the back room of the Vlajnic Pastry Shop, near the scene of the day's action. Suddenly it was Cabrinovic-not Ilia-who created a last-minute difficulty.

Since his return to Sarajevo, Cabrinovic had lived in his parents' house, telling them he'd come home to leave behind his life as a hobo radical. He'd behaved himself accordingly, working in his father's cafe, acting "nicely"-until now; until the imminence of the climax became too much. That morning the elder Cabrinovic decided to hoist the Imperial colors from his establishment. He was a Habsburg loyalist and wished to show respect for the Crown Prince. Suddenly his son broke into protests against "the odious flag." An argument erupted. The father told the boy to leave the house if he didn't like its banner. The boy stalked off, shouting that soon the Austrian Crown Prince would be a joke-the Serbian King would rule Bosnia!

When Cabrinovic joined the other confederates in the pastry shop, he was still shaking with an anger all the angrier for its admixture of fear. He came into the back room spouting about his father. Princip restricted him to a whisper. Hissing furiously, Cabrinovic not only reported his fight at home but announced yet another indiscretion. He would have himself photographed right now; if he should die for Serbia this morning, at least a picture of him would survive-the world would have a photograph of him just before his sacrifice-a memento for his father!

Princip remained calm. One must be calm at the brink. Coming down hard on Cabrinovic now would only have upset the fellow still more. The thing to do was to factor Cabrinovic's instability into his, Princip's, final dispositions.

He told Cabrinovic to post himself at 9 A.M. sharp with the unarmed Ilia and the three armed auxiliaries near the corner of Cumunja Bridge and Appel Quay. Princip's own station as well as Grabez's would be some three hundred yards farther down the Archduke's route along Appel Quay, closer to City Hall.

With this deployment, the unreliables (Cabrinovic, Ilic, the auxiliaries) would be tested first because they would see the target first. If they failed, the serious core of the squad, namely Princip backed by Grabei, could still bring the enterprise to the desired end.

Still calm, Princip dismissed his group. They bade each other farewell since they might never see each other alive again. Princip told them to leave the pastry shop one by one and to arrive at their respective posts a few minutes apart along different paths. Cabrinovic was allowed to go to a photographer's studio on condition that he appear at the exact spot at the exact time, as ordered.

Cabrinovic swore to his leader that he would. During that brief huddle in the back room, Princip had managed to invest Cabrinovic with some of his own self-control. Cabrinovic proved that a few minutes later in the street. He stumbled on an old crony (with whom he presently had his picture taken), and then on two girls of their acquaintance. Crony and girls wore their Sunday clothes; they were on the town for the gala morning that featured an Archduke's visit. Crony and girls joked with Cabrinovic. None of them noticed anything amiss.

Neither did Maxim Svara, son of the Attorney General of Sarajevo and a former schoolmate of Princip's. Princip happened to run into him on the way to what no one must know was his battle station. Princip casually small-talked with Maxim, pistol and bomb arranged so as not to bulge his jacket even slightly. For six blocks they strolled together on Appel Quay. All along they watched flags being run up on poles and people assembling to watch the Habsburg prince ride by. Then the two youths wished each other good day. Maxim turned left to the Cathedral where the bishop was offering High Mass in honor of the dynasty. Princip continued walking along the Quay until he reached Latin Bridge.

From 9 A.M. on he stood there. He waited in the gathering crowd. His ear was cocked for the motorcade. His hand was ready for the trigger of his pistol, for the cap of his bomb, for his capsule of cyanide.

Just after 10 A.M. he heard cries of "Zivio!.. Zivio!.." followed by a powerful growl of car engines and then, suddenly, a detonation. The bang faded into shouts. At once Prin cip pressed forward fiercely through the throng and saw, at last, the bomb-smashed wooden shutter of a store front with the Habsburg flag waving above, a big car with gesticulating generals and blown-out tires, some people sitting on the curb bloodying their Sunday best-and Cabrinovic held in a rough grip by two gendarmes… Cabrinovic retching from the cyanide, dripping from the river across which he'd obviously tried to escape. No sign of the Archduke, but Princip assumed his body had been spirited away.

So Cabrinovic, the unstable, had come through after all. Yet obviously he had been prevented from swallowing the cyanide and might not be able to remain silent under tough interrogation. He would give away the Black Hand. Princip's fingers tightened around the Browning. He must kill first Cabrinovic, then himself. That moment a whole new stampede of gendarmes came down on Cabrinovic with their gold-crested helmets and whisked him off. Princip heard the sputter of car engines being cranked up. The motorcade sped off much faster than it had come. And everywhere people who had been closer to the lead car were saying how calm the Archduke had acted, how crazy these fanatics must be with their bombs, how lucky the Archduke had not been hurt.

The Archduke had not been hurt.

It had all been for nothing-at least so far. Desperately Princip looked for his confederates in order to regroup. But they were hard to find in the excitement everywhere and the rapid influx of new spectators. The bomb had made the high visit dramatic. Now the Archduke was much more than an interesting sight. He had become a sensation. Very soon this sensation was due to drive back from City Hall, again along Appel Quay. More and more people brimmed on the sidewalk. Nobody of Princip's team was among them, no matter where he looked. They had all fled. They had scattered. They had deserted. Princip was alone. Alone with his bomb, his pistol, and the knowledge of how unlikely he was to use either because of the precautions the enemy would now take.

But, having driven himself so far without mercy, he decided to go on without much hope. He crossed over to the other side of the Quay. That way he would be closer to the automobiles, just in case the Archduke really did return along Appel Quay, as called for by the original schedule. Once more, he waited, this time at the corner of the quay and a side street. He heard the church clocks strike 10:30 A.M., tolling all is over, all is over, into his ears. He heard the motorcade return at 10:32, and all would have been over indeed-the very spot on which Princip stood would not be memorialized today by two footprints sunk in concrete, the house at his back would not have become a museum enshrining Princip's heroism, the bridge to his left would not now be named Princip Bridge-if…

If two mistakes had not been made by the entourage of the Austrian Crown Prince. The first was nearly logical. Since Cabrinovic had thrown the bomb from the river side of the quay, an officer of the escort stood on the running board on the same side-not on Princip's side-to protect the Archduke with his body. The second mistake was as mysterious as fate itself. The chauffeur of the lead car, filled with police, had been clearly instructed on what route to take to the garrison hospital where the Archduke wished to visit his wounded aide. Nonetheless the chauffeur made the wrong turn on Appel Quay into the side street off Latin Bridge.

This mistake did not escape General Potiorek, who sat in the front seat of the second car, that of the Archduke. The General cupped his hands to shout to the first car, "Turn back! Back to the Quay!" The chauffeur obeyed. To obey he must make a U-turn. To make a U-turn in the narrower side street he must come to a halt. Since he came to a halt, so must the drivers of the motorcade behind him. An inevitability decreed that the second car must stop at the corner, directly in front of a thin, small youth who was reaching inside his coat.

The many days Princip had spent on target practice, the weeks of training and rehearsal, the months of waiting, planning, of steeling himself and disciplining his crew, of patience, cunning, and perseverance-they all converged on this one moment, at 10:34 A.M., on this sunlit corner of the Appel Quay and Rudolf Street, in front of the Schiller Delicatessen Store.

The chauffeur had just begun to work the wheel for the U-turn. Count Harrach of the Archduke's escort stood on the running board, on the river side of the quay. There was nothing between Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg and Gavrilo Princip except five feet of translucent summer air. For this one moment the pale blue eyes of the son of a postman looked into the pale blue eyes of a lord descended from thirteen European dynasties. The next second the son of the postman realized he could not throw the bomb he was already gripping inside his coat: the Archduke was too close and the crowd too dense around him for hauling out his arm. Therefore he pulled out his Browning. He turned his head away (later he would say he had been confounded by the sight of the Duchess, a woman) and, perhaps to compensate for this lapse, pressed the trigger twice.

And then all was really over. After the two bangs Princip saw the car pull away fast, the Archduke still sitting upright, unaffected, unscathed, even after this final effort.

Princip put the pistol to his own head, but someone wrested it from his hand. He reached for the cyanide capsule, managed to get it between his teeth, bit it open, already felt a taste of bitter almonds, but a policeman's stick came down on his head and knocked the thing out of his mouth. From everywhere arms reached for him, gripped him and punished him, yet nothing punished him more in this nightmare tumult than the fact that he was still alive and so was the Archduke.

General Potiorek, the Military Governor of Bosnia, was under that same impression, but only for about five more seconds. After the explosions he looked back instantly at the august pair; the two sat erect and unruffled. But just as the car turned back onto the Quay, the Duchess began leaning oddly against the Archduke. The Archduke's mouth began to dribble red. Count Harrach on the running board, appalled, fumbled for his handkerchief and leaned over to wipe the blood from the Archduke's lips. The Duchess, leaning, cried at her husband, "For heaven's sake, what has happened to you?" The Archduke, who usually roared at any irritation, sat stiffly and silently as he bled. The General shouted at the driver to proceed at top speed to his residence. The Archduchess's head had drooped onto her husband's knees. Blood from the wound in her abdomen soaked through her white silk dress and stained the red and white bouquet of roses clenched in her hand. The Archduke, still sitting stiffly, whispered with his blood-filled mouth: "Sopherl, Sopherl, stirb nicht!.. Bleib am Leben fur unsere Kinder!" ("Little Sophie, little Sophie, don't die!.. Stay alive for our children!") Then he, too, began to droop forward. Count Harrach tried to hold him up as the car hurtled and veered. He asked, "Is Your Highness in great pain?" The Archduke's head had slumped down onto the head of his wife resting on his knees. "It's nothing," he said, quite clearly even above the car engine's roar. "It's nothing," he said again. He kept saying it, more softly, seven more times, the last time just before the car stopped at the Governor's residence. When the two were lifted out of the automobile, her blood had mingled with his on the leather seat.

In the residence a doctor tore open the Archduke's collar to reach his smashed jugular. The gold collar had turned scarlet. Inside the collar seven amulets against seven evils became visible, all wrought of silver and gold. They, too, were dripping scarlet. By the time the church clocks of Sarajevo struck 11 A.M. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had both stopped breathing, she less than ten minutes before him. They died as they had lived, in unison.

History's will was done.

0073

THAT SUNDAY VIENNA'S SKIES WERE AS BRIGHT AND JOVIAL AS SARAJEVO'S. So were those of nearby Baden, a cozy Biedermeier spa where, on a bench under an oak tree, the writer Stefan Zweig was reading a biography of Tolstoy. Shortly after half past two in the afternoon, something made him look up from the page. Something had stopped happening. It took him a moment to realize just what: a few hundred feet away, in the band shell of the Spa Park, the musicians had broken off in the middle of a waltz.

At Aspern Airfield on Vienna's southern edge, a young summer-happy crowd under straw hats and flowered bonnets craned necks at an aeronautical display. At half past two the smartly kepi'd brass band launched into "The Airmen's March." They never finished it.

In Vienna itself all green spaces were teeming vivaciously. Everybody was outdoors, celebrating Peter and Paul, a favorite Saint Day of the town. The poor basked and munched bacon rind on the "free" park benches. The less poor sliced cervelat on more comfortable chairs costing one heller each. The rich nibbled chocolate cake served prettily doilied on cafe terraces. All enjoyed the jasmine-scented air, the violins undulating in pergolas. Sometime before 3 P.M., policemen seemed to shoot out of the ground to whisper into the ears of orchestra conductors everywhere. Everywhere bows dropped away from strings. Flutes fell silent. The music stopped.

Never since the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf twenty-five years earlier had so much music stopped so suddenly in Vienna.

There was a difference, though. Back in 1889, Rudolf had been Austria's gracious and graceful young promise. His death had anguished the Empire, seeming to sever it from its future. Now, in 1914, Vienna was startled but not stricken. Franz Ferdinand's arctic image had thawed a bit lately, yet for most citizens he evoked neither hope nor youth nor grace. His public face was lined too grimly, his mustaches were too much like fixed bayonets. He augured oppression at home, abrasiveness abroad.

"If that Archduke had lived to sit on the throne," Freud said the day after the assassination to his patient the Wolf Man, "war with Russia would have been inevitable." The truth was precisely the reverse. Yet most Viennese shared Freud's breezy misjudgment and his mistaken relief. This included the realm's highest councillors, who knew the Archduke well. They absorbed his death rather briskly. Many had been of fended by his un-Austrian, unmannerly directness, by his uncouth insights. The journal of Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold confides that during the first cabinet meeting after the outrage". one noted, yes, consternation and indignation but also a certain easing of mood."

One noted it in Franz Joseph, too, at his Alpine villa in Bad Ischl. The All-Highest summer holiday had started earlier than usual in order to elude an encounter with Franz Ferdinand. By going on vacation the Emperor avoided official business like the Archduke's personal report on the Bosnian maneuvers. No more danger of that now. Franz Joseph promptly returned to his capital to deal with the enormity that freed him from all further vexations by his nephew.

"Certainly Papa was shocked," his daughter the Archduchess Valerie records in her diary, "but I found him amazingly fresh. When I said that Karl [The Archduke Karl, Franz Ferdinand's nephew, just become the new Crown Prince] would acquit himself well, Papa said 'For me it is a great worry less.'"

Throughout the Empire headlines screamed from front pages framed in black. But to his adjutant, the Emperor was candid about his composure. "God will not be mocked," he said. "A higher power has put back the order I couldn't maintain." Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand had disordered the hierarchy by inflating his wife's place in it. Now she had lost her life, and soon she would lose her inflated place.

At first, however, the Duchess's status seemed unchanged by her slaying. Cannons from the great fortress of Sarajevo had boomed to greet the live Crown Prince and his wife at their entry into the city on the morning of June 28. The cannons boomed again, twenty-one times, on the evening of June 29, to bid farewell to their embalmed remains. Though the funeral train puffed through the Bosnian night without halting, army regiments stood at attention at every station it passed. The train rolled on to the Adriatic coast where the foremost dreadnought of the Imperial fleet was waiting, the Viribus Unitis, on which the breathing Archduke has sailed toward Sarajevo just five days earlier. Now marines in dress uniforms sheltered the two caskets under a baldachin on the quarter deck and draped them with flags and flowers. Early on June 30, the huge man-of-war began to stream northward at a speed solemnly slow, under a hot sun, under black pennants and a flag at half-mast, followed by other battleships, cruisers, destroyers, civilian yachts, motorboats, fishing boats, even ferries, all with flags half-mast and flying black ensigns. This giant, wave-borne cortege moved close to the shore, where more cannons rumbled their mourning from the hills and priests stood in full vestments on the beaches, swung thuribles censing the corpses, and called out blessings for the souls of the faithful departed.

On the evening of July 1, the dolorous armada steamed into the harbor waters of Trieste. More cannons boomed, more regiments presented arms and lowered colors as the caskets were transferred from the black-garlanded ship to a blackgarlanded special train. Twenty-four hours later, on the night of July 2, it came to a halt in Vienna's South Terminal.

Here the responsibilities of the military ended. Here began the jurisdiction of Prince Montenuovo, First Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty, foe of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for life and beyond.

***

Neither Franz Joseph nor any member of the dynasty met the funeral train. There was just one exception. Only the new Crown Prince, the Archduke Karl, escorted his predecessor through the dark and empty streets.

Next morning the dead couple lay in state at the Palace Chapel from 8 A.M. to noon. Not one second longer. Some 50,000 people converged from every district of the town onto the Inner City. It was not so much affection that drew them as awe and curiosity. Most were turned away because of the absurd briefness of the viewing period. Those who managed to pass the chapel portals found something curious indeed.

The two coffins stood side by side, but their closeness only emphasized their inequality. Franz Ferdinand's was larger, much more ornate, and placed twenty inches higher than Sophie's. His bore the many insignia of his rank-the Archducal crown, the General's plumed helmet, the admiral's hat, his ceremonial sword, and all his principal decorations including the Order of the Golden Fleece. Her coffin was bare except for a pair of white gloves and a black fan. These were the emblems of a lady-in-waiting.

She had been a lady-in-waiting before her marriage. Her subsequent elevations to Princess and then to Duchess were now cancelled. Only a little over 100 hours earlier Franz Ferdinand had committed for her sake yet another disorderliness against the privileges of genealogy. He had carried her parasol before the honor guard at Sarajevo in order to lift her to his level before the world. Now his caparisoned coffin was used to push her down again, to exhibit her inferiority by contrast. The First Lord Chamberlain and the Serb schoolboy assassin, working in tandem, had put the woman back in her place.

There were many wreaths that morning, sent to the chapel from great notables like the American President Wilson down to humble folk like the Shoemakers' Guild of Lower Austria. There was no wreath from the Emperor or any other Habsburg.

At the stroke of noon the public was turned away. At 4 P.M. Franz Joseph appeared, accompanied by Archdukes and Archduchesses but not by any of Franz Ferdinand's children. Their mother was a morganatic corpse. They were morganatic orphans, hence not members of the Highest Family. No foreign dignitaries attended. Every monarch and president in Europe had wired his intention to come. By return cable the First Lord Chamberlain had advised them to "kindly have your ambassador act as representative to avoid straining His Majesty's delicate health with the demands of protocol." (The King and Queen of Rumania were politely stopped at the border.)

So the ambassadors came-and departed again almost immediately together with the Emperor. Vienna's Cardinal Piffl ran through the funeral services in less than fifteen minutes. At 4:15 P.M. the bodies were locked away. They had been brought to the chapel in the dark of the previous night. They were not taken out again until the new night was very dark again.

Vienna of the schone Leiche, of the corpse beautiful, where paupers scrimped and schemed to be buried like princes, now had a prince reduced to an impoverished and furtive funeral. None of the nobility had been invited to pay their final respects to the Heir Apparent or to accompany him on his last journey through the streets of the capital. But as the remains of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were rolled out of the chapel, a band of aristocrats pushed past the police. Led by the Archduke Karl and by Count Chotek, Sophie's brother, they made less lonely the scant procession behind the coffins moving to the West Terminal.

Near midnight a car coupled to a milk train took the dead sixty miles west along the Danube to the small town of Poch- larn. There only a delegation of local veterans saluted, in old uniforms wetted down by a sudden squall.

Two plain black hearses of the Vienna Municipal Undertaking Service transported the coffins onto a ferry. In midstream a thunderbolt frightened the horses into a panic that almost pitched the caskets into the Danube.

At 1 A.M. on July 4, the hearses gained the other shore. A few minutes later they stopped before the castle of Artstetten,[4] Franz Ferdinand's family manor. In its crypt the pair found the peace that now began to drain away from the world outside.

The next day all of Vienna was abuzz with that midnight in Artstetten. Some deplored its meanness. No one saw it as overture to vast, lethal chaos. On the contrary. The court considered that funeral a fitting end to dissonance. It recovered a harmony disturbed by the slain Crown Prince himself.

His very testament assaulted tradition. For centuries Habsburgs had been buried beneath the nave of Vienna's Capuchin Church. Franz Ferdinand, however, had anticipated that his Sophie would not be allowed to enter eternity among them. Since they would exclude her, he would exclude himself. His Last Will defied the custom of the house he had come so close to heading: He was to lie not with his kinsmen but with Sophie in the vault he had had built for them both in Artstetten.

As a result-in Palace eyes-their remains were inevitably subject to the consequences of his wilfulness. Since Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had died together, his final journey must share not only the destination but the limits of hers. Their funeral must not take on the grandeur his would have shown had he married suitably. The aberration he had visited on Habsburg while alive must not be ratified by their state funeral after his death. No: The ceremonies of his death must atone for the irregularity of his life. And the fact that a teenage zealot had killed him made not a scintilla of difference. The madness of a schoolboy must not change dynastic principle. That principle must override assassin and assassinated. In sum, the funeral was essential to Franz Joseph's "restoration of order."

Of course another source of disorder remained: Serbia. It was more dangerous than the man it had killed. Sarajevo proved that Serbia had been eating away far too long at the Empire's security, dignity, tranquillity. The First Lord Chamberlain's etiquette had disciplined the late Archduke. Next, Serbia must be punished. And for that purpose etiquette was not enough.

Within twenty-four hours of the murder, the Belgrade government wired condolences to Vienna, vowing that Serbia would". certainly, most loyally do everything to prove that it would not tolerate within its borders the fostering of any agitation… calculated to disturb our already delicate relations with Austria-Hungary." These sentiments came too late. They were not enough.

Belgrade's Prime Minister made a further gesture of appeasement that at the same time rebuked the ideology of Colonel Apis's Black Hand. The Prime Minister ordered all places of entertainment closed in Belgrade on the day of Franz Ferdinand's funeral. He also cancelled the rest of the weeklong celebrations of St. Vitus, the Saint's Day so sacred to the Serb national soul. It was not enough.

Throughout Bosnia, Habsburg-loyal Croats and Muslims smashed shops and inns and hotels owned by Serbs. In Bosnian schools, Serb students were beaten up. In Vienna, mobs kept attacking the Serb Embassy, barely stayed by police. It was not enough.

Not after Sarajevo. Not when Princip's initial interrogations established the fact that he had done the deed after a stay at Belgrade, probably with Belgrade's help. None of it was enough.

Order in Franz Joseph's sense could be restored only by a decisive act of the Habsburg government against Serbia. But an act of what kind? Of what force? Franz Joseph instructed his ministers to submit options.

At a cabinet meeting hastily called on June 29, four days before the funeral, Foreign Minister von Berchtold showed himself still guided by the pacifism of the late Crown Prince. He proposed relatively temperate demands: that Serbia dismiss its Minister of Police, jail all suspected terrorists, and dissolve extremist groups.

Prime Minister Tisza of Hungary sided with Berchtold for reasons of his own. Tisza could not be very furious with the Serbs for removing his worst enemy, the Crown Prince; nor did Tisza relish a war in which a victorious Austria would swallow Serbia, thereby increasing the Empire's Slav population and reducing the Magyars to an even smaller minority. Still, nei ther Berchtold (whose main resource in a debate was a small, fine flourish of his cigarette-holder) nor the Calvinist Tisza (who kept quoting I Kings 2:33 on the dangers of bloody vengeance) were a match for General Conrad. For now Conrad's anti-Serb wrath was triumphant. His one tamer, the Crown Prince, lay dead. And the Crown Prince's very death by a Serb documented that Conrad had been right all along. There was a deadly snake hissing at Austria's heels, he now said; it would not do to slap at this serpent. Its skull must be crushed.

Conrad's argument would have overridden all others, had it not been for the German envoy in Vienna, Count von Tschirsky. Von Tschirsky acted in the spirit of his monarch's prudence vis-a-vis the Serbs, the prudence so laboriously inspired in the Kaiser by the late Crown Prince. On June 30, two days after Sarajevo, the German ambassador called on the Austrian Foreign Minister to warn". with great emphasis and seriousness against hasty measures in settling accounts with Serbia."

Berchtold made the most of these cautions when he went to his Emperor. Austria, he argued, could not afford to define its stance against Serbia without Berlin's backing. After all, Russia was Serbia's protector; Austria needed the weight of the German army-the world's most powerful-as counterpoise to the Tsar's endless regiments. Only Germany's full support would keep St. Petersburg from meddling. But, as the German ambassador had just shown, only a temperate Austria would earn such support.

The Emperor agreed: Conrad was not to do any Serb skullcrushing, at least not yet. Any decision of the kind must be made shoulder to shoulder with Berlin. Franz Joseph himself would elicit Kaiser Wilhelm's sympathies in a handwritten letter.

Of course Berchtold wanted the sympathies to be low-key rather than inflammatory. He knew that the Kaiser had lost a boon companion at Sarajevo-but that going to war over this loss would mean cancelling the Kaiser's delightful summer cruise to Scandinavia. Berchtold knew that the Kaiser was much better at attitudinizing gorgeously than at thinking cogently or feeling deeply. Being a bit like the Kaiser himself, Berchtold knew that His Majesty's emotions were unsteady, unsure, manipulable. In addressing such a man, Franz Joseph's letter must manipulate accurately.

Berchtold saw to it that in writing the Kaiser, Franz Joseph modulated his phrases a shade closer to restraint than to firmness. Franz Joseph's letter spoke of "the terrible events at Sarajevo" and of the need to "neutralize Serbia as a political power factor"; it did not, however, mention military action nor did it preclude purely diplomatic means.

The letter was a discreet invitation to answer circumspectly. All-Highest circumspection from Berlin would reinforce similar circumspection in Vienna; it would work toward an honorable peace rather than an onerous war; it would improve the chances for the Kaiser's Scandinavian cruise and, for Franz Joseph, the prospect of a cloudless sojourn at Bad Ischl.

Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold schemed well. His own chef du cabinet, Count Alexander Hoyos, outschemed him. Hoyos performed no echoing deeds before or after July 1914. But during that one month his intrigues were historic.

Berchtold had chosen Hoyos as his chief assistant because, as an aristocrat, he habitually preferred mode over matter. To the Foreign Minister, Hoyos's politics-as rabidly anti-Serb as General Conrad's-signified less than the Hoyos cachet: Originally of Spanish origin, the Hoyos clan had long been prominent in the inner sanctum of the Court. Indeed the name Hoyos runs scarlet through the final Habsburg decades. In 1889 Count Josef von Hoyos had been invited to Crown Prince Rudolf's hunting lodge at Mayerling on the morning of Rudolf's suicide; he had brought the news to Vienna. Twenty-five years later his young cousin Alexander Hoyos also became a messenger after an Archducal death. The later Hoyos, however, did more than report calamity. He sped it on its way.

On the afternoon of July 4, 1914, twelve hours after Franz Ferdinand's burial, a courier was about to carry Franz Joseph's letter to Berlin. Suddenly Alexander Hoyos volunteered to take it himself. Why? Because, Hoyos claimed, His Majesty's words (and their nuances) would be amplified by the fact that they traveled to Germany with a senior official of the Austrian Foreign Minister's office.

Such reasoning made sense to the Foreign Minister. He thought he was finessing General Conrad through his Emperor's letter to the Kaiser. Actually he was being finessed by General Conrad through Count Hoyos.

Hoyos arrived in Berlin on July 5, just after the German Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow had left for his honeymoon in Lucerne. The timing, while accidental, served Hoyos well. As mere chef du cabinet he would have had no easy access to von Jagow, a personage of full ministerial rank in Berlin. But the German Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs who acted for the Minister in his absence was a different matter.

While the "Wrinkled Gypsy" (the Kaiser's name for Szogyeny-Marich, Austria's aged ambassador to Germany) was at Potsdam Palace, presenting Franz Joseph's letter to the Kaiser, Hoyos sat in the Under Secretary's office "interpreting the letter's unofficial essence." He explained that Franz Jo seph's phrase "neutralizing Serbia as a political power factor" meant nothing less than the detoxification of Serbia by full force. Hoyos also "interpreted" an implication that, he said, Franz Joseph was too diplomatic to spell out, namely, that the time had come for Germany to prove herself a full-blooded and reliable ally at long last, and that furthermore, only Germany's outspoken willingness to place its unique might behind Austria's action would prevent reprisals by other powers. Berlin's courage would do more than buttress the brotherEmpire; it would ensure the peace of Europe.

The German Under Secretary listened and took fire. He telephoned the Kaiser's Chancellery at Potsdam Palace to ask, urgently, for an audience.

Next morning the Kaiser strolled the Palace gardens with his Chancellor and the Under Secretary. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, "Lanky Theo" (in the Kaiser's badinage), was eager to return to his country estate, wary of Balkan complications yet also too weary to interrogate the Under Secretary who was aflame with Hoyos's "oral elaboration" of the letter from Vienna. The Chancellor let the Under Secretary spout.

And the Kaiser lent his ear. His stroll became a strut. He heard that between the lines Franz Joseph was appealing to his, Wilhelm's, valor as Germany's first soldier, to Wilhelm's chivalry as a Prussian knight who would not fail his venerable fellow-sovereign in Vienna. Then and there Wilhelm swore not to fail him. And since, by not failing him, Wilhelm at the same time was ensuring the peace of Europe, he could take off safely for his Scandinavian cruise.

On July 6, at 9:15 A.M., Wilhelm's train steamed for the port of Kiel where his yacht Hohenzollern rode anchor. "This time," he told the industrialist Gustav von Krupp at an on-board dinner that night, "this time I haven't chickened out."

Austria-Hungary saw proof of that the following day. Berchtold in Vienna and Tisza in Budapest received telegrams from Berlin. They were identical and both were signed by the Wrinkled Gypsy, the Habsburg ambassador to Germany. However, both had been drafted by the victorious Hoyos. "His [German] Majesty," the cable read, "authorized me to convey to our august sovereign… that we may count on the full support of the German Reich. He quite understands that His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty [Franz Joseph], with his well-known love for peace, would find it hard to march into Serbia, but if we [Austrians] really recognize the necessity of military measures against Serbia, he [Kaiser Wilhelm] would deplore our not taking advantage of the present moment which is so favorable to us."

This, of course, was drastically different from previous German advice on the subject. It almost mandated the occupation of Serbia. An astonished Berchtold began to telephone long distance. He discovered the turn of events in Berlin. In vain he reported to the Vienna cabinet that Hoyos had overstepped his authority. That Hoyos had not been empowered to meet substantively with the German Under Secretary. That Hoyos had expressed his personal opinions, not those of the Emperor or the Austrian government. That Hoyos's distorted account of the Habsburg position had distorted the Kaiser's response.

All in vain. All too late. Hoyos had maneuvered irrevocably well. The Kaiser himself had been recruited in General Conrad's cause. Who dared unrecruit the Kaiser-especially a Kaiser away on his Norse cruise? Who dared resist Conrad's imperative to crush the Serb skull, now that Prussia's spiked helmets were massing behind the General?

No one in Vienna. Wafflers in the cabinet, like Finance Minister Bilinski, came around to General Conrad's side. After a while even Tisza relented. And Berchtold? Berchtold caved in quickly, easily, even lithely. No deep convictions encumbered the Count. The wind had veered and he veered with it, making the movement into ballet.

The new Berchtold proposed that Serbia should be invaded, yes; but only after it had rejected Austrian demands that were diplomatically impeccable as well as absolutely unacceptable.

The cabinet nodded. General Conrad agreed, too. A diplomatic showdown would condition the populace for a call to arms. And it would give him time to mobilize fully for the crushing of the Serb skull for the total extirpation of Serb power.

Now the cabinet's collective sense must receive All-Highest approval. On the night of July 8, Berchtold entrained for Bad Ischl where Franz Joseph had returned after the Archduke's funeral. It is a measure of Berchtold's spinelessness that he invited Hoyos along, to brief His Majesty on the strength of the new German support. It was as though Hoyos had never tricked Berchtold in Berlin.

Berchtold smoothly submitted the cabinet's position. The early. morning sun shone on this crucial encounter. Outside the windows of the Imperial villa, thrushes and larks were in sweet voice. Franz Joseph pondered. Yes, the restoration of order, the redemption of Austria as a major power that couldn't limply suffer the gunning-down of its Crown Princeyes, that did require a settling of accounts with Serbia. But a settling so dangerous? Causing what repercussions? Interna tional war was a supreme disorder Franz Joseph had no wish to face at his age. Berchtold, however, spoke only of a police action deftly justified, well prepared in advance, and executed fast enough to render pointless any aid Serbia's friends might want to extend.

How decide on such a sun-dappled day? Frau Schratt was waiting to be taken for a stroll through lilies in full flower. As a lover, Franz Joseph was an ascetic, but an ascetic with style. As a Foreign Minister, Count von Berchtold lacked policy, consistency, vision. But he wore his lacks with style. Nothing but style underpinned the Empire-style and an army with the world's smartest uniforms. That's why the Emperor held on to his stylish Berchtold. Perhaps Berchtold's proposal carried some risks. But it was not raw. It was steeped in style. The Emperor nodded at the Count. The Count bowed from the waist. An hour later he and Hoyos boarded his salon car at Ischl station and rode back to Vienna. The ultimatum was on its way.

On july 9, then, the decision fell to crush the Serb skull. General Conrad's agenda would be honored. But it would be implemented a la Count von Berchtold. It would be much more civilized than the murder it avenged. It would be sophisticated theater of the sort only Vienna could devise.

This skull-crushing would come as a fine third-act surprise. Until then the secret would be nursed backstage, refined and rehearsed behind shuttered blinds in Count von Berchtold's offices at the Ballhausplatz. Like a cunning playwright, Berchtold planned his plot. He would mislead his audienceSerbia's patrons like Russia, France, and France's ally, Britain. He would lull them all into mid-summer drowsiness. For the next few weeks he would play down diminuendo the Austrian hue and cry over Sarajevo. He would encourage the holiday mood of the season. At the same time, unbeknownst to all, the Ballhausplatz would craft its diplomatic time bomb; the Ministry of War would hone its mobilization plans. Then, out of nowhere, Berchtold would spring the ultimatum. But, as in a drama of hidden identities, it would go by another name; only a "note" would be thrust at Serbia, yet a note charged with conditions much tougher, with a deadline much shorter, than most ultimatums. This nonultimatum super-ultimatum would be abruptly posed, inevitably refused-and followed instantly by the lethal pounce of Conrad's troops. Before the audience could catch its breath, before Europe's torpid chancelleries could stir, it would be over. The curtain would fall on Serbia conquered. Austria would take bows, having performed as a still vital and puissant great power.

All in all, an excellent Habsburg libretto. Act I called for marshalling, discreetly, the evidence to be used later against Serbia. Here the best source was testimony from the conspirators, now in police custody.

Princip and Cabrinovic had been quickly apprehended. Within four days of the deed, police sweeps of possible suspects happened to net Ilk and Graben. Arrests continued and spread all over Serbia. Many hundreds with no connection at all to the crime were jailed and grilled. Princip knew that because he was allowed to read newspapers. Therefore he became more responsive at interrogations. He talked (as he put it) "to prevent more innocent people from coming to harm." He also talked for propaganda reasons "to educate the new generation with our martyrdom." But he talked selec tively; he named only Graben and Ilia as well as the band's "auxiliaries," who, already on the list of the potentially seditious, would have been rounded up in any case. He did not breathe a syllable about Colonel Apis or the Black Hand. Graben and Ilia talked a bit more. Ilk was most anxious to save his life; therefore he talked the most, but even he did not give away the Apis group.

On July 10, Berchtold dispatched an aide to Sarajevo to evaluate the information. On July 13, an analysis arrived by top-secret cable from the Bosnian capital:

Statements by accused show practically beyond doubt that accused decided to perpetrate the outrage while in Belgrade, and that outrage was prepared… with help of Serb officials… who also procured bombs, Brownings, ammunition and cyanide. Bombs definitely proven to be from Serb Army stores, but nothing to show they had been taken out for this express purpose… Hardly any room for doubt that Princip, Graben, Cabrinovic smuggled across frontier with help from Serb customs… However, no evidence of complicity of Serb government ministers in directly ordering assassination or in supplying weapons..

All this fell a bit short of Berchtold's hope. It failed to implicate Belgrade's highest authorities. However, it did taint them for condoning, if not encouraging, a terrorist climate and the willingness on the part of lesser officials to cooperate in the outrage. And that was enough to activate Berchtold's scenario. It started to go forward on tip-toe, while Europe dozed.

***

The groundwork for deceiving the continent had already been laid on July 8, in a conference between the Foreign Minister and the Chief of Staff. "I recommend," Count von Berchtold had said to General Conrad, "that you and the Minister of War leave Vienna for your vacation so as to keep an appearance that nothing is going on."

On July 14, the Army announced that General Conrad had started his holiday at Innichen, a remote hamlet in the Dolomites, 3,500 feet high. War Minister Krobatin, the official Wiener Zeitung said a day earlier, had gone to take the waters at Bad Gastein. All along Franz Joseph remained in Bad Ischl, apparently with little on his mind save sniffing blossoms with Frau Schratt.

As for Berlin, it played along. Chancellor von BethmannHollweg was charmed by Berchtold's dramaturgy; Berchtold's denouement would prove that Austria was not a baroque carcass but suprisingly alive, doughty, adept, decisive-a worthy confederate of Germany.

And so the Germans acted on Habsburg's cue. On the yacht Hohenzollern the Kaiser sported innocent through the North Sea. The German Chancellor holed up in his country place where he communed with Beethoven on the grand piano and read Plato in the original Greek. The German Foreign Minister continued to honeymoon at Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. The German Minister of the Navy, Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, promenaded with wife and children through the greenery at Bad Tarasp in the Engadine. The Chief of the German Admiralty also went on holiday, and so did the German Minister of War. General von Moltke took the cure at Carlsbad, again.

The sun shone. The days passed. The jolt of Sarajevo subsided. The world discovered that Austria, instead of rounding on the Serbs, rusticated placidly along with its German ally. Belgrade relaxed. So did St. Petersburg, Paris, London. The feeling grew that Habsburg's response to the assassination would be as reasonable as it was tardy.

And since so many leaders jaunted away from Vienna and Berlin, why should their counterparts elsewhere stick to their desks? One by one the dramatis personae of the opposing camp began to play their parts in Count von Berchtold's script.

Together with his daughter, the Chief of Staff of the Serbian Army went on vacation-in Austria, of all countries, at Bad Gleichenberg. On July 15, Raymond Poincare, President of France, that is, of Serbia's closest Western ally, embarked on a cruise as cheery as the Kaiser's. With his Prime Minister he sailed on a summit junket to Norway and Russia. Tsar Nicholas II, Serbia's eastern protector, awaited his French guests at Tsarskoe Selo, a pleasure dome of multi-hued marble overlooking the Gulf of Finland that served as his summer castle. "Every day," he noted in his diary, "we play tennis or swim in the fjords."

In England, the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, a childless widower and lover of leafy solitude, indulged himself in leafy solitude. Near Winchester, by the banks of the river Itchen stood his cottage, brushed by willows and embraced by ivy. During much of that July, Sir Edward could be found here. He spent the days leaning against the rail of a footbridge, lowering his rod down to the stippled trout.

The First Lord of the British Admiralty pursued a more ebullient pastime at Overstrand on the Norfolk coast: There Mr. Winston Churchill had his holiday house. On its beachfront he worked away with spade and bucket, assisted by his children. The Churchill family was building sand castles that featured deep moats to trap the tide.

At almost the same time the British Prime Minister Sir Herbert Asquith sent his daughter off to Holland "so that the girl can have some fun." Sir Herbert himself did not stray too far from No. 10 Downing Street. After all, he had to tend to something of a crisis. More fuss was afoot about the Irish Home Rule Bill.

The sunny, stable high over Europe was of double benefit to Vienna. Politically, it painted just the right trompe l'oeil backdrop for Count von Berchtold's stage. But the fine summer also met the personal needs of the Viennese. Perhaps more than other cities, theirs had been an incubator of the treacheries of the human soul. Perhaps more than others, it cultivated the therapy of the meadow.

After many rainless weeks, a nocturnal downpour on July 9 washed away the dust. At dawn the west wind scented the streets with the pine of Alpine pastures. (It was the day Berchtold's team began to draft in secret the nonultimatum super-ultimatum.) By noon the sun had re-burnished the foliage of the Vienna Woods. And since only a few streetcar stops separated the Viennese from their Woods, the weather drew them outdoors in unprecedented numbers. They might stoop the work day away in dank factories or behind cramped desks. But on Sunday the lagoons of the Danube splashed with swimmers. At night, the vineyard inns sounded with more song than ever. "Wien… Wien…" they sang, turned toward the heart of the city, namely its past. They still sang about its dreamy courtyards, its gothic alleys, its Biedermeier gardens-all dear and cozy and going, going, gone. Who would suspect that, hidden away at the Ballhausplatz, Count von Berchtold was preparing a giant grenade? In July 1914, Vienna presented itself as a spectacle of nature and nostalgia-the very opposite of imminence and war.

Nature and nostalgia. Their twin lure was felt by many during just those weeks. On July 12, Sigmund and Martha Freud left Vienna for Carlsbad. They arrived there at almost the same time as the Chief of the German General Staff, General von Moltke. The Freuds, though, lived just outside the spa. They took rooms at the Villa Fasolt on the Schlossberg, a hummock among wooded knolls. This landscape resembled the environs of Fribor, a small Moravian town where Freud had lived during his first four years. In Fribor, by the foothills of the Carpathians, he had been"… the happy child who received his first indelible impressions from this air… from this soil." Even as an adult". I never felt really comfortable in the city. I believe now that I was never free from a longing for the beautiful woods near our home."

During this summer Freud began to develop thoughts for a paper (never published) called "Philogenetic Fantasy," about mankind's infancy-a pre-Ice Age, pre-Angst, pre-Jung Eden with food and space aplenty, succeeded by much rawer and more crowded times in which paranoia became a survival instinct.

In contrast to Freud, Leon Trotsky could not afford an expensive resort. He spent July of 1914 in his sparse apartment near the flowering edge of the Vienna Woods. Longingly, no doubt. His autobiography shows that for all his sophistication, Trotsky retained the yearnings of a country boy born in the Southern Ukraine". a kingdom of wheat and sheep… The village would flare up in my consciousness and draw me on like a lost paradise. In my years as commander of the Red Army… I was greatly pleased to see each new [rural] fence constructed of freshly cut pine boards. Lenin, who knew this passion of mine, often twitted me about it."

Yet this same summer saw Lenin sharing this same passion. His headquarters at Cracow near the Austro-Russian border had been chosen for reasons beyond revolutionary expediency. "Illyich likes Cracow so much," his wife would write, "because it reminded him of Russia." But Lenin, born in a Volga backwater many miles from the nearest railroad, liked better yet a nook in his Habsburg exile that was smaller and greener than Cracow.

"Autumn is magnificent in the Tatra range," he'd written his sister Maria in April 1914. "If we have a fine autumn we shall probably live in the country." The summer of 1914 was too seductive. Lenin didn't wait for fall. In July he and his wife Krupskaya moved to Poronin in the Tatras. Krupskaya suffered from a goiter and couldn't walk far from their cottage. But Lenin took off with knapsack, walking stick, and notebook "clambering up the steeps like a mountain goat." Sometimes he stopped to make notes on the contentious Socialist Con gress scheduled in Vienna for the following month. But for most of July (while the Ballhausplatz hatched the nonultimatum super-ultimatum) Lenin hiked the glorious days away.

Lenin was an occasional visitor in Vienna. Hitler, like Trotsky, had lived there for years. Unlike Trotsky he'd never been drawn to the city's green precincts. He had painted, brooded, ranted, on pavement only; in fact he'd meticulously kept away from the Vienna Woods as if their fragrance might compromise his bitterness. But in this balmy summer he seemed to be haunted by leaf and tree. In July Hitler meandered through Munich's sub-Alpine outskirts, those pointing toward Salzburg and his native Upper Austria. He sketched river shores and villas, often with a garden motif.

That summer the idea of the garden, of nature and nostalgia, also haunted another demon. A virtuous demon, this one, obsessed with morality as others are obsessed with hate. Karl Kraus was the most merciless critic in Austria of Austria. About three times a month he published Die Fackel (The Torch), a magazine of inexhaustible indignation and surgical brilliance. At first it had printed polemics from a variety of writers. But by 1914 no other Jeremiah even approached Kraus's eloquence; by then every syllable in Die Fackel hissed from his pen. His wit seared Vienna's operetta Machiavellis, its hand-kissing nastiness, its whipped-cream ethics. Die Fackel lit up the ways in which the city debased manners and debauched language.

But the summer of 1914 proved that Kraus, Austria's scourge, shared certain sympathies with the late Austrian Crown Prince. Of course both were dedicated haters-the Archduke forever frowning and the torch-hurling Jew. But there was another affinity. Both men were drawn to nature and nostalgia, the dual hallmark of the season. Both loved the garden because it sustained virtue that had withered elsewhere. For the Archduke, the garden-particularly his great garden in Bohemia-was a haven of divine grace; it sheltered him and his Sophie against the godless and malevolent artifice of Vienna's court. For Kraus, the garden was a sanctuary from civilization, which had "betrayed God to the machine."

The Crown Prince loved the garden lavishly, naively, as evidenced by the vast rose beds of Konopiste. Kraus loved the garden mystically. Show him a border of violets, and his acid genius would pulse in an orphic vein. To Kraus, nature occasioned a transfiguring nostalgia. Nature and nostalgia were part of a trinity whose third member was the Maker Himself.

Not long before the summer of 1914, Karl Kraus wrote "The Dying Man," a poem that spies a beacon glimmering from the garden of Creation. It glimmers on through the Fall to guide the fallen toward Redemption; a Redemption whose flowers are the same as those of Genesis.

In the poem God, the Gardener, addresses man, the moribund:

But the garden did more than furnish Kraus with apocalyptic metaphor. During July of 1914, he experienced the garden as a very personal, real, blooming, and twittering haven. In the park of Janowitz, the Bohemian estate of his mistress, Baroness Sidonie von Nadherny, he could lean back under chestnut boughs. He could breathe deeply and release himself from his angers. In public he was the mordant aphorist capable of defining a woman as "an occasionally acceptable substitute for masturbation." In private, among Janowitz's groves, he kissed his baroness's slim fingers as they intertwined with his own. In Janowitz Park he relished his rare moments of repose and affection.

Less than fifteen miles away from Janowitz lay Franz Ferdinand's Konopiste. On June 15, when the archducal gardens had opened to the public, Kraus and his baroness had been among the dazzled visitors. This was the ultimate garden. Therefore it was the ultimate antithesis to what Kraus hated most: Vienna's artificiality, especially the kind perfected by the Viennese press with its deliciously concocted slanders, the bribed bias of its reportage, the slick charm of its feuilletonists. Through sheer organic honesty of stalk and leaf and petal, the garden rebuked all such ink-stained turpitude.

Shortly after visiting Konopiste, Kraus fired off a philippic culminating in the declaration

that the preservation of the wall of a manor park, where between a five-hundred-year-old poplar and a bluebell flowering today, all the miracles of creation are salvaged from the wreck of the world-that such a thing is more important in the name of the spirit than the pursuit of intellectual infamy which takes God's breath away!

These words in Die Fackel, vibrating on the rim of "the wreck of the world," were the last Kraus wrote before the shots of Sarajevo.

After Sarajevo (while Berchtold was hatching the nonultimatum super-ultimatum), Die Fackel of July 10, 1914, ran a eulogy of the late Crown Prince that was also a hymn to nature's naturalness as well as the indictment of a culture. "In this era so deplorable for humanity," wrote Kraus, which in our Austrian laboratory of the apocalypse is expressed by the grimace of gemutlich sickliness-in such an era the Archduke had the measure of a man. Only now, as Vienna mimics mourning, do we realize… how much he disdained that indispensable affability used by the powerful to promote their careers… He was no greeter. He had no winning ways to charm the people past their grievances. He did show character through his radical championship of the commonplace against a fake modernity.

He proved himself by his taste. At his estate he opened to the people a floral landscape intelligible on the most popular level, a park with few rarefied pretensions… He was not part of the fancy dynamics of Austrian decay… he wanted to rouse our era from its sickness so that it would not sleep past its own death. Now it sleeps past his.

Even as Kraus wrote that passage, Europe drowsed on toward a great death. In fact, some of his admirers had a hand in both the drowsing and the dying. Many bright young diplomats read him with awe. This included the group under Count von Berchtold laboring on the composition of the missive Berchtold was to unveil exquisitely, explosively, during the second act of his scenario-the nonultimatum superultimatum to be served on Serbia.

"We were all devotees of Karl Kraus," one of the group would later reminisce in a memoir. "We all devoured, fascinated, every issue of Die Fackel. From Kraus we had learned to believe in the magic of the word as the womb of thought… We were the last generation [of Habsburg Foreign Office officials], and our highest aim was to crystallize language into utter perfection. For four weeks we worked on the phrasing of the ultimatum as if we were polishing a jewel."

To Kraus, had he known of it, such adulation would have been abomination. For him "the magic of the word" lay in quarrying the truth, not in tricking it out. Die Fackel aimed to expose, as he once put it, the "difference between an urn and a chamber pot." In July of 1914 his fans on the Ballhausplatz manipulated the word in order to blur just this distinction. They were festooning the chamber-pot crassness of an ultimatum with the adornments of an urn, to be passed on a silver server from Excellency to Excellency.

Meanwhile excellencies all over Europe continued in the roles assigned to them by Count von Berchtold's Act I. The weather continued as the Count's obedient stagehand. A slumbrous tropical sun made the continent a lotus land. Belgrade announced that the Serbian King would shortly travel to a spa abroad. In London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, took a languid view of international relations; speaking at a banquet, he said that while some clouds always hovered on the horizon, there were fewer this year than last, and that His Majesty's Government would help to dissipate even those… In Vienna itself, a skeptical journal like the Socialist ArbeiterZeitung relaxed its suspicions of the government. "The quiet and slow pace of events," it wrote, "suggests that no drastic action will be taken against Serbia."

Just past the midpoint of July, rumors skittered along the Ringstrasse. What was happening behind those drawn blinds at the Ballhausplatz? The stock market registered a sudden, though not major decline.

But Count von Berchtold knew how to restore the blandness required by his scenario. On July 18, he visited British Ambassador Sir Maurice de Bunsen at the ambassador's summer residence Schloss Stixstein. The Foreign Minister "was unusually chatty and agreeable," Sir Maurice would later report, "… not a word was let drop that a crisis impended."

To the Italian ambassador, who seemed a bit unnerved by Austria's impassivity after Sarajevo, the Foreign Minister said that the situation was not grave-"it just needs to be cleared up." And the French ambassador, who did not find much clarification in that statement, was assured by Berchtold that Vienna's note to Belgrade would be "reasonable."

The French ambassador duly relayed this news to his government. Paris, not overly alarmed in the first place, let its attention wander. Just then a magnificent scandal was engulfing France. On July 20, a judge's gavel at the Court de Seine started a trial mesmerizing the Gallic imagination. Mme. Henriette Caillaux, wife of the Finance Minister (widely touted to be the next Prime Minister), had pumped six bullets into the body of France's most powerful journalist, the editor in chief of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette. That had been back in March. But now, in mid-July, fireworks between prosecutor and defense counsel lit up the erotic glamor behind this charismatic homicide. Much of the trial revolved around the love letters Caillaux had written Henriette during the extramarital affair that preceded their wedding-letters whose imminent publication in Le Figaro had driven Mme. Caillaux to murder.

The shots at Sarajevo faded rapidly as those from the Figaro office resounded once more in newspaper columns. This was the stuff of prime gossip, made even tangier by a courtroom duel. It enlivened millions of French vacations. Certainly it piqued President Poincare on his summer cruise. About to land in St. Petersburg, he asked to be apprised of every moist detail by cable.

Britain also had an absorbing domestic concern-apart from holiday-making, of course. The Irish Home Rule Bill was roiling tempers very badly. On July 20-on the morning the Caillaux judges assembled in scarlet robes at the Seine Tribunal-His Britannic Majesty summoned the contending parties to Buckingham Palace, taking a very rare step beyond his constitutional role as a reigning, not a ruling, monarch. And King George did manage to postpone the crisis-until a superior urgency submerged it. But who would have expected such an urgency? Where would it come from? The Henley Regatta?

British King and Paris murderess were spear-carriers for Count von Berchtold's stagecraft. They both diverted attention as he readied the surprise climax. Vienna itself remained quiet, basking its way through July. It did generate some official news-though of a literally festive character. The City Fathers were planning the First International Vienna Music Festival, scheduled for June 1915. Newspapers reported a spirited debate on the subject in the Municipal Council. Among the main points discussed were (1) should the program consist of concerts only? and (2) if operas were included, would this be aping Salzburg, whose own first large-scale festival was slotted for August of this year and which would feature the great Felix Weingartner conducting Lotte Lehmann in Don Giovanni?

Vienna, then, looked preoccupied with matters either esthetic or bucolic and at all events harmless. As late as July 20, the Russian ambassador saw no reason for not leaving town on a two-week holiday. He left. From St. Petersburg came an even more conclusive signal of detente. On July 21, the Tsar and his guest, French President Poincare, exchanged toasts that dwelled on the international picture: The Serb-Austrian problem wasn't even mentioned.

But forty-eight hours earlier, while Europe sunned and napped, Count von Berchtold had tiptoed toward the last scene of his first act. On the afternoon of July 19, a number of taxis and private automobiles drew up before his Palais overlooking the Strudlhof Steps. The cars arrived at intervals, avoiding a dramatic convergence. It was Sunday. The scene seemed to point to some weekend social gathering. A passerby, had he cared to notice, would not have spotted a single official limousine.

Yet this was an official occasion, as crucial as it was covert: a cabinet meeting of the Joint Ministers of the AustroHungarian Empire. Berchtold had summoned them to review the text of the note to the Serbian government. On the morning of that day the "jewel" had finally been polished to perfection.

Next morning, on Monday July 20, a courier left the Ballhausplatz for the Emperor's villa at Bad Ischl. He made this trip routinely, every weekday, carrying state papers. On the twentieth he carried "the jewel" for Franz Joseph's inspection. On Tuesday the twenty-first, a brief, laconic item in the official Wiener Zeitung reported that Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold had gone to Bad Ischl "to discuss current business with His Majesty." And that morning, at 9 A.M., he was received by the Emperor.

Berchtold's diary records a Franz Joseph braced, tart, taut, not at all octogenarian.

"Well, Berchtold, ever on the go?"

"Yes, Your Majesty, one has to be. These are fast-moving times."

"Exactly, as never before. The note is pretty sharp."

"It has to be, Your Majesty."

"It has to be indeed. You will join us for lunch."

"With humble pleasure, Your Majesty."

Hoyos, whom Berchtold had brought along to the audience, took the official copy of the demarche from his briefcase. Franz Joseph initialed it. "The Jewel," already endorsed by the Joint Ministers, now bore the Imperial imprimatur.

Actually this was only the formal ratification of action taken twenty-four hours earlier. On Monday the Emperor had read and approved the note handed him by the courier. On that same Monday it had been wired to the Austrian Embassy in Belgrade. It was ready to be thrust at Serbia by the time a white-gloved footman set down a tureen before Franz Joseph, Berchtold, and Hoyos at midday of July 21.

In summary, the note said

This was the super-ultimatum. In the words of the British Foreign Secretary, it constituted "the most formidable document ever addressed by one state to another." It was also the nonultimatum. Though its tone left no doubt over the consequences of noncompliance, it did not mention the possibility of war, and therefore arrived at the Austrian Embassy in Belgrade labeled as a mere "demarche with a time limit."

And there were other fine aspects to Berchtold's game. The sledgehammer message came phrased in fastidious diplomatic French, the last such "final notice" to be written in that language. Last but not least, Berchtold used precision timing, always important in a theatrical enterprise. Belgrade relied on two principal protectors, Russia and France. Just then the French Head of State was finishing his visit with the Tsar. Berchtold did not want the two to react jointly when the "demarche with a time limit" struck. Through German diplomatic sources, Berchtold had learned that President Poincare would end his stay at the Russian capital in the early afternoon of Thursday, July 23. By 5 P.M. he would be floating away on the cruiser France. Berchtold instructed the Austrian Ambassador in Belgrade to deliver the "demarche" at 6 P.M. sharp.

As ordered, so done. Berchtold had successfully achieved the end of Act I.

Act II opened well, or so it seemed. Abruptly, out of the blue of yet another lovely day, the Austrian Ambassador Baron von Giesl placed a telephone call "of utmost urgency" to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgrade. It was 4:30 P.M. on July 23, and the Ambassador said that he must deliver "an extremely important communication" to the Prime Minister-who was also the Foreign Minister-that very afternoon at 6 P.M.

Prime Minister Panic was not even in town. He had no reason to stay close to his office. True, at the beginning of the month, Serbian diplomats abroad had reported rumors that something "strong" might be brewing in Vienna. Yet week followed week after Sarajevo, and nothing "strong" materialized. Serbia began to turn to internal matters. An electoral campaign engrossed the country in mid-July. Panic left the capital for a political tour, speaking against Apis's extremist party. It was at this point that the Austrian ambassador placed his peremptory call.

Since the Prime Minister was away on the hustings in the Southern provinces, the Finance Minister substituted for him. The Finance Minister received that astounding note from the ambassador at 6 P.M. of July 23. It did not reach Pasic until 8 P.M. that night, when he heard over the telephone details of the suddenness, the severity, the smooth murderousness of Vienna's demands. He had less than forty-eight hours to answer them.

Panic cancelled all further election speeches. He returned to Belgrade at five o'clock the next morning and immediately called a cabinet meeting. Sessions continued throughout the day, through most of the night that followed, and through most of the day after.

Shortly after 6 P.M. of Saturday July 25, a tall rotund man with a seignorial white beard and a black formal frock coat hurried on foot from the Foreign Ministry to the Austrian Embassy a few blocks off. It was Prime Minister Pasic, holding in his hand an envelope with his government's reply.

When he was admitted to the Ambassador's office it was 6:15 P.M., a quarter of an hour after the deadline set by Vienna. Therefore Ambassador von Giesl did not ask the Prime Minister to sit down. He himself read the note standing. It was a messy document, revised and re-typed many times, after frenzied debates and febrile consultations with the Russian and French embassies. The final version in Baron von Giesl's hands had an inked-out passage and a number of corrections made by pen. That did not interest the Austrian ambassador, nor did the reply's conciliatory and mournful prose, nor did its acceptance of all points of the demarche except those demanding the participation of Austrian police in pursuit of Serbian subjects on Serbian soil. Such requests, the note said, Belgrade "must reject, being a violation of the Serbian constitution and of the law of criminal procedure."

It was this rejection that mattered to the Ambassador. It was the necessary next event in Austria's scenario. The Ambassador had counted on it. He had anticipated it. That was why he stood before the Serbian Prime Minister in his trav eling clothes. That was why his code-book had already gone up the chimney, why his secret papers had been shredded, his luggage packed, and his motor-car readied at the front door. That was why he only needed to sign a statement prepared in advance: It said that "due to the unsatisfactory nature" of the Serbian response, the Austro-Hungarian Empire saw itself forced to break off relations with the Kingdom of Serbia.

At 6:20 P.M. a messenger took the statement from Baron von Giesl's desk for delivery to the Serbian Prime Minister's office. As the messenger left, Giesl repeated the statement orally to the Prime Minister who still stood before him. Then the Austrian ambassador bowed, wished the Prime Minister good day, walked to his car. At half past six he boarded a train that crossed the Austrian frontier ten minutes later.

33

THAT SAME EVENING OF JULY 25, THE AUSTRIAN FOREIGN MINISTER Count von Berchtold sat in the Ischl office of Emperor Franz Joseph's military aide-de-camp. They were waiting for a call from the War Ministry in Vienna, which in turn waited for a telephone call from the Embassy in Belgrade. When the clock struck 6:30 P.M., the Foreign Minister, white-faced, said he had to leave, he must get some fresh air. Two minutes after he had gone, the telephone rang with the staccato news. Serbia rejects essential demand. The aide ran to have himself announced at the Emperor's villa.

Franz Joseph received his message (as the aide would remember) "hollow-eyed" and "hoarse of voice." "Also dock…" he said. ("So, after all…"). Then, after a long silence, he added, "But the rupture of relations needn't necessarily mean war!.

What sudden change. Barely two days earlier, in the same idyllic Alpine setting, with the same beneficent weather, the same Emperor and the same Foreign Minister had looked forward to just this news: Serbia's rejection of the demarche, which now justified its military punishment. Why, then, was the Emperor shaken? Why the Foreign Minister's ashen cheeks?

Because the play had begun to fail.

In Belgrade Berchtold's libretto had proceeded on cue, but elsewhere the second act was suddenly unravelling. The trouble began with Austria's chief supporting actor, namely Germany.

On the surface nothing seemed wrong. Vienna had sent the text of the "jewel" demarche to Berlin on July 22. Within a day the Austrian ambassador cabled from the German capital that the Kaiser's Foreign Minister "thanks for the communication and assures me that the government here is entirely in agreement with the contents of the demarche."

Actually the Wilhelmstrasse was only imitating the attitude struck by its overlord, the absentee Kaiser (still away on his cruise) before he had boarded his yacht. Aping their master, German ministers stepped before the footlights to stiffen their upper lips at Europe: On July 27, Berlin officially and publicly advised its ally not to accept an offer of mediation from Britain.

But Berlin performed only the external mechanics of the Austrian script, as Vienna was soon to know. Internally things were rather different. A cable sent by the German Foreign Ministry to its principal diplomats abroad said". we have had no influence of any kind on the wording of Austria's note to Serbia, and no more opportunity than other powers to take sides in any way before its publication…" The tart implication here was made plain to the Austrian ambassador by the German Foreign Minister von Jagow shortly after he had read Vienna's demarche. "I at once gave my opinion to His Excellency [Jagow's memoirs would state] that the contents of the Austrian note to Serbia seemed pretty stiff and going beyond its purpose… I expressed my pained surprise… that the decisions of the Austrian government had been communicated to us so tardily that we were deprived of the possibility of giving our views on it. The Chancellor, too, to whom I at once submitted the text of the ultimatum, thought it was too harsh."

If Berlin thought so, in its heart of hearts, what about capitals less friendly?

On July 24, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey returned to London from trout fishing on the river Itchen, and the First Lord of the Admiralty Mr. Winston Churchill from his beach idyll near Norfolk. They met in Parliament, which was still in something of a dither over the Irish Home Rule Bill. But the debate suddenly gave way to Sir Edward's voice. He was reading from a paper just handed to him-the Austrian note to Serbia, ". an ultimatum [this is Churchill describing the scene] such as had never been penned in modern times before. The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone [i.e., the Irish issue] faded back into the mists… and a strange new light fell on the map of Europe."

Little more than forty-eight hours later the Admiralty announced that new orders had been issued to the First and Second Fleets of the British Navy. They were the most powerful units of the world's most powerful marine force, and they happened to be concentrated in the English Channel for maneuvers just finished. Now, contrary to previous plans, they were not to disperse. All shore leaves were cancelled.

In Paris, a hastily called Ministerial Council cabled the text of the Austrian "jewel" to President Poincare on the battle cruiser France. Poincare was about to visit some Scandinavian ports. He cancelled all further travels. The France headed straight for Dunkirk.

At his summer residence on the Gulf of Finland, the Tsar stopped playing tennis. The Russian General Staff Gazette proclaimed a "State of Pre-Mobilization." It involved, among other measures, preparations to deploy troops quickly at "any threatened frontier" (in this case the Austrian) and the recall of reservists to bring border divisions to full strength.

Overnight Berchtold's libretto had gone to pieces. He had miscalculated entirely its effects on its intended audience.

The pause he had spun out so cunningly after Sarajevo; the lethargy so studiously orchestrated through four weeks; the dolce far niente put on by the Ballhausplatz that was to have gentled Europe into a summer sleep so sweet that, by the time it woke and rubbed its eyes, it would see Serbia crushed-all that artfulness had produced a very different outcome and an altogether unwanted mood.

During the long month, Sarajevo had dimmed into a trivializing distance. By the end of July, Vienna's abrupt growl at Serbia sounded-even in diplomatic French-like a savage vendetta over a remote cause. Huge Habsburg looked like a brute seizing a stale pretext to exterminate little Serbia. Now it was the ultimatum that looked like an outrage, not the Archduke's assassination.

And that wasn't all. Vienna's month-long "peace" act produced yet another unpleasant result. During the many days the Ballhausplatz had spent styling the nonultimatum super-ultimatum, General Conrad on his nonholiday holiday had seethed and scribbled and cabled in his Dolomite village, perfecting the mobilization schedules of his army. Of course he had put none of them in effect as yet-that would have rattled the fair-weather scenery. But with the demarche delivered, this backstage phase of his effort was over. On July 26, the General charged into Berchtold's office saying that the martial moves made by Serbia's friends in the last twenty-four hours had revised his plans. To prepare for all contingencies, Austria's forces must now be at absolutely maximum strength and in optimum condition before striking Belgrade-a goal he, Conrad, would need at least three weeks to reach; the army could not start its offensive until then.

Count von Berchtold took all this like a true Viennese. Yes, he had lost his poise temporarily in Ischl. But he recovered it fast, together with his instinct for make-believe. So the fiction that was to beguile Europe had misfired. Very well, he would produce another fiction.

This one he believed in himself. Cleverly it turned Conrad's bleak news of the Army's unreadiness into the semblance of an advantage. Now (as one of the Foreign Minister's lieutenants would later recall)

Berchtold regarded even the declaration of war as not more than an extreme form of pressure to obtain a diplomatic surrender from Serbia which still had almost twenty days for reflection, seeing that military operations would not commence before August 15th…

How induce the proper "reflection" in Serbia and her allies? Again by theatrical means, naturally. The Foreign Minister decided that Habsburg would put on a face that was absolutely resolute and charmingly patient at the same time.

To show absolute resolve, Austria declared war on Serbia at 1 P.M. of July 28, by cable. For the first time in history a telegram opened hostilities between two countries (a first time balancing the last time of Austria's ultimatum in diplomatic French). Austria also trumpeted its determination with thousands of mobilization posters materializing overnight, black print on gold background, from one end of the Empire to the other; by patriotic fireworks in newspapers amenable to government influence; by the announcement that His Majesty was about to issue a ringing manifesto calling his subjects to arms.

At the same time the mask of charming patience spoke. Austrian ambassadors-especially those accredited with Serbia's friends-pointed to Habsburg restraint. Here was a great power at war. Yet so far Austria had not taken advantage of its enemy's smallness but only of the fact that the Serb capital lay just across from the Austrian border. Austria had done no more than shell that capital from its own territory. There was still no invasion of Serbia. Furthermore, despite the enormity of Sarajevo, the Austrian government asked only justice from Belgrade and not one square inch of Serbian land.

Surely this demonstrated Vienna's patience? As for Vienna's charm, consider her treatment of General Radomir Put- nik, Chief of Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces. When Vienna had surprised Belgrade with the ultimatum, the General was still sipping the waters of the Austrian spa Bad Gleichenberg. Of course he departed instantly. On his way home via Budapest, he was hauled off the train and held as a potential prisoner of war-the war Austria would declare within hours. However, "orders from an All-Highest level" had the General released. An Austrian army physician was detailed to attend the General's asthma while he remained on Austrian soil. An honor guard escorted him to the personal train of General Conrad; and it was in the luxury of Conrad's salon car that he was allowed to proceed to the Serbian border to assume command against the troops of his host.

Shouldn't such Viennese gallantry sway Belgrade's heart, even as Austria's might should soften Belgrade's impertinence? And wouldn't Belgrade's allies be wise to help Belgrade practice moderation? Shouldn't they join Berchtold's effort to prevent the deepening and widening, indeed the very continuance, of the conflict? Shouldn't they make Belgrade see reason on the one sticking point in the Austrian demarche (participation of Austrian police in the pursuit of Sarajevo accomplices on Serbian soil)-the one point whose settlement on Austrian terms would stop the war before it had really begun? This was the outline of Berchtold's new plot. But Libretto B fared no better than Libretto A. And once more Germany chimed in with the wrong note.

Not that Berlin had changed its-public-willingness to sing along. This time, though, the Heldentenor himself, the Kaiser, insisted on making an entrance. When the crisis broke, he was still away on his Nordic cruise. His ministers tried to keep him there. They knew too well His Majesty's impulsiveness, unevenness, hollowness-the thunder of his tongue, the shaking of his knees. During Libretto A they had encouraged the blithe continuation of his voyage. The Wilhelmstrasse had radioed the Imperial yacht Hohenzollern as little of the tension as late as possible. In fact, the Kaiser first learned of the Austrian ultimatum not from his Berlin Chancellery but from his yacht's radio officer who had listened to news agency reports on July 24.

This irritated Wilhelm, but not enough to abandon his sail along the glitter of the fjords. He did ask Berlin to keep him abreast of developments in detail. In return he received a long, ingeniously murky telegram from his Chancellor, climaxing in the sentence "the diplomatic situation is not entirely clear." By then it was early in the morning of July 27. Libretto B was on. The Kaiser wired Berlin that he proposed to head home. Back came a telegram saying "Your Majesty's sudden reappearance might cause undue alarm." And just that alarmed His Majesty at last.

Never mind that Berlin had just announced that he would not return until August 2. He not only decided to turn his yacht around, he transferred to the swiftest of his escorting cruisers, the Rostock, to speed his homecoming.

On the afternoon of July 27, he hastened down the gangplank at Swinnemunde to be greeted by his pale, hand-kissing ministers as well as by the news that stock markets were quaking all over Europe. En route to Berlin he realized that a major crisis had matured rapidly in his absence. He faced it in character, by blurting out epithets. At this point he still blurted grandiosely, hand on sword hilt, repeating some exclamations he had made on board. He called Berchtold "a donkey" for pledging to let Serbia keep all its territory. He accused his naval chief of "incredible presumption" for advising against drastic fleet movements at this precarious juncture. He said that the Balkan countries were mostly contemptible scum.

Still exclamatory, he entered Potsdam Palace on the evening of July 27. The text of Serbia's response to the ultimatum had reached Berlin rather tardily only that afternoon. But the German Foreign Minister delayed its transmission to Potsdam yet further. He waited until late at night after the Kaiser had retired: better to let His Majesty calm down first with a good rest.

Next morning Wilhelm was shown the Serbian note. Again he began to exclaim-but in the opposite direction. "A brilliant achievement in a time limit of only twenty-four hours!" he annotated Belgrade's reply. "More than one could have expected! A great moral success for Vienna! All reason for war is gone! After that I should never have ordered mobilization!"

As he scribbled this, he had no idea that Vienna had done much more than mobilize. A few minutes later, an aide handed him a bulletin: Austria had declared war. It staggered the Kaiser. Within an hour the German Chancellor von BethmannHollweg stood before him, peremptorily summoned, "very humble, with a pale and wretched face."

"How did all this happen?" the Kaiser demanded.

Bethmann tried to explain the purpose and hope of Libretto A, as devised by Vienna: true, the nonultimatum that was an ultimatum had not worked out right, but perhaps this war just declared would yet turn into a nonwar, maybe the Serbs would give in after all, maybe-

Wilhelm, blurting epithets, cut him off. The Chancellor, "utterly cowed, admitted that he had been deceived all along by Vienna and submitted his resignation." Wilhelm refused him.

"You have cooked this broth," said His Majesty. "Now you are going to eat it."

The Kaiser knew that it was beyond his ability to eat it himself. According to Prince Bernard von Bulow-eye-witness of the scene above-Wilhelm was "well aware that he was a neurasthenic. His exaggerations were mainly meant to ring in the ears of the Foreign Office… His jingo speeches intended to give the impression that here was another Frederick the Great. But he did not trust his nerves under the strain of any really critical situation. The moment there was danger His Majesty became uncomfortably conscious that he would never lead an army in the field. Wilhelm did not want war."

Quite simply the Kaiser did not feel up to the nervy part demanded of him by Vienna's script. Therefore the Chancellor must renounce all participation in Libretto B, claiming that Germany had been lured into it by Vienna's seductive bad faith. Almost immediately after the Kaiser had dressed him down, the German Chancellor wired his ambassador at the Habsburg Court:

With great emphasis the Ambassador spoke to Count von Berchtold about Berlin's new position. In effect this position constituted Libretto C, authored posthaste by the Kaiser himself: Vienna should forgo the total knuckling-under of Serbia; instead it should proceed with a temporary and token occupation of Belgrade, just across the frontier, avoiding any further substantial penetration of territory. After this punishment Austria should declare its honor satisfied and withdraw.

***

But Libretto C failed much faster than Librettos A or B. It could not go far without Franz Joseph's approval. However, by the time Wilhelm proposed it to him on July 28, the old Emperor had passed the point of authorizing alternatives to the inevitable. He was now the prisoner of quite another, invincible dramaturgy.

On July 25, his Minister of War had appeared in audience at Ischl to receive permission to mobilize. Franz Joseph gave it, not like a monarch commanding a general but like a puppet controlled by a ghost. "Go…" he had whispered to the Minister. "Go…. I can do no other." A few hours later he walked on foot, as usual, to the villa of Frau Schratt. From the way he stooped his way across the little bridge before her gate, she knew what turn history had taken. "I have done my best," he said to her. "But now it is the end."

"Very quickly," the Tsar of Russia cabled a few days later to his cousin and soon foe, the Kaiser, "I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure brought on me." Not only had Franz Joseph I and Nicholas II been disenfranchised but so had all their august peers.

Their ministers thrashed about impotently. They had been yanked from their vacations, out of their hunting boots, their fishing waders, their beach wear. The crisis had slammed them back into their striped trousers. Now they were pacing around telegraph keys that kept clattering adjurations and avowals from chancellery to chancellery. Vienna cabled St. Petersburg that the Austrian Army had mobilized solely against Serbia. St. Petersburg cabled Vienna that the Russian mobilization was only partial and wholly defensive. Berlin cabled Paris about the dangerous consequences of French mobilization. Paris cabled that it mobilized only to protect French security. Berlin cabled London, urging Britain to stop the mobilization of its allies. London cabled Berlin, asking Germany to ask Austria to use mediation, not mobilization, in the Serbian matter. Austria cabled London its willingness to negotiate but without delaying its "operations against Serbia." London cabled Vienna that it could not remain neutral in a European war. All cables invoked the sacredness of peace. All countries involved kept thrusting bayonets into the hands of their young men.

Power had drained from thrones and chancelleries into the offices of Chiefs of Staff. Clumsily, diplomats tried to bluff their counterparts into peace. Efficiently, each Chief of Staff activated his mobilizing apparatus. Inevitably, the mobilizations accelerated each other.

Now the subordination of Chiefs of Staff to heads of state was only nominal. Now the Chiefs drew their true prerogative from an unofficial but tremendous power. Overnight this power had become visible. It was surging through the streets all over the continent.

The new power did not wait for proclamations from governments. It needed no galvanizing by propaganda, no goading from the press (which was by no means uniformly militant in the principal countries). The new power had already divided the world into Allies-until-Victory and Enemies-unto-Death. This new power had gathered thousands along the shores of the Danube where they sang, fervently, "The Watch on the Rhine" against France. The new power burned German flags in Paris while cafe orchestras along the Champs Elysees played "God Save the King." The new power raised a sea of fists against the Russian Embassy in Vienna, against the German Embassy in Paris, and its stones shattered eleven windows of the British Embassy in Berlin. Even restaurants felt the fingers of the new power. "Menu cards here in Vienna," Karl Kraus wrote to his beloved Sidonie, "now have their English and French translations crossed out. Things are getting more and more idiotic.. "

But Kraus himself knew better. It wasn't mere idiocy that was governing things now. It was something far more formidable. Sarajevo had only been a flash point of its strength.

A key sentence on the century's key moment as nations were turning themselves into regiments. Kraus did not amplify here on the God from whom progress had severed mankind so fatally. He had done that earlier elsewhere, in his poem "The Dying Man." There God meant the Presence in the pristine garden that was both "source and destination." But now men had paved over His soil and their souls. Concrete had strangled the "source." They had lost their sense of origin and of final purpose. Therefore they must claw from the barrenness a new "destination"-an angrier destiny. Under the oppressiveness of a loss, the new power had been forged.

It had forged the life of Gavrilo Princip, modernity's foremost assassin, who had triggered the crisis. The family of "this schoolboy" had lived for centuries in an approximation, however imperfect, of Kraus's garden. As a zadruga, that is, as a tight-knit, farm-based Bosnian clan, the Princips had raised their own corn, milled their own flour, baked their own loaves, and worshipped a God close enough to their roof to be their very own protector.

Progress had broken all that apart. Princip's father could no longer create bread from his earth. He could no longer live his livelihood. He must earn it with the estranged, endless trudgings of a postman. His son Gavrilo, more educated than his father, more sensitive, more starved for the wholeness that is holiness and thus more resentful of the ruins all about him, had to seek another garden. He sought something that would satisfy his disorientation and his anger; something which, as his readings of Nietzsche suggested, would restore the valor of the vital principle that his race had lost. He found it in the Black Hand. It conjured "the earth that nourishes… the sun that warms." It was part of the new power. It offered him the cohesion, the communal fortitude and faith of the shattered zadruga.

Progress had shattered numberless zadrugas by hundreds of other ethnic names, from the hamlet of Predappio in Italy's Romagna where a blacksmith named Mussolini had a son named Benito, to the village of Didi-Lilo in Russia's Transcaucasia where a cobbler named Dzhugashvili sired a boy later called Stalin. The Stalins, Mussolinis, Hitlers, Princips were the monsters of progress. Progress had abused and bruised them, but they could turn the sting outward and avenge the injury. There were many millions like them with less fury in their bafflement, less steel in their deprivation: the lumpen-proletariat on whose backs Europe rode toward the marvels of the new century. Their anonymous pain fermented the new power.

A year before Sarajevo, Vienna's Arbeiter Zeitung published a survey documenting that it was always the most rapidly industrializing areas which produced among the poor the highest rate of alcoholism, of syphillis and tuberculosis, of emotional pathology, and by far the highest rate of suicide. Their sickbeds and their graves marked the trail of "progress unmoored from God." But now Princip's deed was inspiriting its live and able-bodied victims. With two shots he had set in motion a firestorm that was to burn meaning into the numbest slums.

Instead of beating their heads against the prison of their class, instead of deadening themselves with toil or liquor, the masses now had something to kill for. Before Sarajevo, hundreds of thousands had been on strike in Russia. Not long afterwards the factories hummed again all day. At night, toilers massed before the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg with torches and holy ensigns, acclaiming the Tsar as their defender. "Wonderful times…" said a British diplomat who saw the spectacle. "Russia seems to have been completely transformed."

In Vienna the transformation was just as wonderful. On May Day 1914, workers had marched on the Ringstrasse with the chant "Frieden, Brot, and Freiheit!" ("Peace, Bread, and Freedom!"). On August 1, many of the same crowd marched again with "Alle Serben mussen sterben!" ("All Serbs must die!"). "The patriotic enthusiasm of the masses in AustriaHungary seemed especially surprising," Trotsky wrote in his autobiography. "I strode along the main street of the familiar Vienna and watched the most amazing crowd fill the fashionable Ring, a crowd in which hopes had been awakened… What was it that drew them to the square in front of the War Ministry?… Would it have been possible at any other time for porters, laundresses, shoemakers, apprentices to feel themselves masters of the Ring?… In their demonstrations for the glory of Habsburg arms, I detected something familiar to me from the October days of 1905 [when Trotsky had led a shortlived insurrection]. No wonder that in history war has so often been the mother of revolution."

In Paris workers had sung the "Internationale" on May Day before returning to their tenements. Now their throats rang with the "Marseillaise" while the Kaiser's effigy went up in flames. Everywhere life leaped from lonely gray grind to grand national adventure. Hurrah!

But the poor weren't the only ones grateful for the zest provided by the crisis. The middle classes, too, felt exhausted and baffled. Progress had fed them well. Yet the more meat on their table, the less tang was there to each morsel, the more intolerable the superior cut of somebody else's steak. No doubt they were dining well. Were they still eating together? They consumed as they produced: aggressively against each other. When worshipping, they knelt on velvet in churches unmoored from a common God. Their mansions brimmed, but they did not feel sheltered. They promenaded in spats and top hats-where from? To what end?

Germany's most popular almanac for 1913 featured a poem by the writer Alfred Walter Heymel. It was called "Eine Sehnsucht aus der Zeit" ("A Longing in Our Times").

Im Friedensreichtum wird uns toedlich bang.

Wir kennen Muessen nicht noch Koennen oder Sollen

Und Sehnen uns und schereien nach dem Kriege.

(In the wealth of peace we feel the deadliest dread.

We are bereft of prewess, mission, or direction,

And long and cry for war.)

Hurrah!

The cry came, as the British poet Rupert Brooke phrased it, from "a world grown old and cold and weary." It came from "this foul peace which drags on and on. " as General Conrad wrote to his mistress Gina von Reininghaus. For worker or burgher or poet or Chief of Staff, Mars was the God of Liberation. "A crisis had entered Western culture," a high Habsburg official would write later, "and many of its representative citizens had been oversaturated into desperation. Like men longing for a thunderstorm to relieve them of the summer's sultriness, so the generation of 1914 believed in the relief that war might bring." Their longing for thunder was the new power.

The thunderstorm with its mortal flash-this image shivers ubiquitously through the whole period. In the summer of 1914, Europe's musical sensation was still Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiered a year earlier in Paris, where Nijinsky's "lightning leaps" celebrated the theme of the ballet, namely the enchantments of death.

In painting, a dominant mode was Futurism, which anticipated the lightning-like strokes of stroboscopic photography; the Futurist manifesto exalted war because it would blast away the stultification of present concepts and structures; as though defining lightning's lethal beauty, the manifesto proclaimed that "movement and light must destroy the substance of objects."

"The sense of approaching catastrophe," wrote a Futurist who didn't know he was one, in his book Mein Kamp f, "turned at last to longing: Let heaven finally give reign to the fate that could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed, and with the thunder of heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries."

"The war," said German Chancellor von BethmannHollweg in his book on the subject, "would be a thunderstorm to clear the air."

"The palpable beginnings of the European crisis reach back a number of years," wrote Count Ottokar Czernin who would succeed Count von Berchtold as Habsburg Foreign Minister, "… certain dynamics must take their course before a thunderstorm discharges its lightning and thunder."

"I am convinced the storm is coming," French President Raymond Poincare remarked to a friend in July of 1914. "Where and when the storm will break I cannot say."

"There is a crisis in the air," Freud had written Lou AndreasSalome as 1913 turned to 1914, referring to Jung yet articulating much more than psychoanalytic weather. "May it soon explode so that the air is cleared!"

The shots of Sarajevo sounded like an answer to many prayers in many nations. Afterwards some tried in vain to push back the bolt that came down from the blue-for example, in Paris on the sudden death of Jean Jaures, the French Socialist leader and Europe's most eloquent voice against war. On July 31, as he sat in the Cafe du Croissant, a nationalist zealot gunned him down. His comrades organized a pacifist parade around his body. They were swamped by a mob of conscripts. Brand-new lieutenants graduated from St. Cyr led the warriors, shouting, "We'll go into battle with white plumes on our kepis and with white gloves on our hands!" Behind them young men roared by the happy thousands. The French General Staff planned for 87 percent of called-up reservists to appear at induction centers; 98.5 percent did. Hurrah!

In Austria, where Viktor Adler had groomed the worker to be a thinker and a doer, the proletariat accomplished not a single thoughtful act to halt disaster. Adler himself, though, did intervene in history without knowing it. During the antiRussian hysteria in Austria, Habsburg constables in Galicia arrested Lenin "as a Tsarist spy" on August 8. In response to an appeal from Lenin's wife, Adler went to the headquarters of the political police in Vienna, cited their own sponsorship of this useful Bolshevik as an enemy of the Tsar and thus as a friend of Austria (Hurrah!), and obtained Lenin's release and safe passage first to Vienna, then to Switzerland. A few days later he helped usher Trotsky across the Swiss border. In other words, Adler put into place the preliminaries of the Russian Revolution three years later.

He also couldn't help collaborating in the genesis of its most important preliminary, namely that of the Great War. No matter that his ArbeiterZeitung had published many warnings against the threat of international slaughter. On August 5, the day before Austria issued its first declaration of war against a major power-Russia-this same Arbeiter Zeitung intoned, "However the fates decide, we hope they will decide for the holy cause of the German people." Hurrah! Two days earlier Adler's paper had reported that his German comrades, the Socialist deputies to the Reichstag in Berlin, had joined the other parties in voting the government the war credits it needed. This action marked, said the ArbeiterZeitung, "… the proudest and loftiest exaltation of the German spirit." Hurrah!

Two men made dogged, last-ditch attempts against that inexorable hurrah. They were Nicky and Willy. That was how the two Emperors signed their respective cables, which started jittering, on the night of July 29, between the palace of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg and the palace of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Potsdam. Nicky "in the name of our old friendship" begged Willy to stop his Austrian ally from going too far. Willy, in turn, declaring himself to be Nicky's "sincere and devoted friend and cousin," said he was sure that Nicky as a fellow monarch wanted to see the murder of the Austrian Crown Prince duly punished. Nicky thanked Willy for "the conciliatory and fraternal" message but in view of it voiced astonishment at the ominous tone of the note just delivered by Willy's ambassador to his, Nicky's, Foreign Minister. Willy answered that just because Nicky shared so cordially the wish for peace, he hoped Nicky would agree to remain "in a spectator role" in the Vienna-Belgrade conflict, for only by localizing the matter and by not taking Russian military measures could Nicky avoid "involving Europe in the most horrible war ever witnessed." In reply, Nicky, "grateful for the speed of your answer," assured Willy that all Russian military measures were purely precautionary with no offensive intent and should therefore not interfere with Willy's "much-valued role as mediator with Vienna." Willy's response regretted that he could not mediate in Vienna while Russia persisted in mobilizing. To which Nicky answered that it was "technically impossible" to stop Russian military preparations but that since, like Willy, he was very far from wishing war, he gave Willy his solemn words that "my troops shall not commit any provocative action." Whereupon Willy thanked Nicky for his telegram but said that "only immediate, clear, unmistakable, and affirmative answer from your government can avoid endless misery." And he begged Nicky to order his troops "on no account to commit the slightest act of trespassing over our frontiers."

This cable, ending the series, leaped from Berlin to St. Petersburg on August 1, at 10:30 P.M. Three and a half hours earlier, at 7 P.M., the Kaiser's ambassador had presented the German Government's declaration of war to the Russian Foreign Minister.

It was no longer important what Willy said to Nicky when. Quite aptly the two Emperors had reduced themselves to diminutives: two sashed little figurines raising toy scepters against the storm. The storm paid little attention. All over the continent young men filed into barracks in clockwork fulfillment of mobilization plans. Troop trains kept hurtling toward frontiers.

The martial hurrah of multitudes kept echoing on the square before Wilhelm's palace. Through his Lord Chamberlain the Kaiser thanked his subjects for this show of loyalty but asked them to disperse "so that His Majesty can attend undisturbed to the challenges of leadership." The hurrahs continued.

Less than twenty-four hours after Willy's final telegram to Nicky, Willy rose from his desk in the Star Room of his palace. It was a desk made from the wood of Lord Nelson's flagship Victory-a gift from Willy's grandmother Queen Victoria. On this desk he had just signed the order that let his soldiers flood across the borders of Luxembourg and then of Belgium. "Gentlemen," he said hoarsely to the military dignitaries assembled around him, "you will live to regret this."

Shortly afterward he sent a note to the British ambassador: Let King George of England be informed that he, Wilhelm, would never ever, as long as he lived, wear again the uniform of a British Field Marshal. Coming from the Kaiser, this signified ultimate bitterness. As usual, his statesmanship became a matter of epaulettes. From now on his role would be to gesticulate. Others commanded.

In these commanders the new power now began to manifest itself quite nakedly. They were the ones who controlled the final libretto, Libretto D, the libretto of Kraus's progress crescendoing toward a titanic fusillade. The spotlight, after shifting from the futility of Excellencies to the helplessness of Majesties, now came to rest on the supremacy of generals.

On July 31, German Chief of Staff von Moltke sent his Austrian counterpart a cable whose imperatives bluntly bypassed the Ministers of War in Vienna and in Berlin; a telegram which ignored both Emperors, theoretically the AllHighest decision-makers. "Stand firm!" von Moltke cabled Conrad. "Austria must fully mobilize at once!"

"How odd," Foreign Minister von Berchtold said when Conrad showed him the message. It contradicted the tenor of two other cables, one from the German Chancellor to himself, the other from Wilhelm to Franz Joseph. "Who rules in Berlin?"

He might just as well have asked: "Who rules in Vienna?" By then his own cables were following almost verbatim General Conrad's proposals.

Who ruled in Russia? "I shall smash my telephone," the Russian Chief of Staff General Janushkevich told the Russian Foreign Minister. By which he meant that he would refuse to do again what he had done the day before, namely to rescind mobilization on telephoned orders from the Tsar. His pressure forced the Tsar to renew the order. "Now you can smash your telephone," said the Foreign Minister meekly.

Who ruled in France? Not Rene Viviani, though he was Prime Minister as well as Foreign Minister. His problem: He was a Socialist and peace-seeker. He had wept at the bier of the great pacifist Jean Jaures slain on July 31. He had given his arm to the widow walking behind the coffin on the way to the grave. Therefore it didn't matter that he was the Chief Executive of the Republic while Raymond Poincare as President was only the symbol of state. It did matter that Poincare had been born in Lorraine, the province lost by France to Germany in the War of 1870 and which must be won back again. It mattered that Poincare had a stake in the war to come. Hurrah!

Under Poincare's secret manipulation, the French Embassy in St. Petersburg stopped being an instrument of Foreign Minister Viviani and became a tool of General Joseph Joffre, Chief of the French General Staff. The French ambassador withheld from his Foreign Minister news of the martial intentions of the Russian General Staff. But he did convey General Joffre's encouragement to his Russian colleagues "to commence an offensive against East Prussia soonest." The ambassador deliberately delayed Viviani's very different, moderating words to St. Petersburg until it was too late.

"Russian troops," Poincare announced to the French cabinet on August 2, "will be in Berlin by All Saints' Day." Hurrah! The Zeitgeist vested in him the power withheld by the French constitution.

Who ruled in Britain? On July 29, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill wrote his wife that he would "do my best for peace and nothing would induce me to wrongfully strike the first blow." Yet the same letter confessed that "war preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity." Two days later he mobilized the fleet, against the explicit decision of the British cabinet. "Winston," said Prime Minister Asquith indulgently, "has his war paint on." "The lamps are going out all over Europe," said Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. "We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." The shores darkened. Churchill's dreadnoughts fanned out across the North Sea. Hurrah!

***

Who ruled the world? In Habsburg's Prague, the insurance official Franz Kafka was just developing some notions on the subject. At another time he was to refer to himself ruefully as "the nerve end of humanity." Right now, on July 29, 1914, the day after Austria's declaration of War on Serbia, two days before Germany's ultimatum to Russia, the name "Josef K" appears for the first time in Kafka's journal. That week he began to sketch out ideas for The Trial"[6]-the novel registering in a personal compass an evil erupting internationally: some incalculable force, insidious, inexorable, operating beyond all normal jurisdictions, closing in on its victims.

With what phrases did such power enter history? This was the time when ambassador after ambassador appeared before Foreign Minister after Foreign Minister to declare that he had the honor to inform His Excellency that his government, in order to protect the security and integrity of its realm, was forced to consider itself at war.

Honor? Security? Integrity? Excellency?

On August 9, 1914, while such words were still being intoned, Ludwig Wittgenstein began to ruminate systematically about the disjunction between language and truth. On that day he began the notebook that led to his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. The Tractatus, purging language of its routine shams, was born on the grandest proscenium of such shams, Imperial Habsburg. Flourish, not fact, held the realm together; flourish painted the mirage of dynastic communality between crown and people. Progress was corroding all things communal, but flourish painted over the corrosion. In the Empire of the flourish, Wittgenstein developed the philosophy that punctured, on the deepest modernist level, the theatrics of style. And here Kafka wrote the paradigmatic modernist novel, steeped in the angst underlying our daily charades.

Meanwhile great charades of state lit up the horizon. On August 4, the Kaiser stood on the balcony of his Berlin palace. He had not wept, like the Tsar, when the declaration of war had been published. But his face (in Grand Admiral von Tirpitz's description) "looked ravaged and tragic." The thousands who had come to hear him didn't notice. They only saw that their sovereign wore a spiked helmet under which his mouth shouted its mustachioed duty from the speech text handed him: "We draw the sword with a clean conscience and clean hands… from now on I no longer know parties. I only know Germans!"

Hurrah!

The masses cheered. They cheered him and their own relief. Hurrah! Here in Berlin as well as in Paris, in London, in Vienna, in St. Petersburg, war had freed them from politics, from partisanship, from all apartness. Until now they had been mutually separated. Competition had driven them against each other. Or poverty had marooned them. Or they had been isolated in their cocoon of envy and alienation. Now it was all marvelously different. Now the worn-down unemployed, the trodden-under scullion, the unfulfilled genius, the bored coupon-clipper, the jaded boulevadier-they could all link arms and walk forward together in the same electrifying adventure, against the enemy. Now they were Germans together, Frenchmen together, Englishmen together, Russians together and-most astounding-ethnically motley Habsburg subjects together. The enemy made it possible for them to break through to one another. Now the same patriot warmth embosomed them all. "Hurrah!" they all cried with one voice. "Hurrah!"

The most inveterate outsiders joined this surge. In Munich, Adolf Hitler had been living without a friend, without a lover, without even the bleak commonalty of Vienna's Mannher- heim. "The war," he says in Mein Kampf, "liberated me from the painful feelings of my youth… I fell down on my knees and thanked heaven with an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune to be alive at that time." Hurrah!

Dr. Sigmund Freud, outcast from his city's medical establishment, grim practitioner of the Viennese affectation of despising Vienna-this same Freud now said, "for the first time in thirty years I feel myself to be an Austrian"; that England (hitherto his favorite country) was "a hypocrite" for supporting "Serbia's impudence"; that "all my libido goes to AustriaHungary." Now the war with Jung fell away. Freud hurried from Carlsbad back to Vienna, where his sons Martin and Ernst joined the colors "for the noble cause" to which the over-age Freud himself made a contribution: He refused to give male patients of conscription age Certificates of Nervous Disability; he would not help them evade service to their country. Hurrah!

Ludwig Wittgenstein was medically exempt from war service, having undergone a double hernia operation in July. He should have been immune to the war spirit since he was a recluse, a maverick, a deviant from norms sexual, semantic, or financial (he had just given away most of the vast fortune left him by his industrialist father). On August 9, he started his notebook exploring the deceptions of language. On August 7, he showed that he was at one with the deceived crowd. He enlisted. Hurrah!

Years earlier Arnold Schonberg had gone abroad because the Austrian capital grated on him as much as his music grated on it. In the summer of 1914, he returned and joined Vienna's own regiment, the Deutschmeister. The atonal heretic began to compose military marches for Austria's glory. Hurrah!

Oskar Kokoschka made the same fast transition from enfant terrible to waver of flag. Before Savajevo he had spoken of "the personal misery of living in Vienna, utterly alone, without a friend," and sought opportunities as distant as possible from the Danube, ". perhaps a commission for a fresco in America." After Sarajevo he sold his most valuable painting, The Tempest (showing him with Alma Mahler), to a Hamburg pharmacist. With the proceeds he bought a horse and a cavalry uniform-a light blue tunic with white facings, bright red breeches, and a brass helmet. Now he could volunteer for the 15th Imperial Dragoons who prized war so much that they shaved before each battle. Now Kokoschka's fellow rebel, the architect Adolf Loos, could print a photograph of the helmeted painter as a postcard publicizing Kokoschka's hurrah!

What about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke? Born in Habsburg Bohemia, he was an itinerant solitary, a free-floating mystic who considered Austria and Germany countries to which he was attached "only by language." In the summer of 1914, he reattached himself with a vengeance. He rhapsodized along with the throngs in German and Austrian streets. His Five Cantos / August 1914 celebrate the War God:

Hurrah!

"To be torn out of a dull capitalistic peace was good for many Germans," said Hermann Hesse. "I esteem the moral values of war on the whole rather highly." For Thomas Mann, war was "a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers." Hurrah!

It was a clamorous, resonant, exultant summer, this summer of "progress unmoored from God." It was a summer catapulting men from their separate vacations into a much higher, gallant, and collective holiday. "We saw war," Freud would write some months later "as an opportunity for demonstrating the progress of mankind in communal feeling… a chivalrous crusade."

"What is progress in my sense?" asked Nietzsche, "I, too, speak of a 'return to nature,' although it is not really a going back but a progress forward-an ascent up into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness, where great tasks are something one plays with… Napoleon was a piece of 'return to nature.' "

Nietzsche had written this twenty-five years earlier, but he was the patron saint of the summer of 1914. That summer millions began to ascend not to Kraus's garden of pristine repose but to Nietzsche's jungled Napoleonic proving ground. It embowered and empowered them. It delivered them from soot, squalor, impotence, loneliness. Here they found what Gavrilo Princip-assassin of the Archduke, disciple of Nietzsche-had invoked when he swore the Black Hand oath: "the sun that warms… the earth that nourishes…"

***

And the sun shone on, over Bad Ischl with its hills and parks but no longer with its Emperor Franz Joseph. On July 27 he settled down to the last official act he was to perform in his Alpine villa. He revised the "Manifesto to My Peoples" written in his name. From a phrase characterizing Serbia he deleted "blind insolence." He struck the words "inspired by traditions of a glorious past" from a sentence describing the Empire's armed forces. The same day he had said to General Conrad: "If the monarchy goes under, let it go under with dignity." If war must be proclaimed to his peoples, let it be a proclamation without bathos.

Karl Kraus, the scourge of verbiage, was awed by the proclamation. He called it, "An august statement… a poem."

To the end Franz Joseph remained the steward of Imperial taste. Now the end was close.

On the morning of July 29, he left Ischl for Vienna, never to return. On August 6, when war was declared between Austria and Russia, he quietly removed from his uniform a decoration he had worn for sixty-five years: the Cross of St. George, Third Class, conferred on him in 1849 by Tsar Nicholas I. For the twenty-six months that were left of his life, he never stirred from Schonbrunn Palace.

The disorder he had sought to cure after Sarajevo had lapsed yet further into an unforeseen disarray, into a derangement whose wild pyrotechnics dazzled Europe. The librettos of his Foreign Minister had been exploded; the populace applauded the glow of the fragments. Machine guns were beginning to perforate the bows and hand-kisses of the stage Franz Joseph had commanded for two thirds of a century. But the bowers of bows and the kissers of hands did not know yet that they were bleeding. All they felt was a thrill and a tingle.

Franz Joseph felt something more final. A change in the Emperor's will detailed how his descendants would receive his fortune, should the family lose the crown. The last principal of the Habsburg drama prepared to retreat into the wings.

His retirement was partial and discreet. Other exits had official character. Sir Maurice de Bunsen, British Ambassador to Austria, turned out to be the last Western diplomat to leave the capital. On August 12, he made this sad statement to Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold: "As of twelve o'clock tonight, Great Britain and Austria will be in a state of war." Berchtold, ever the gentleman, bowed and assured His Excellency that "though Austria must accept this challenge, the two states are still associated politically and morally by tradition and sympathies and common interests."

Two days later, on August 14, the Ambassador and his wife left their residence for the West Railroad Terminal where Berchtold had arranged a private salon train for them, bound for neutral Switzerland.

Much of the town's anti-Allied anger had dissipated, though it had not lost its patriotic exhilaration. The de Bunsens encountered no hostility. They were accompanied by police in dress uniform, resembling an honor guard, and by their own wistful thoughts. It was hard to say good-bye to this city. Eight months ago they had taken up their posts, in December of 1913, during the swirl of the social season. They had leased a castle from Count Hoyos, "a dream of beauty," according to Lady de Bunsen's diary. The whole Danubian ambiance had enchanted them, especially Vienna's carnival, which had begun shortly after their arrival. "The mise-en-scene," Lady de Bunsen had mused of these revels, "was wonderful."

And now, as they departed, the mise-en-scene maintained its wonder. On the way to their train they met an artillery regiment also en route to a railway station. Green sprigs bounced from the kepis of the soldiers, roses garlanded the cannons, a band lilted the "Radetzky March," the march that is more polka than march. Housewives waved kerchiefs from windows, children skipped along, girls popped sweets into the recruits' pockets, all prancing and laughing and never missing a single musical beat. It was an alfresco dance, festive with sun, sporting happy masks.

Of course similar scenes enlivened other capitals as well. They sparkled on the Champs Elysees, at Picadilly Circus, along the Nevsky Prospekt, and up and down the Wilhelmstrasse. But Vienna-origin of this great international midsummer frolic-Vienna out-waltzed friend and foe alike in celebration.

The World War had come to the city by the Danube, dressed as a ball. Tra-la… Hurrah!..

Afterword

ON OCTOBER 28, 1914, THE SARAJEVO DISTRICT COURT SENTENCED Gavrilo Princip to twenty years of hard labor, with a fast once a month; one day a year-June 28, the date of the assassination-he was to spend on a hard bed in a darkened cell. The same sentence was imposed on Trifko Graben and Nedeljko Cabrinovic. These three were under-age for the death penalty. Danilo Ilk, the oldest of the team, was sentenced to be hanged.

Ilic was executed on February 3, 1915. Princip, Graben, and Cabrinovic were removed to the Bohemian fortress at Theresienstadt (later site of the concentration camp under the Third Reich). At Theresienstadt, Cabrinovic died on January 23, 1916, of tuberculosis. Graben died here, also of tuberculosis, on October 21, 1916. Princip died in Theresienstadt of the same disease on April 28, 1918. It is probable that malnutrition and prison conditions contributed to these young deaths.

On a wall of Princip's cell, the following lines were found, written in pencil:

Our ghosts will walk through Vienna And roam through the Palace Frightening the Lords.

Afterword to the Da Capo edition

WHEN I FINISHED THESE PAGES IN 1989, THE BALKAN MAP REVEALED only half of the devastating truth in Max Weber's observation: "History is a web of unintended circumstances." In response to the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serb Gavrilo Princip in 1914, Austria intended to uphold the honor and integrity of its realm by declaring war on Serbia. Consequence: By 1918, the Hapsburg empire lay shattered into jagged pieces.

Princip's intention, on the other hand, seemed to have prospered. The bullet he put through the archduke's neck did more than punish an Austrian oppressor; it kindled the global conflagration whose aftermath saw the South Slavs unite into one country. Yugoslavia, Princip's dream, emerged from the slaughter as a breathing reality. During World War II the Nazis abrogated it briefly. In 1946 it revived, continued on under communism, and persisted after Tito's death into the late 1980s.

But soon after 1989-the year of this book's publication-history dropped the other shoe. With cannon and sniper it began to disembowel Princip's utopia.

Today, in 2001, Yugoslavia is a minefield rather than a country. It consists of Serbia in turmoil clutching a simmering Montenegro. Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia have fought themselves apart into separate states. The province of Kosovo is an explosive U.N. protectorate. Two adversarial entities-one Muslim, one Serb-form Bosnia, each with its own parlia ment, police, and army. Croat troops ruined much of the Gravoho valley where Princip first brooded over his Pan-Slav ideals.

In the course of the last century, a pageant of the futilities Max Weber had in mind has moved past the corner of Appel Quai and Rudolf Street in Sarajevo. Here on a bright June morning in 1914 the two most fateful pistol shots of all time rang out. After the deed, Austria erected here a column in honor of the slain archduke. This yielded to a memorial to the slayer, put up by postwar Yugoslavia: The spot where Princip had pointed his weapon was marked, Hollywood-fashion, by footprints sunk in concrete. They celebrated Gavrilo Princip as megastar of Serb valor. Then, in 1997, the Muslim-dominated municipality of Sarajevo, hostile to all Serb insignia, used a jackhammer to pulverize Princip's sidewalk immortality.

One irony succeeds another. For what authority will prevent Serbs from avenging this insult to Princip's remembrance? It is the office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, instituted by the international community of fifty-five nations signing the Dayton Peace Accord in 1995. And who enforces the directives of the High Representative to keep the peace among ethnic strains and to establish democracy in Bosnia? A contingent of 25,000 NATO-led troops. Its headquarters are located in Ilidze, near Sarajevo, bristling with barbed wire and sandbag revetments. In 1914 this very building, then known as the Hotel Bosna, was the final lodging of the archduke and his wife before their murder the next morning. The landscape teems with paradoxes.

Not least among them is the background of Wolfgang Petritsch, the High Representative himself, appointed on the eighty-sixth anniversary of Franz Ferdinand's assassination. He has the power to dismiss Bosnian officials high or low and to dissolve parliament. His job before his present position was as Vienna's ambassador to Belgrade. He is, of all things, one of Austria's most brilliant diplomats. Letters threatening his life are often addressed to "His Honor Franz Ferdinand Petritsch."

And so Vienna 1914 ghosts through Sarajevo 2001. The future keeps mocking the past. The past, in eerie resilience, keeps shadowing the present.

— F. M.

WRITING THIS BOOK HAS MEANT INCURRING DEBTS OF GRATITUDE ON TWO continents.

In the United States, my thanks go for vital assistance extended to me to Dr. Wolfgang Petritsch, head of the Austrian Information Service for North America, and his deputy, Dr. Irene Freudenschuss; to Dr. Wolfgang Waldner, Director of the Austrian Institute in New York, and to Friederike Zeitlhofer, the ever-patient, ever-forthcoming librarian of the Institute; to Dr. Walter Klement of the Austrian National Tourist Bureau in New York whose office has been generous with maps and geographical advice. I have also benefited from the tremendous resources of the New York Public Library. Pucek Kleinberger proved a source of comfort. Jonathan Kranz of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York aided this project with significant research. Martin Tanz and Dale Cou- dert were also helpful, as was David Kahn with his expertise on the history of military intelligence. I am also grateful to Minister Philip Hoyos of the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C.; to Roberta Corcoran; Sylvia Gardner-Wittgenstein; Dr. and Mrs. Erwin Chargaff; and my excellent copy editor, Gypsy da Silva.

In Britain, Dr. Edward Timms of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, has generously shared his erudition with me.

In Austria, the staff and stacks of the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek have been indispensable to my labors and so has Dr. Brigitta Zessner-Spitzenberg of the Bildarchiv. I am much obliged to the Literarische Verwertungsgesellschaft- and to its President, the novelist Milo Dor-for grants awarded me. I owe Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg many thanks for fine-tuned information on diplomatic and aristocratic aspects of the period covered in this book. Hetti von Bohlen and Halbach provided valuable access to the unpublished memoirs of her father, Prince Alois von Auersperg. I have been the beneficiary of Count Michael von Wolkenstein's advice and of his liberality with Mohnstriezel. The editors of the Socialist Arbeiter Zeitung furnished photocopied back volumes of their newspaper and thereby gave me the sort of education without which this book could not have been written. Inge Santner- Cyrus and Adolf Holl have been wonderful cultural hosts by the Danube. Further support and ideas have come from Hilde Spiel, Ernst Trost, Peter Marboe, Ernst Wolf Marboe, Alfred Payrleitner, Dr. Kurt Scholz of the office of Mayor Zilk of Vienna, and, at a rough estimate, at least five other people I have left out because of lamentable holes in my memory. Last, and far from least, I want to mention Wolfgang Kraus among my Viennese helpmeets. As President of the Osterreichische Gesellschaft fur Literatur and as a personal friend, he has been a treasure.

Now I come to a special category of thanks owed. There is my brother, Henry, Professor of Political Science at Queens College, CUNY. I have learned from his acumen and I have profited from the scholarship of his colleague, Professor Keith Eubank (History Dept., Queens College), who has given me crucial advice on researching facets of the genesis of the Great War. Robert Stewart, my editor at Scribners, has been the guardian angel of this book every step of the way. My wife, Marcia, was-as always-of incalculable help in shaping the manuscript.

— F.M.

Source references

Periodicals are referred to by the following abbreviations:

Books are referred to by author's last name except where more than one work by that author is cited in the Selected Bibliography, in which case an abbreviation of the title is included. Thus, Tuchman, Guns, and Tuchman, Proud Tower; Dedijer, Tito, and Dedijer, Sarajevo.

CHAPTER 1 (pages 1-14)

Bankruptcy Ball: IWE, Jan. 15, 1913; AZ, Jan. 15, 1913.

Parliament vote: AZ, Jan. 16, 1913.

Weather: AZ, Jan. 15–17, 1913.

Auersperg ball: Auersperg, p. 65.

Greengrocer ball: Schlogl, pp. 40–43.

Trotsky details: My Life, pp. 230, 207-9; interviews with Dr. and Mrs. Erwin Chargaff; Wolfe, p. 186; J. Sydney Jones, pp. 164-65.

Stalin details: Deutscher, Stalin, p. 210; J. Sydney Jones, p. 249; Delbar, p. 64; I. S. Levin, pp. 96–97.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand details: Kiszling, pp. 192-93.

Tito details: Vinterhalter, p. 44; Auty, p. 29; Dedijer, Tito, p. 30.

Auto Mechanics Ball: IWE, Jan. 25, 1913.

Freud details: Clark, pp. 352-53.

Hitler details: J. Sydney Jones, pp. 120, 145, 229, and passim; Maser, pp. 33–36.

CHAPTER 2 (pages 15–23)

Duties of Minister of Exterior Affairs: AZ, June 23, 1913.

Ethnic statistics and details: May, p. 428; A. J. P. Taylor, pp. 221, 263, 265; Kiszling, p. 215; Corti, p. 312; Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 70, 75, 110.

On nationalities' problem: Possony, p. 149.

Lenin on Stalin: Wolfe, p. 577.

Troyanovsky details: Smith, pp. 279, 284.

Trotsky on Stalin encounter: Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, p. 209.

Stalin letter quote: Smith, p. 276.

Stalin's treatise on nationalities: Wolfe, p. 581; Smith, pp. 292-94; Hingley, pp. 71–73.

Stalin's activities in Vienna: Deutscher, Stalin, p. 117.

CHAPTER 3 (pages 24–40)

Schuhmeier assassination: NFP and AZ, Feb. 12, 13, 14, 1913.

Schonberg concert riot: Spiel, p. 172.

Student keller fights: AZ, Mar. 26, 1913.

Attack on Negro: AZ, Apr. 8, 1913.

Schuhmeier funeral: Barea, p. 344; J. Sydney Jones, p. 251; Johnston, p. 101; AZ, Feb. 17, 1913.

Housemaids' hours: AZ, July 24, 1913.

Schuhmeier's Parliament speeches and housing conditions: Barea, pp. 336-37.

Vanderbilt quote on Austrian aristocrats: Barea, p. 356.

Theodore Roosevelt quote on same: Tuchman, Proud Tower, p. 327.

Austrian aristocrats, details: Auersperg, pp. 28, 32, 40–45; Friedlander, Glanz, p. 194; Fritsche, pp. 265, 363-66.

Princess Metternich sobriquet: Barea, p. 323.

Franz Ferdinand insanity rumors: Steed, Thirty Years, p. 367; Auersperg, p. 78.

Franz Ferdinand's courtship and marriage: Brook-Shepherd, pp. 77, 91, 108-10; Kiszling, pp. 39–47.

Franz Ferdinand and General Conrad: Kiszling, pp.160–200 passim.

General Conrad's tic: Redlich, p. 197.

Franz Ferdinand remarks at Duke of Wurtemburg dinner: Kiszling, p. 193.

Franz Ferdinand letter to Berchtold: Kann, pp. 219-20.

Franz Ferdinand's emissary's message to General Conrad: Kiszling, pp. 196-97.

Correspondence between Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Wilhelm: Kann, p. 80; Kiszling, p. 198.

Emperor Franz Joseph's message to Tsar: Kiszling, pp. 193-94.

Reduction of Austrian forces at Russian border and Franz Ferdinand's travel south: Kiszling, p. 199.

CHAPTER 4 (pages 41–53)

March/April mood and weather in Vienna: IWE and Fremd., April 1913 issues passim.

Spring suicide statistics and Warmstuben: AZ, Mar. 3, 1913.

Dante's Inferno film and Vienna weather: AZ, April 1913 issues passim.

German Consul General's dinner party: Redlich, p. 194.

May weather and blossoms in Vienna: IWE and NFP, early May issues passim.

Spring description by Trotsky's wife: Trotsky, p. 230.

Trotsky quotes on Russia versus the West: Deutscher, Trotsky, pp. 180-93 passim.

Stalin's arrest: Deutscher, Stalin, p. 122.

Trotsky and art in Vienna: Deutscher, Trotsky, 184.

Trotsky and Viennese Socialist cafe intellectuals: Trotsky, My Life, pp. 207-11.

Trotsky and psychoanalysis: Trotsky, My Life, p. 220.

Freud-Trotsky analogies: Clark, p. 196; Wolf, p. 254.

Freud conquistador quote: Clark, p. 212.

Freud on Adler: Clark, p. 311.

Freud's patronage of Cafe Landtmann: based on research by Timms and conveyed to this author in interview in 1988, New York.

Freud's evening habits: Clark, p. 217.

Freud's self-confessed philistinism: Clark, p. 196.

Dr. Starr on Freud's morals: Clark, p. 324.

Freud's comment on Starr's charges: Clark, p. 324.

Jung on Freud's "triangle": Portable Jung, p. xviii.

Freud's mushroom hunting: Clark, p. 199; Martin Freud, p. 59.

Psycho-Analytical Society Spring Outing: Ernest Jones, vol. 2, p. 99.

CHAPTER 5 (pages 54–62)

On May Day parade conception at Berggasse 19: Clark, p. 112.

May Day weather and workers' march: AZ, May 2, 1913.

May 1 as aristocrats' promenade: Groner, p. 446.

Upper class fear of May Day march: Barea, pp. 310-11.

Stefan Zweig on same subject: Barea, p. 312.

Hitler on May Day: Mein Kampf, pp. 40–43.

Hitler and prostitutes: J. Sydney Jones, pp. 58–59.

Hitler's philosophy formed in Vienna: Hitler, p. 30.

Hitler's departure for Germany: Bullock, p. 47.

Hitler's last days in Vienna, revisiting old haunts: J. Sydney Jones, p. 243.

Hitler's draft-dodging: J. Sydney Jones, p. 252.

Redlich-Krobatin encounter: Redlich, p. 198.

Montenegro crisis and its end: Redlich, p. 199; May, p. 464; Kiszling, p. 204.

Montenegro, Franz Ferdinand, and Redl: Asprey, p. 263.

Franz Ferdinand at Konopiste: Auersperg, p. 87.

Kaiser's daughter's marriage: Kiszling, p. 204

Franz Ferdinand's Derby plans: Brook-Shepherd, p. 93; Fritsche, p. 371.

CHAPTER 6 (pages 63–76)

May weather: IWE, May 26, 1913.

Hitler departs Vienna, May 24, 1913: J. Sydney Jones, p. 253.

Detectives' stakeout: Asprey, p. 237.

Why the stakeout: Asprey, p. 236.

Further stakeout background: Asprey, pp. 237-38.

Colonel Redl details: Asprey, p. 269.

Stakeout pays off: Asprey, pp. 243-46.

General Conrad gets Redl news at Grand Hotel: Asprey, pp. 252-53.

Redl instructed to commit suicide at Hotel Klomser: Asprey, pp. 256-58.

Redl news as initially presented in Vienna press: Asprey, pp. 262-63.

Redl fully exposed in press (Kisch story): Asprey, pp. 264-66.

Redl's decorations and honors: Asprey, pp. 194, 222-23, 150.

Redl's corruption: Asprey, pp. 263, 272.

Redl's treason details, information betrayed: INSJ, October 1987, p. 187.

Repercussions of Redl case: Asprey, pp. 266, 287-90.

Exclusion of Franz Ferdinand from Imperial wedding in Germany: Kisz- ling, p. 205.

Franz Ferdinand accuses General Conrad on Redl: Redlich, p. 202; Asprey, p. 280.

Berlin reaction to Redl: Asprey, p. 286.

Franz Joseph's reaction to Redl: Corti, p. 394.

CHAPTER 7 (pages 77–88)

Background and description of Corpus Christi procession: Auersperg, p. 63; Friedlander, Glanz, pp. 33–38; IWE, May 23, 1913.

Derby details: Fritsche, pp. 371-73; IWE, June 9, 1913.

Redl's poor childhood: Asprey, pp. 25–26.

Redl's brothers change names: Asprey, p. 289.

Zweig's reaction to Redl: Asprey, p. 267.

Zeppelin over Vienna: AZ, June 10, 1913.

Ladies fainting in Berlin: AZ, June 15, 1913.

Theater fire: AZ, June 18, 1913.

Film watching causes speech regression: WMW, July 1913.

Genesis of Second Balkan War: May, p. 465.

Hot summer and police helmets: AZ, June 5, 1913.

Postal unemployed: AZ, July 2, 1913.

Poor in New York heat: AZ, July 5, 1913.

History of Franz Joseph-Schratt relationship: Haslip, pp. 63, 70.

Franz Joseph remark on monarchy going under: Corti, p. 431.

CHAPTER 8 (pages 89-108)

Franz Ferdinand's efforts to restrain Austria: Kiszling, p. 210.

Franz Joseph's letter to Schratt: Briefe, p. 392.

Franz Joseph's military and diplomatic decisions: NFP and AZ, Aug. 1-10, 1913, issues; Kiszling, pp. 211-12.

Hitler draft-evasion investigation: Fest, p. 61.

Assassination attempt on Governor of Croatia: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 273-75.

Aljinovic threatening Franz Ferdinand: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 276.

Franz Ferdinand's letter to Berchtold: Kann, p. 223.

Franz Ferdinand's sigh about "how" Franz Ferdinand is: Auersperg, p. 89.

Austria sponsoring Lenin: Lenin, p. 146; Possony, pp. 134-38.

Bolshevik "summer conference": Possony, pp. 145-46.

Trotsky and 1905 revolution: Wolfe, pp. 285, 333.

Trotsky versus Lenin: Wolfe, p. 253.

Lenin on Trotsky ("absurd, semi-anarchist…"): Wolfe, p. 292.

Trotsky on Lenin ("master-squabbler…"): Shub, p. 75.

Trotsky off to cover Balkan war: Deutscher, Trotsky, pp. 205-6.

Freud off to Marienbad: Jones, vol. 2, p. 99.

Jones on Freud's structuring of International Psycho-Analytical Association: Clark, p. 296.

Freud on Jung as his successor: Clark, pp. 296-97.

Jung on Freud's libido dogma: Portable Jung, pp. xviii-xix.

Jung abandoning Freud's libido dogma: Clark, pp. 330-31.

Jung defies Freud in letter to him: Clark, pp. 328-29.

Kaiser anniversary: NFP, Jan. 28, 1913.

Tsar newsreels: AZ, Aug. 19, 1913.

Rilke on Russian exiles: Leppmann, p. 121.

Freud's reply to Jung: Clark, p. 329.

Totem and Taboo as part of Freud's anti-Jung stance: Clark, p. 352.

Freud's rheumatism: Jones, vol. 2, pp. 99-100.

Freud in the Dolomites: Jones, vol. 2, pp. 100–101.

Psycho-Analytical Congress maneuvering: Jones, vol. 2, pp. 148-52; Clark, p. 331.

Jung to Jones on not voting "Christian": Jones, vol. 2, p. 102.

Freud's "delicious days" quote: Jones, vol. 2, p. 103.

Freud's "lonely weeks" quote: Clark, p. 358; Bakan, p. 123.

Freud's Rome neurosis: Clark, p. 200; Bakan, p. 177.

Freud's first Rome visit in 1901: Clark, p. 202.

Freud's Moses identification: Clark, pp. 12, 358, 360.

Freud as "good hater": Clark, p. 333.

Dreiser on Freud: Clark, p. 421.

Freud quotes on Michelangelo's Moses: Bakan, pp. 125-26; Clark, p. 359.

Freud's "nonanalytic child" quote: Clark, p. 358.

Freud on Michelangelo and Pope Julius Il: Bakan, p. 127.

Freud's conciliatory intentions vis-a-vis Jung: Jones, vol. 2, p. 149.

CHAPTER 9 (pages 109–127)

Bregenz peace meeting details: AZ, Aug. 5, 1913.

Vienna's mellow summer scenes: AZ, Aug. 7 and 13, 1913.

Schuhmeier widow asks lenience for killer: AZ, Sept. 11, 1913.

Zionist Congress: AZ, Sept. 19, 1913.

Kafka in Vienna that September: Hayman, p. 168.

Franz Joseph and Kinetophone in Ischl: Corti, p. 394.

Franz Joseph appoints Franz Ferdinand Inspector General: Kiszling, p. 261.

Franz Joseph return to Vienna September 3: AZ, Sept. 4, 1913.

Fall fashions: IWE, Sept. 29, 1913; AZ, Nov. 30, 1913.

Fiacres encouraged: AZ, Nov. 10, 1913.

Tangos at Industrialists' Ball: Fremd., Sept. 28, 1913.

Tangos taboo with Kaiser: Cowles, p. 65.

Cotillion at Industrialists' Ball: IWE, Nov. 1, 1913.

Austria and Balkan situation: NFP, September and October issues passim.

Franz Ferdinand on "Serb horror stories": Kann, p. 231.

Austrian naval build-up: AZ, Oct. 1, 1913.

Berchtold peaceable: AZ, Oct. 2, 1913.

Panic communique: Fremd., Oct. 4, 1913.

Bolshevik "summer conference" and consequences in Russia: Possony, p. 146; Shub, p. 72.

Lenin on Austria's superior handling of nationalities: Possony, p. 149.

Beilis case: AZ, Oct. 7, Nov. 10, 1913.

Pleasant Churchill speech: AZ, Oct. 19, 1913.

Woodrow Wilson published in German: AZ, Sept. 5, 1913.

William Jennings Bryan peace performance: AZ, Sept. 5, 1913.

Jim Brady quote: IWE, Sept. 3, 1913.

Franz Ferdinand royal English hunt announced: WZ, Oct. 1, 1913.

Sophie incognito luncheon guest at Buckingham Palace: Brook-Shepherd, p. 204.

Franz Ferdinand informs General Conrad on Sarajevo plans via Potiorek: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 286.

Chicago plans to kill Franz Ferdinand: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 276.

Bohemian maneuvers: Kiszling, pp. 262-63.

Franz Ferdinand urges modern navy: Brook-Shepherd, p. 142.

Franz Ferdinand barks at Conrad: Kiszling, p. 265.

Conrad to Gina quotes: Gina Conrad von Hotzendorf, pp. 72, 77, 84.

Conrad offers resignation: Kiszling, p. 265.

Franz Ferdinand choice for Conrad successor: Kiszling, p. 266.

Franz Ferdinand summoned to Hofburg: Auersperg, p. 101

Franz Ferdinand's friendly letter to Conrad: Kiszling, p. 266.

Kaiser to Franz Ferdinand on Albania: Corti, p. 391.

Conrad-Franz Joseph exchange on Germany's commitment: Corti, pp. 381-82.

Franz Ferdinand versus Conrad Leipzig scene: Kiszling, pp. 268-69.

Post-Leipzig jockeyings of Conrad and Franz Ferdinand: Kann, p. 232; Auersperg, p. 102.

Austrian and Italian demarches to Serbia: May, p. 468.

Serbia yields: May, p. 468.

Franz Ferdinand letter to Berchtold: Kann, p. 233.

Franz Ferdinand host to Kaiser at Konopiste: Kiszling, pp. 269-70; Brook-Shepherd, pp. 89–90.

CHAPTER 10 (pages 128–131)

Franz Ferdinand shooting at Windsor: Brook-Shepherd, pp. 207-10.

London Times quote on visit: AZ, Nov. 25, 1913.

Russian Prime Minister toast in Berlin: AZ, Nov. 20, 1913.

Total of game killed at Windsor: Fremd., Nov. 23, 1913.

CHAPTER 1 1 (pages 132–145)

Trotsky mood: Trotsky, My Life, p. 230, and interview with Dr. and Mrs. Erwin Chargaff.

Trotsky "human locust" quote: Trotsky, My Life, p. 227.

Trotsky's Bulgaria sympathy: Deutscher, Trotsky, p. 205.

Meeting of Bulgarian King and Franz Joseph: Fremd., Nov. 19, 1913.

Schratt soiree for Bulgarian King: Haslip, p. 260.

Vienna celebrates triumph-over-Napoleon centennial: Corti, p. 395; NFP, Oct. 17, 1913.

Franz Joseph at celebration: "Wein 1913: Wartesaal der Geschichte" (newsreel of event in Austrian State Television documentary).

All Souls' Day: Friedlander, Glanz, p. 344; IWE, Nov. 3, 1913.

Caruso in Vienna: AZ, Sept. 13, 1913.

Maria Jeritza in Girl of the Golden West: AZ, Sept. 19, 1913.

Jascha Heifetz: AZ, Mar. 1, 1914, referring to earlier appearance.

Pygmalion: AZ and NFP, Oct. 16, 1913.

Everyman: AZ, Dec. 20, 1913.

Thomas Mann: AZ, Dec. 6, 1913.

Jack Johnson, boxing champion: AZ, Sept. 17, 1913.

Chess champ Lasker: AZ, Nov. 29, 1913.

John Galsworthy: AZ, Oct. 7, 1913.

Zola's Germinal: AZ, Sept. 3, 1913.

Austrian economics: Jaszi, pp. 209-12; AZ, Dec. 20, 1913.

Slum scenes: AZ, Jan. 19, 1914.

Suicide statistics: AZ, Jan. 7, 1914.

Funeral habits: Friedlander, Glanz, p. 233.

Warm fall and winter weather: AZ, Oct. 5, Dec. 5, Dec. 7, and Dec. 30, 1913.

Warm-winter scenes: AZ, Dec. 7, 1913; IWE, Dec. 27, 1913.

Christmas scenes: Wilhelm, p. 97; Friedlander, Glanz, pp. 196-99.

New Year's Eve scene: AZ and IWE, Jan. 2, 1914.

Pummerin: Groner, p. 450.

CHAPTER 12 (pages 146–151)

Molten-lead game: author's interviews.

Archducal baby: AZ, Jan. 9, 1914.

Fifty-two suicides: AZ, Feb. 26, 1914.

Sudden blizzard: AZ, Jan. 9, 1914.

Serb cable on Habsburg baby: WZ, Jan. 11, 1914.

Serb Prince on Prime Minister to Russia: May, p. 469.

French-Russian ties against Central Powers: Corti, p. 403.

Conrad pushes for military preparedness: Kiszling, p. 270.

Franz Ferdinand counters Conrad: Brook-Shepherd, p. 211; Auersperg, p. 187.

Conrad's measures: Kiszling, p. 271.

Hitler's arrest and his letter: Maser, pp. 39–42; Bullock, p. 48.

CHAPTER 13 (pages 152–160)

Ilk details: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 184-85.

Princip details: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 192.

Young Bosnians: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 175.

"Only our poets and revolutionaries awake": Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 230.

Young Bosnians' abstinence: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 208.

Ilia in Second Balkan War: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 185.

Princip tries to enlist in Second Balkan War: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 195-96.

Princip's favorite Nietzsche lines: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 288.

Princip and Ilia discuss killing Franz Ferdinand, and Princip leaves for Belgrade, via his native village: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 283-84.

Kokoschka details: Whitford, pp. 36–37.

Kokoschka and Alma Mahler and the painting Tempest: Whitford, pp. 94–95.

Kokoschka on his Tempest: Spiel, p. 193.

Haugwitz gala: Fritsche, p. 258.

Bank Employees' Ball: Fremd., Jan. 22, 1914.

Public Bath Attendants' Ball: AZ, Jan. 20, 1914.

Laundresses' ball: NWT, Feb. 9, 1914.

Ball at Court details: Brook-Shepherd, p. 211; Corti, pp. 407-8; Auersperg, p. 67.

Habsburg family ball: Fritsche, p. 256.

Cumberland Ball: Groner, p. 107; Fritsche, pp. 258-59.

Croy-Sternberg benefit: Fritsche, p. 259.

Vienna weather and mood around Ash Wednesday: IWE, Feb. 27, 1914; NWT, Feb. 28, 1914.

CHAPTER 14 (pages 161–171)

Albanian background: May, pp. 460-67; Corti, p. 407; AZ, January and February passim.

Prince of Wied details: AZ, February, March, and April 1914, passim; Redlich, pp. 224-28 passim.

Albanian postage stamps: AZ, Dec. 29, 1913; AZ, Jan. 22, 1914.

Wied's journey to and arrival in Albania: NFP, Mar. 8, 9, 10, 1914; Redlich, p. 221.

"Tragic operetta": Redlich, p. 220.

Princip's arrival in Belgrade: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 287.

Princip commemorations: Brook-Shepherd, p. 271.

Princip's father: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 189.

Student firebrands in Belgrade: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 288.

Princip-Cabrinovic alliance to kill Franz Ferdinand: Kiszling, p. 285; Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 289-90.

Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser meeting at Miramare: Brook-Shepherd, p. 212; Kiszling, pp. 273-74; Albertini, p. 508; Duke of Hohenberg oncamera account about his grandfather Franz Ferdinand, in TV documentary made by Ernst Trost for Austrian State Television in the series Das Bleibe vom Doppel-Adler.

Mordskerl quote by Franz Ferdinand on Kaiser: Kann, p. 120.

Franz Ferdinand choice of Albanian mbret: Kiszling, p. 199.

Hungarian oppression of Serbs in Bosnia: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 123.

Franz Ferdinand report on Miramare to Franz Joseph: Franz Ferdinands Lebensroman, p. 176.

CHAPTER 15 (pages 172–179)

Turf gala: NFP, Apr. 14, 1914; IWE, Apr. 14, 1914.

Aeronautical Parade: Apr. 14, 1914; IWE, Apr. 14, 1914.

Unemployed march: AZ, Apr. 14, 1914.

Paragraph Fourteen dissolving Parliament: May, pp. 433-34.

"I gave them spring fever": IWE, Apr. 15, 1914.

Sttirgkh background: May, p. 429.

Conversations with Berchtold at track: NWT, Apr. 15, 1914; Redlich, p. 224.

Radoteur wins race: NFP, Apr. 14, 1914.

Berchtold meets Italian Foreign Minister in Abbazia: AZ, Apr. 15, 1914; Hantsch, pp. 534-36; Fritsche, p. 266.

Russian strikes: AZ, Mar. 29, Apr. 7, 1914.

Vienna spring weather: IWE, Apr. 23, 1914.

Deliciously traditional questions: AZ, Mar. 10, 1914.

Princess Metternich party: Fritsche, p. 78.

Alt Wien exhibit: AZ, May 1, 1914.

Franz Joseph's illness announced: Corti, p. 408.

CHAPTER 1 6 (pages 180–188)

Franz Joseph's illness and succession problems and prospects: Kiszling, pp. 252-53; Cormons, p. 154; Redlich, p. 228.

Restaurant Meissl & Schadn: Groner, p. 650.

Franz Ferdinand's plans to change Empire: Kiszling, pp. 81, 252-60, 275-76; Brook-Shepherd, pp. 120, 145-50.

Franz Ferdinand versus Tisza: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 127; Albertini, vol. 1, p. 509; Kiszling, p. 205.

Franz Ferdinand's prospective appointments: Kiszling, p. 265.

Worriers in vineyard inns: Fremd., Apr. 27, 1914; IWE, Apr. 25-May 10, 1914, passim.

"Wien, Wien": Johnston, p. 128.

Grand Hotel restaurant: Fritsche, p. 114.

General Conrad's bleak prospects: Gina Conrad, p. 109.

General Conrad's letter to Gina: Gina Conrad, pp. 29 and 31.

CHAPTER 17 (pages 189–193)

Graben background: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 212; Brook-Shepherd, p. 217.

Graben recruited by Princip: Kiszling, p. 285.

Colonel Apis details: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 26–29; Taylor, pp. 195-96.

Apis assassinates King Alexander: Brook-Shepherd, p. 214.

Black Hand: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 371, 376.

Princip contacts Black Hand: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 290-93; Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 56–57.

Pistol practice: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 293.

CHAPTER 18 (pages 194–202)

Ilia attacks Socialists of Vienna: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 223-24; BrookShepherd, p. 226.

Trotsky's impression of Viktor Adler: Trotsky, My Life, p. 211.

Young Bosnians' abstinence: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 208-9.

Adler's student group: de La Grange, p. 68.

Nietzsche's influence on such groups: McGrath, pp. 69–70.

Hitler gives Mussolini works of Nietzsche: Fermi, p. 433.

Adler's version of new proletarian: McGrath, p. 214.

Socialists' many clubs: Friedlander, Wolken, pp. 265-69.

"World's most educated proletarians": McGrath, p. 215.

International situation tense: NFP, Apr. 20-May 5, 1914, passim.

Rosa Luxemburg quote: AZ, Feb. 21, 1914.

German Reichstag statistics and French election date: NFP, Apr. 20May 5, 1914, passim.

Russian strikes: Possony, p. 154.

Anniversary session of Socialist International: AZ, Apr. 14, 1914.

Mahler's Third Symphony, Nietzsche, and May Day: de La Grange, pp. 101, 365-66; McGrath, pp. 222, 244.

May Day march description: AZ, May 2, 1914.

CHAPTER 19 (pages 203–206)

Freud's symptoms: Jones, vol. 2, p. 105; Schur, p. 91.

Freud's tactics vis-a-vis Jung: Clark, pp. 352-53.

Freud using "Narcissism" paper against Jung: Clark, pp. 336-37.

Jung resignation from Yearbook: Clark, p. 332.

Freud's "breach against my will" and "desired rupture" quotes: Clark, pp. 330 and 334, respectively.

Jung is "totally… incompatible": Clark, p. 334.

Barrage at Jung and completion of Freud-Jung breach: Jones (abridged), p. 325; Clark, p. 335.

Freud submits to cancer exam: Jones, vol. 2, p. 105.

CHAPTER 2 0 (pages 207–215)

Moltke-Conrad meeting in Carlsbad: Albertini, vol. 1, p. 561.

Moltke character: Thomson, pp. 142-43; Tuchman, Guns, pp. 98–99, 513.

Moltke on rigors of next war: Tuchman, Guns, p. 38.

Details of Conrad-Moltke meeting: Conrad, vol. 3, pp. 669-73; Tuchman, Guns, pp. 93–94.

Colonel House's report: Albertini, vol. 1, p. 550.

Rapid armament growth, statistics: Albertini, vol. 1, pp. 550-51; Kleindel, p. 303; AZ, May 29, 1914.

Vienna cold spell and then spring warmth: AZ, May 31, 1914.

Franz Joseph's recovery: Corti, p. 408.

Berchtold winner at races: AZ, June 3, 1914.

Berchtold speech: Hantsch, p. 538.

Mbret in Albania totters: AZ, June 12, 1914.

International situation seems to improve: Albertini, vol. 1, pp. 577-78.

Lenin anticipates no war: Wolfe, pp. 607-8.

Lenin offensive against Mensheviks: Wolfe, pp. 608-9.

Milksop Mensheviks: Wolfe, p. 376.

Lenin solicits financing of Bolsheviks: Possony, pp. 152-53.

Freud's Dresden conference: Clark, p. 365.

Jung resignation: Clark, p. 335.

Freud has no cancer: Jones, vol. 2, p. 105.

Jung speech in Aberdeen: Clark, p. 338.

Freud's Wolf-Man position re Jung: Clark, p. 290.

CHAPTER 2 1 (pages 216–222)

Princess Metternich "mixed dinner": Fritsche, p. 97.

Weather and mood genial in Vienna: AZ, June 7, 1914.

Corregidor badly reviewed: AZ, June 9, 1914.

Anti-Mahler bias of opera management: Kralik, p. 53.

Salome kept out of opera repertoire: AZ, June 17, 1914.

Selma Kurtz curtain calls: AZ, May 26, 1914.

Wedekind: IWE, May 10, 1914.

Suffragettes in England: AZ, June 3, 1914.

French elections: NWT, June 2, 1914.

Kerenski: AZ, May 20, 1914.

Serbian domestic politics: Reiners, p. 146; Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 387-89; Thomson, p. 47.

Urbanski sudden retirement: AZ, June 7, 1914.

Black Hand initiation ceremony: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 292, 294; Albertini, vol. 2, p. 87; Schmitt, pp. 192-94; Brehm, 109-12; Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 375.

Princip and company depart for Sarajevo: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 295; Auersperg, p. 187.

CHAPTER 22 (pages 223–229)

Jovanovic calls on Bilinski: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 102-3.

Pa9ic information of assassins on the way: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 90, 98, 100.

Bilinski reasons for not informing Potiorek: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 21, 112-13; Kiszling, p. 287.

Number of troops at Sarajevo maneuvers: Kiszling, p. 292.

Preparations for Franz Ferdinand visit: Brook-Shepherd, p. 221; Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 411-12.

Franz Ferdinand discusses Sarajevo visit with Franz Joseph: Conrad, vol. 3, p. 700; Kiszling, p. 290; Corti, p. 408; Auersperg, p. 46.

Sophie's honors at Sarajevo: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 286.

Franz Ferdinand's fear of tuberculosis: Eisenmenger, p. 174.

Franz Ferdinand's stoicism re assassins: Brook-Shepherd, p. 235.

CHAPTER 2 3 (pages 230–236)

1914 Derby details: NFP, June 8, 1914; Fremd., June 8, 1914; IWE, June 8, 1914.

Kaiser visits Franz Ferdinand: Brook-Shepherd, pp. 229-32; Kiszling, p. 277.

Newspaper comment on floral scent and gunpowder: NFP, June 13,1914; Brook-Shepherd, pp. 229-30.

Franz Ferdinand argues anti-Tisza case: Albertini, vol. 1, pp. 533-34; Kiszling, pp. 278-79; Hantsch, pp. 544-45; Auersperg, p.-89.-

Konopiste dinner and Kaiser departs: Brook-Shepherd, p. 232; Kiszling, p. 279.

Konopiste open to public: Brehm, pp. 155-56.

Franz Ferdinand and wife prepare to leave for Sarajevo: BrookShepherd, p. 233; Fremd., June 30, 1914.

CHAPTER 2 4 (pages 237–241)

Rail detour through Budapest: Brehm, p. 190.

Electric lights fail on train: Kiszling, p. 291; Pauli, p. 291.

Franz Ferdinand onward travel to Sarajevo: Brehm, pp.189-91; Albertini, vol. 2, p. 19.

Franz Ferdinand arrives in Ilidze: Kiszling, pp. 291-92.

Maneuver details: Kiszling, pp. 292-93.

Franz Ferdinand's cable to Franz Joseph: Kiszling, pp. 294, 345.

Deletion of "my wife and I": Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 102.

Ilidze dinner: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 9-10

CHAPTER 25 (pages 242–248)

Franz Ferdinand and wife start last day: Kiszling, pp. 296, 298.

Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, details up to first assassination attempt: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 11–12; Brook-Shepherd, pp. 244-45; Brehm, p. 235; Kiszling, pp. 296-98.

First assassination attempt: Edmond Taylor, pp. 9, 10; Fremd., June 30, 1914.

City Hall scene: Brehm, p. 241; West, p. 331–32; Kiszling, p. 298; Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 12–13.

Franz Ferdinand speech at City Hall and City Hall conversations: Ded- ijer, Sarajevo, pp. 14–15; Kiszling, pp. 299–300; Albertini, vol. 2, p. 36.

CHAPTER 2 6 (pages 249–256)

Princip and company start journey from Belgrade to Sarajevo: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 291, 294-97; Brook-Shepherd, pp. 223-25.

Princip disciplines Cabrinovic: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 296-97.

Ilic's doubts: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 306-9 passim.

Assassins' days in Sarajevo prior to deed: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 305-14; Brook-Shepherd, pp. 226-27, 236-37; Pauli, p. 275.

CHA-PTER 27 (pages 257–264)

Assassins gather at pastry shop: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 315.

Cabrinovic dispute with his father: Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 315.

Assassins deploy for kill: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 316-19; Brook-Shepherd, pp. 242-44.

First attempt to kill: Brook-Shepherd, pp. 245-47; Dedijer, Sarajevo, p. 320; Dor, p. 40.

Second, successful attempt at Archduke's life: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 15–16, 321-23; Brook-Shepherd, pp. 249-52; Kiszling, pp. 299–301; Dor, pp. 40–41; Pauli, pp. 278-79.

CHAPTER 28 (pages 265–271)

Zweig recollection: Zweig, p. 249.

Vienna happy Sunday scene: Cormons, p. 157; NFP, June 30, 1914; Fremd., June 30, 1914.

Freud on assassination: Jones, vol. 2, p. 169.

Other responses to assassination: Hantsch, p. 557.

Franz Joseph reacts to assassination: Brehm, pp. 204-5; Corti, pp. 41213; Crankshaw, p. 390.

Bodies' transport from Sarajevo to Vienna: Brook-Shepherd, p. 260; Kiszling, pp. 301-2; Albertini, vol. 2, p. 117.

Mortuary details in Vienna and Artstetten: Kiszling, pp. 303-5; BrookShepherd, pp. 262-69; Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 118-19.

CHAPTER 29 (pages 272–281)

Repercussions of Franz Ferdinand's testamentary stipulation to be buried in Artstetten: Kiszling, p. 302.

Serbian government's condolences and mourning: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 273.

Anti-Serb disturbances in Habsburg Empire: AZ and NFP, June 29-July 3, 1914, passim.

Austrian government deliberations: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 124-26; Hantsch, pp. 558-60.

Cabinet opinions brought to Emperor by Berchtold: Hantsch, p. 562.

Franz Joseph's letter to Kaiser: Hantsch, p. 562; Albertini, vol. 2, p. 134.

Alexander von Hoyos mission to Berlin: Cormons, pp. 161-63; Albertini, vol. 2, p. 135.

Kaiser's reponse to Hoyos's manipulation: Thomson, p. 44.

Kaiser's words to Krupp: Berghahn, p. 193.

Austrian Ambassador's cable to Habsburg government to take drastic initiative: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 138-39, 148; Hantsch, p. 571.

Berchtold, too late, on Hoyos's duplicity: Hantsch, pp. 572-73.

Bilinski's waffling: Redlich, p. 236.

Berchtold joins hawks: Hantsch, pp. 583-88; Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 25455.

Berchtold in Ischl: Hantsch, pp. 589-90; Auersperg, p. 51.

CHAPTER 3 0 (pages 282–287)

Berchtold's game plan for ultimatum: Hantsch, pp. 589-92.

Depositions of caught assassins: Dedijer, Sarajevo, pp. 325-28, 329-32.

Cable from Belgrade: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 173-74.

Berchtold recommends vacation to Conrad: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 171, 256.

Other such "vacations": WZ, July 13, 1914.

In other countries, leaders go on vacation-German Foreign Minister: Thomson, p. 19; Tirpitz: Ludwig, p. 67; Kaiser: Balfour, p. 345, Berghahn, p. 190; Serbian Chief of Staff: Corti, p. 418, AZ, July 26, 1914; Poincare: Thomson, p. 51, Edmond Taylor, p. 211; Tsar: Thomson, p. 52, Auersperg, p. 59; Churchill: Manchester, p. 465; Sir Edward Grey: Thomson, pp. 71–72; Asquith: Thomson, p. 81, Edmond Taylor, p. 210.

Vienna summer scene: Fremd., AZ, IWE, July issues passim.

CHAPTER 3 1 (pages 288–294)

Freud rusticates in Carlsbad: Jones, vol. 2, p. 172.

Freud's bucolic childhood: Clark, p. 5; Walter, pp. 101-3.

Freud's "Philogenetic Fantasy": New York Times Science Section, Feb. 10, 1987.

Trosky's bucolic longings: Wyndham and King, unpaginated quote; Trotsky, My Life, pp. xvii, xix, 43.

Lenin's bucolic longings: Wolfe, pp. 40, 566, 613.

Hitler in Munich: Maser, p. 51; J. Sydney Jones, p. 222.

Kraus poem: Timms, pp. 264-65.

Kraus at Janowitz Park: Timms, pp. 255, 265.

Kraus's Manor Park quote: Fackel no. 400–403, Summer 1914, p. 95.

Kraus eulogy of Franz Ferdinand: Fackel no. 400–403, July 10, 1914, pp. 1–3.

Kraus devotees in Foreign Ministry polish ultimatum: Cormons, pp. 165-66.

Urn and chamberpot distinction: Janik and Toulmin, p. 89.

CHAPTER 32 (pages 295–304)

Serbian King plans travel abroad: AZ, July 14, 1914.

Pacific Lloyd George speech: AZ, July 19, 1914; Fremd., July 20, 1914.

Arbeiter Zeitung placid view: AZ, July 10, 1914.

Berchtold's blandness to British ambassador: Dugdale, p. 294.

Berchtold's blandness to Italian ambassador: Beck, p. 35.

Bechtold's blandness to French ambassador: Beck, p. 33.

Caillaux affair: Thomson, pp. 264-67.

Poincare and Caillaux affair: NWT, July 21, 1914.

British King and Irish Home Rule imbroglio: Manchester, p. 463.

Vienna music festival plans: AZ, July 21, 1914.

Tsar and Poincare toasts omit all mention of Serb-Austrian problem: AZ, July 22, 1914.

Secret Cabinet session: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 256.

Routine announcement of Berchtold report to Franz Joseph: WZ, July 21, 1914.

Berchtold in Ischl re ultimatum: Hantsch, pp. 602-3, 605.

Summary of note to Serbia: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 286-89.

British Foreign Secretary on note: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 289.

"Demarche with a time limit": Hantsch, p. 604.

Last note in diplomatic French: Crankshaw, p. 399.

Austrian Ambassador phones Serbian Ministry: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 284.

News of Austrian note reaches Serbian Prime Minister: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 347-49.

Panic returns to Belgrade: Albertini, p. 348–49.

Panic at Austrian Embassy: Hantsch, p.489; Edmond Taylor, pp. 214-15.

Serbian response to note: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 363-64.

Austrian Ambassador rejects note, leaves Belgrade: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 373; Hantsch, p. 490.

CHAPTER 3 3 (pages 305–316)

Franz Joseph and Berchtold in receipt of Serbian reply: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 374-75; Hantsch, p. 612.

German government in agreement with demarche: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 266-67.

German officials stiffen upper lips: Edmond Taylor, p. 218; Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 449-50; Crankshaw, pp. 402-3.

Germans disavow influence on Austria's note: Parkinson, p. 100.

Germans think note too sharp: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 265; Ludwig, p. 92.

Churchill on note's reception in London: Churchill, p. 204.

Churchill's order to fleet: Thomson, p. 91.

Poincare hurries home: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 590-91.

Russian Pre-Mobilization: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 304-5.

Conrad needs two weeks to strike: Conrad, vol. 4, p. 40; Crankshaw, p. 398.

Berchtold on war declaration as not really war: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 388, 457-58.

War declaration by cable: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 461.

Austrian mobilization posters: Auersperg, p. 153.

Austrian restraint: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 427.

Gallantry vis-a-vis Serbian Chief of Staff: Corti, p. 418; AZ, July 26–27, 1914.

Yachting Kaiser kept uninformed: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 439.

"Situation… not entirely clear": Albertini, vol. 2, p. 433.

Kaiser hastens home: Balfour, p. 348; AZ, July 27, 1914.

Kaiser blusters: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 434.

Delay of transmission of Austrian note text to Kaiser: Albertini, vol. 2, pp. 440-41; Thomson, p. 101.

"Brilliant achievement": Albertini, vol. 2, p. 467.

Kaiser-Bethmann scene: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 437.

Bulow quote: Albertini, vol. 2, p. 436.

Bethmann to German Ambassador in Vienna: Ludwig, p. 223; Thomson, p. 119.