July 1914: Countdown to War (4 page)

Jovanovitch duly took the weapons and, with panache, hid them in a box of sugar, which he wrapped in white paper and bound with twine. While looking for Ilitch in Doboj, Jovanovitch at one point left the box hidden underneath his raincoat in the rail station waiting room; he later left it unattended, for a time, in a friend’s workshop. Ilitch, after finally taking the dangerous cargo to Sarajevo, placed it “in a small chest, which I
locked, under a couch” in his mother’s bedroom. Fittingly, on the morning of 28 June 1914, Ilitch at last returned the “sugar” to Princip, Chabrinovitch, and Grabezh in the Vlajinitch pastry shop (minus several revolvers turned over to his own local recruits). Princip took a pistol, Chabrinovitch a bomb, and Grabezh one of each. The assassins were ready.
⁹

There was no great mystery about the route the archduke’s motorcade would follow that morning. Sarajevo was a small enough city, with obvious enough features, that one could have guessed at it without inside knowledge of the itinerary. Sarajevo is a low-lying valley town, split in the middle by the Miljăcke River (although “river” is a misnomer during the summer months, when it dries to a trickle) and surrounded by high hills that frame the town’s dramatic skyline. Any royal progress would likely proceed down the Appelquai, the main avenue running parallel to the Miljăcke.

As if to confirm what everyone suspected already, in the same decree in which he had exhorted Sarajevo’s subjects to show the Habsburg heir their best Slavic hospitality, Mayor Fehim Effendi had also informed them of the itinerary of the archduke’s Sunday visit, including the Appelquai (to be traveled both to and from town hall), the idea being that residents and shop owners along the route should bedeck the streets with imperial flags and flowers. Many Sarajevans had gone the mayor one better, displaying large portraits of the archduke on their walls and windows. Judging from the ubiquitous displays of hospitality blanketing the city all weekend, and the overwhelming warmth with which the locals had greeted him during his impromptu Friday night tour of the bazaar, Franz Ferdinand had no reason to expect anything different on Sunday.

But Sunday
was
different, because the travel itinerary—including both the route and the timing of the visit—had been published beforehand. The archduke’s private secretary, Paul
Nikitsch-Boulles, later wrote that during the spontaneous Friday tour “any would-be murderer would have had a thousand chances to assault Franz Ferdinand, undefended.” And yet, although accessing the victim would have been easy, none of the assassins had made a move on Friday because they did not have their weapons. On Sunday, they did.
¹⁰

The sun shone brilliantly across Bosnia on the morning of Vidov Dan, as the Habsburg heir prepared to run out the clock on his visit. Franz Ferdinand wore the uniform of an Austrian cavalry general, with a blue tunic over black trousers with red stripes, topped off by a gold collar with three silver stars. Sophie was elegantly outfitted in a “gossamer white veil” and white hat, with a bouquet of roses tucked into her red sash. Together they arrived in Sarajevo by train from Ilidža at 9:20
AM
, accompanied by Governor Potiorek, who acted as tour guide. A brief review of local troops followed, at which Sophie, significantly, was allowed to walk side by side with her husband. The archducal couple then took the position of honor in an open car in the imperial motorcade, behind the lead car holding the mayor and police chief, with three other staff cars trailing behind. The cannons boomed a “twenty-four-fold salute” to announce the start of the royal progress, followed by shouts of “
Zivio!
” (“long live the heir”) from the crowds. As everyone in town knew, the motorcade would now, between 10 and 10:30
AM
, proceed down the length of the Appelquai toward the town hall, along the right side of the road bordering the river; on the return route, the motorcade would proceed on the opposite, landward side of the quai.
¹¹

There, along the Appelquai, the assassins waited. Counting Ilitch himself, there were seven in all. Chabrinovitch, Grabezh, and Princip, fresh from Belgrade, formed the core muscle of the conspiracy. Ilitch had recruited three more locals: Vaso Chubrilovitch and Cvjetko Popovitch, both Bosnian Serbs, and, perhaps to throw investigators off the scent of the crime, a token Bosnian Muslim with the wonderfully evocative name of Mehmedbashitch (“Mehmed” being a Turkic variant of Mohammad and “bashitch” the Slavicization of the Turkish word for kickback,
baksheesh
). Ilitch, the organizer, chose a post for himself on the landward side of the Appelquai across from the Cumurja Bridge, flanked by Popovitch. Directly opposite, Mehmedbashitch, Chubrilovitch, and Chabrinovitch took up key positions along the river. The motorcade would pass by the first two, who carried pistols, just before passing the Cumurja Bridge and then Chabrinovitch, with his handheld fuse bomb. In case these three missed their chance, Princip was waiting with his revolver right before the cars reached the next bridge, the Lateiner. Finally, if the first four failed, the motorcade would have to get by Grabezh—the only assassin who carried both bomb and pistol—short of the Kaiser Bridge.

For all the brilliant redundancy of Ilitch’s plan, there was a glaring weakness. Perhaps overestimating the dedication of his own recruits, the organizer of the assassination plot had given the two most important positions to Vaso Chubrilovitch, a young Bosnian with little training and less courage, and Mehmedbashitch, a Muslim of questionable loyalty to the Serbian cause. Neither man raised a finger when the motorcade passed him by. Only the third assassin and first of the Belgrade conspirators, Chabrinovitch, acted. As the motorcade was passing by the Cumurja Bridge, Chabrinovitch knocked the cap off his bomb and hurled it at the archduke’s car. Luckily, the driver had seen the assassin readying to strike; he accelerated rapidly, and the fuse bomb, after grazing Ferdinand’s face, bounced off the back hood and detonated underneath the staff car that followed behind. The explosion did serious damage to the latter vehicle, wounding Potiorek’s adjutant and several bystanders on the quai. Chabrinovitch jumped into the dry riverbed, only
to be seized by policemen before he could pop his poison pill (if he intended to).

Never was the quiet dignity of the Habsburgs more in evidence than in the minutes following the attempt on the archduke’s life. Dismissing his own minor scratch, Franz Ferdinand calmly surveyed the damage to the car, asked if anyone had been injured, and made sure all wounded men were sent forthwith to the garrison hospital for treatment. “Come on,” he remarked, “the fellow is insane. Gentlemen, let us proceed with the program.” When the motorcade resumed its course along the Appelquai at a higher speed than before, so as to discourage further attempts on the archduke’s life, Ferdinand scoffed and asked his driver to slow down so that his subjects might see him better. His instinct was sound: having seen Chabrinovitch’s bomb fail to hit its target, Princip and Grabezh had abandoned their positions.
¹²

Despite his show of pluck in the face of this act of terrorism, the archduke was in a foul mood when the party reached the town hall. Sophie, uninjured but for a small scratch and not too badly shaken, went off to meet with a deputation of Muslim women, while Ferdinand prepared to endure one last round of public speeches. The scene was novel, at least. Underneath a canopy of “red-gold Moorish loggias”—a nod to Sarajevo’s Ottoman past—the archduke was greeted by “turbaned mullahs, bishops in miters and gilt vestments, rabbis in kaftans.” But there was an unmistakable air of awkwardness. When Mayor Fehim Effendi, unsure of how to behave in the wake of the incident on the quay, simply read off his prepared text of platitudes and compliments for the Habsburg heir—read in German, which he spoke decently well for a Bosnian—Ferdinand finally snapped, interrupting Fehim Effendi to say, “That’s rich! We come here to visit this city and we are greeted with bombs. Very well, then, go on.”
¹³

It was approaching eleven
AM
. The program called for a visit to the museum before lunch, which would require navigating the most crowded part of the city by way of Franz Josef Strasse. To avoid further trouble, the archduke’s military advisers suggested he skip the museum and proceed to Potiorek’s gubernatorial Konak, turning left at the first bridge along the quai—the Kaiser—to avoid the trouble spot at the Cumurja farther down; from the Kaiser it was a straight shot to the Konak (this route also passed through the Muslim quarter, presumably safer than the Serbian neighborhoods). With his characteristic sense of honor, Ferdinand chose a third option: visiting the garrison hospital to check on Potiorek’s adjutant and the other wounded before proceeding to the Konak for the luncheon that would, at last, terminate his duties in Bosnia. While the hospital, like the museum, was most directly reached via the narrow Franz-Josef Strasse, Potiorek insisted that the motorcade proceed straight along the broad Appelquai at high speed so as to foil bomb throwers, reaching the garrison hospital by the long—but presumably safe—way.
¹⁴

It was a sensible plan. Meanwhile, Princip and Grabezh were still milling about the quai, despondent after watching Chabrinovitch’s arrest following his near miss. Ilitch and his Bosnian recruits, despite being perfectly located to make mischief after the motorcade had been halted after the bombing, had all slunk away to hide. Grabezh had not distinguished himself either, having failed to strike—even after the motorcade resumed its progress along the quay—because, he claimed later, the crowds at the Lateiner Bridge were too thick. The Serbs’ one remaining hand bomb, held by Grabezh, would have almost no chance to hit a car traveling at full speed. Grabezh and Princip were both carrying pistols, but the idea that either one of them could, after a few weeks’ target practice, hit the archduke with a kill shot in a rapidly moving car was fanciful. Grabezh, knowing this, had taken up a new position at the Kaiser Bridge, hoping
that, if the returning motorcade turned there toward the gubernatorial Konak, it would slow down enough for him get off a shot at close range. Had the archduke not insisted on visiting the wounded men at the garrison hospital, his car would have had to slow down, briefly, turning onto the bridge where Grabezh was waiting—although the Serb would have had only a second, at most, to get off his shot.
¹⁵

Gavrilo Princip had not given up, either. He, along with Chabrinovitch, had set the conspiracy in motion. Both men were committed terrorists. Both had taken oaths to carry out this terrible deed over the Sarajevo gravestone of Bogdan Zherajitch, a Herzogovinian Serb revered for his assassination attempt on General Vareshanin, Potiorek’s predecessor as military governor of Bosnia, in 1910. Zherajitch, like Princip and Chabrinovitch, had been trained by the Black Hand. Although he had failed to kill the governor, Zherajitch had gotten off five shots before committing suicide. Princip, in the days before the archduke’s arrival, spent hours next to Zherajitch’s grave, gathering strength for his task. On the night before Vidov Dan, Princip had made one last pilgrimage, covering the terrorist’s tombstone with flowers to consecrate his own expected martyrdom on the morrow.
¹⁶

So far, Princip had failed his hero. Chabrinovitch had at least made his attempt on the archduke (even if failing to kill himself, as Zherajitch had done). Thus far Princip had not even done that much. True, it was not his fault that Ilitch had placed him fourth in line on the riverside that morning. In the tense aftermath of the bombing, with officers and onlookers blanketing the scene, it would have been nearly impossible for him to get close enough to the archduke to get off a good shot. And yet, for a Serbian terrorist committed to die for his cause, this was no excuse.

Fortified by his graveside pilgrimages, Princip did not lose faith after Chabrinovitch was arrested. As Grabezh had the
Konak route covered, Princip took up a new position on the museum route, opposite the Lateiner Bridge, in front of the Moritz Schiller spice emporium at the corner of Franz Josef Strasse, where the archduke’s car would turn right from the Appelquai if it followed the original program. So dangerous was the publication of the archduke’s itinerary that now, whether he proceeded to either of his two remaining destinations, his motorcade would have to slow down at a sharp corner where a Serb terrorist was waiting, loaded pistol in hand. Still, Ferdinand’s stubbornness in choosing a third destination, and Potiorek’s decision to abandon the Franz Josef Strasse and run all cars at high speed, had dramatically lowered the odds of a successful second attack. If everything proceeded according to the new plan, both Grabezh and Princip would watch the motorcade pass by in a blur, just out of reach. Princip would be a bit closer, but—at nine meters or thirty feet from his new position—a fast-moving car would present an almost impossible target.