July 1914: Countdown to War (7 page)

Emperor Franz Josef I, emperor of Austria-Hungary, proud custodian of a Habsburg mandate to rule “reaching back a thousand years.”
Source: Harris and Ewing Collection, Library of Congress.

Despite the appearance of fragility, however, the emperor remained fully in possession of his faculties. He was no figurehead. While he was necessarily noncommittal during his audiences with Berchtold and Tisza, urging both men to forge a common imperial policy, Franz Josef’s own views on the Sarajevo outrage were probably closer to those of his foreign minister, if not quite as belligerent as those of Conrad. On Thursday, 2 July, the day after he had received Tisza’s written statement opposing war with Serbia, the emperor told Tschirschky, the German ambassador, that he was “not sure how much longer things could remain calm in the Balkans,” and that he hoped Germany’s sovereign, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was able “to appreciate the danger posed to the [dual] monarchy by the presence of Serbia as a neighbor.” Behind Serbia stood Russia. Serbia’s prime minister, Franz Josef believed, “did nothing without consulting [Nikolai] Hartwig,” Russia’s minister to Serbia. Hartwig, the emperor told Tschirschky, was “the real boss in Belgrade.” Franz Josef said he was “particularly disquieted by the Russian trial mobilization planned for fall, just at the time we are shifting our recruit contingents.”
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It is significant that the Habsburg emperor revealed his deepest forebodings about Russia not to Berchtold or Tisza, but to the ambassador of Germany, Austria’s only real ally. The belle of the ball in Metternich’s day, when Vienna had been the fulcrum of a “holy alliance” of the three eastern empires (Austria, Prussia, and Russia) that had pledged to suppress any revolutionary or irredentist-nationalist challenges to the status quo in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, Austria had declined so precipitously that she was now rated barely worth an alliance by the Western powers. Since breaking with St. Petersburg in the Crimean War of 1853–1856, when then-foreign minister Count Buol had demanded that Russian troops evacuate Danube lands at a time when Russia was locked in war with Britain, France, Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire, Vienna had been adrift in European diplomacy. Otto von Bismarck, architect of Germany’s unification under Prussian auspices in 1871, had tried to rope mutually suspicious Austria and Russia together in his Machiavellian Three Emperors League (1873–1879, 1881–1887), the spirit of which was maintained in his still more Machiavellian (and secret) Reinsurance Treaty of 1887, but this improbable grouping worked only so long as the Russians did not intuit Bismarck’s real purpose, which was to keep Paris and St. Petersburg from teaming up against Germany. This they duly did shortly after Bismarck’s fall from power in 1890, concluding a bilateral Franco-Russian military alliance against Germany in 1894.

With Austria having lost its strategic role as a smokescreen for Bismarckian diplomacy, Germany maintained her alliance with Austria largely out of diplomatic inertia—and the fact that the two empires now, since the collapse of Bismarck’s system, shared a Russian enemy. True, Vienna could theoretically count on Italy, third wheel of a Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany dating to 1882, but the tie with Rome was far weaker than the one with Berlin. Italy shared a common potential wartime enemy with Germany (France), but not with Austria, which did not border France. Moreover, Italy’s well-known designs on Austrian Trieste and the South Tyrol made nonsense of the notion that Rome was Vienna’s ally. Conrad had gone too far in proposing a preemptive war with Italy in 1911, but no one at the Ballplatz entertained any illusions that Italy would take Austria’s side in a Balkan or European war. In the face of the Serbian threat, the Austrians knew that Germany alone stood between them and utter isolation. Without the Germans, they could do nothing. On this, if little else, everyone in Vienna—and Budapest—was agreed.

On 1 July, the same day Tisza presented his antiwar memorandum to the Emperor, Conrad visited the Ballplatz again to
sound out the foreign minister. Berchtold informed the chief of staff of Tisza’s stout opposition to waging war on Serbia: Tisza believed that Russia would intervene and that “Germany would leave us in the lurch.” Conrad himself was forced to concede that, if Austria’s main ally did not offer support, “our hands would be tied.” Berchtold himself shared this concern, adding to it the fear that Romania, which Vienna was actively courting as a possible ally in the Balkans, would not likely support an Austrian war against Serbia unless it was clear that the war had German backing. Berchtold told the chief of staff that he had recently prepared a memorandum exhorting Berlin to help cajole Bulgaria and Romania into the Triple Alliance. Conrad was intrigued. The chief of staff concluded his audience with Berchtold by saying, “before anything else we must ask Germany whether she intends to back us up against Russia or not.”
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It is significant that Berchtold told Conrad that he himself had prepared the Balkan policy memorandum that both men agreed must now be dispatched to Berlin. In fact the original memorandum, outlining a new Austro-German “peace initiative” centered on bringing Bulgaria, Romania, and Ottoman Turkey into the Triple Alliance in order to deter Russian aggression in the Balkans, had been prepared on Tisza’s instructions back in March. The most recent draft had been completed on 24 June, four days before the Sarajevo incident. Had the foreign minister told Conrad that the Berlin initiative represented Tisza’s pseudo-pacifist thinking, the chief of staff may not have assented with such alacrity. Berchtold had clearly thought this through, because Tisza’s Berlin peace initiative offered him a possible way out of the current impasse. Ostensibly to do with the bric-a-brac of Balkan politics, Tisza’s memorandum was, at root, about strengthening the German alliance. Austria’s goal, Tisza argued, must be to force Berlin to plunge ever deeper into Austria’s Balkan affairs, so as to take joint ownership of them. “There can be no talk of success,” Tisza had concluded his March
missive, “unless we have complete assurance of being understood, respected, and supported by Germany. Germany must see that the Balkans are of decisive importance not only for us but for the German Empire.” Continuing the same line of thought in his 1 July note to the emperor, Tisza had urged Franz Josef I to approach Wilhelm II at the upcoming memorial service for the archduke, making use of the “recent monstrous events” to win him over to a “wholehearted support of [Austrian] policy in the Balkans.” Conrad wanted to use the Sarajevo outrage as a pretext for settling scores with Serbia. Tisza wished to use it as a pretext for bringing Germany into harmony with Austria on Balkan issues, to prevent another destructive war, as he assumed the Germans wanted to do. Berchtold’s idea was to approach the Germans with Tisza’s peace initiative but use it to win their support for Conrad’s war policy.
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Franz Ferdinand’s funeral, scheduled to take place in Vienna on Friday, 3 July, would, as Tisza suggested, offer the perfect setting for an approach to the Germans. Unlike his Austrian counterpart, Germany’s Emperor Wilhelm II had been fond of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. He had visited them for a long weekend at Konopischt in June, just days before the archduke was assassinated. The kaiser was notoriously impetuous and emotional. The murder of his close friend, a fellow royal, was bound to send him into a rage. So long as the Austrians could direct this rage in the right direction—against Serbia—Germany would be as good as won over.

It was not to be. On the morning of Thursday, 2 July, while the embalmed remains of Ferdinand and Sophie were still en route to Vienna from the port of Trieste, it was announced that Kaiser Wilhelm II would not be attending the funeral; an attack of lumbago had left him unable to travel. Tisza would not have his chance to sell the German sovereign on his Balkan peace initiative, but then neither could Berchtold or Conrad exploit Wilhelm’s
anger to win German backing for a Serbian war. In fact, not a single foreign royal or statesman came to Vienna for the funeral. Supposedly, Berchtold claimed, invitations were withheld to spare the aging Franz Josef from the fatigue sure to result from a lengthy ceremony. Separate memorial services would be arranged by Austrian ambassadors abroad instead. The emperor’s own feelings toward the deceased, as everyone knew, were not warm; despite strong protests from inside the family, he had not yielded on his decision not to bury the archducal couple in the Habsburg vault. A more intriguing explanation has been suggested by Ballplatz insiders: Berchtold did not want foreign sovereigns’ access to the emperor’s ear, for fear they would exercise a moderating influence on the war party.
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The flat memorial service for the heir to the Habsburg throne forms an instructive comparison with the grandiose state funeral of King Edward VII of England in May 1910, so memorably chronicled by Barbara Tuchman in
The Guns of August
. Then, London had seen no less than nine kings, on splendid mounts, ride “through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun,” followed by “five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens,” and “a scattering of ambassadors from uncrowned countries.”
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Franz Ferdinand’s death, by contrast, went nearly unmourned in Vienna. The emperor refused even to meet the funeral train from Trieste, nor did he attend the memorial service. Those few members of the Habsburg dynasty willing to brave the emperor’s wrath were free to attend, but they were given less than fifteen minutes to view the body. Franz Ferdinand’s own children were not allowed even this dignity (although they were allowed to send flowers). Ferdinand’s coffin, at least, bore the full insignia of the second-highest ranking prince of the dual monarchy: his body was properly adorned by the archducal crown, a plumed general’s
helmet, his ceremonial sword, and his principal decorations, including the Order of the Golden Fleece. Sophie’s coffin, by contrast, was not only smaller than her husband’s but stood twenty inches lower. It was bare except for a pair of white gloves and a black fan, symbolizing her former station as a mere lady-in-waiting. The bodies were buried in a modest chapel in Artstetten—a “provincial hole” well removed from imperial Vienna—which Franz Ferdinand had had specially built in case the couple were denied entry to the imperial vault. It was the Habsburg equivalent of an unmarked grave.
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The stiff and socially awkward archduke had, it is true, never been as popular as the gregarious and charming Edward VII, nor was Austria remotely as powerful a country as England, which ruled an empire that literally bestrode the globe. Still, the sharp contrast between the two occasions suggests that something important had been lost in the intervening four years. The year 1910 had seen a kind of Indian summer of Old Europe, a year blissfully free of international tension in between the First Bosnian Crisis of 1908–1909 and the Moroccan crisis of 1911 and the Italian-Turkish and Balkan Wars that followed on its heels. Then, Austria had not yet been humiliated, nor Serbia enlarged; nor had the Ottoman Empire been dealt a series of near-death blows by Italy and the Balkan League. The monarchical principle was still operative in 1910: no matter how loudly the nationalist press of each country bayed for blood against its enemies, sovereigns still shared ties of marriage and blood, some level of mutual comity and trust, which helped to defuse tensions before things went too far.

Had this still been true in 1914, there should have been a powerful international upwelling of sympathy for the slain archduke, whose brutal murder was an obvious affront to rulers everywhere (notwithstanding the frigid feelings of Austria’s own sovereign). Instead, not even Wilhelm II, Franz Ferdinand’s best
and only true friend among Europe’s royal houses, came to Vienna to pay his respects. There was a good—and revealing—reason why Wilhelm stayed home, and it was not, contrary to the public report, owing to lower-back pain. “As a result of warnings I have received from Sarajevo,” German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg informed Franz Josef I in a secret telegram sent via the Ballplatz, “of which the first dates all the way back to April of this year, I have been obliged to request His Majesty the Kaiser to abandon his trip to Vienna.” Assassinations such as those of the archduke and his wife, Bethmann explained, “are well known to have a suggestive effect on criminal elements.”
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