The Sleepwalkers (11 page)

The mood of unity began to dissipate as soon as the Balkan Wars were over, when disputes over the management of the newly acquired areas triggered a catastrophic deterioration in civil–military relations. On one side were the ministry of war, the Serbian army and various fellow travellers from the ranks of the Independent Radical opposition; on the other side were the Radical Party leaders who made up most of the rest of the cabinet.
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The dispute centred on the character of the administration to be introduced in the new lands. The Pašić cabinet intended to install a system of interim civil administration by decree. The army, by contrast, favoured a continuation of military rule. Buoyed up by its recent successes, the military leadership refused to cede control in the annexed zone. It was a matter not just of power, but also of policy, for the hardliners took the view that only a firm and illiberal administration would be suited to the consolidation of Serbian control in areas of mixed ethnicity. When the Radical minister of the interior Stojan Protić issued a Priority Decree in April 1914 formally subordinating the army to the civil authorities, a fully fledged crisis broke out. Officers in the new areas refused to comply with the decree, the military party linked arms with the Independent Radical opposition in the Skupština, just as the conspirators had done after 1903.There was even talk of an impending coup, to be coordinated by Apis, who would lead troops of the Belgrade garrison to the royal palace, force King Petar to abdicate in favour of his son Prince Alexandar and assassinate the Radical members of the cabinet.
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By the end of May 1914, the situation in Belgrade was so finely balanced that it required the intervention of foreign powers to prevent the collapse of the Pašić government. In a highly unusual move, the Russian minister in Belgrade declared publicly that Russia's Balkan policies required Pašić's retention in office. The French backed him up by hinting that a post-Pašić government dominated by Independents and members of the military party might no longer receive the lavish Parisian financial backing that had sustained state investment in Serbia since 1905. It was an imperfect repeat of 1899, when the wily Radical leader had been saved from execution by the intervention of the Austrian minister. Outmanoeuvred, Apis retired from the fray.
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With the threat of an immediate takeover temporarily averted, Pašić looked to the coming elections in June 1914 to consolidate his position.

There was nothing in these opaque political struggles to comfort the observers of Serbian affairs in Vienna. As Dayrell Crackanthorpe pointed out in March 1914, both the ‘more moderate and prudent section of opinion' represented in the Radical cabinet and the ‘military party' influenced by the Black Hand believed in the more or less imminent dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the succession of Serbia to the vast lands of the empire that still awaited pan-Serbian redemption. The difference was one of method: while the military party believed in a ‘war of aggression when the moment arrives and the country is prepared', the moderates took the view that ‘the signal for the disruption of the Austro-Hungarian Empire will come, not from without, but from within the Empire' and thus favoured a posture of preparedness for all eventualities. In institutional terms, moreover, the fabric of moderate official Serbia and the hardline irredentist networks remained deeply intertwined. The senior echelons of the military and its intelligence service, with its system of agents in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the customs service, parts of the interior ministry and other government organs were deeply infiltrated by the networks, just as the networks were infiltrated by the state.

Reconstructing the details of the plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo is difficult. The assassins themselves made every effort to cover the tracks that linked them to Belgrade. Many of the surviving participants refused to speak of their involvement; others played down their roles or covered their tracks with obfuscating speculations, producing a chaos of conflicting testimony. The plot itself produced no surviving documentation: virtually all those who took part were habituated to a milieu that was obsessed with secrecy. The collusion between the Serbian state and the networks implicated in the plot was by design furtive and informal – there was no real paper trail. The historiography of the conspiracy has therefore had to make do with a dubious combination of post-war recollections, depositions and affidavits made under conditions of duress, claims allegedly based on sources that have since been destroyed, and scraps of documentary evidence, most of them related only obliquely to the planning and implementation of the plot. Yet so much hangs on the background to this plot that historians have pored with forensic intensity over nearly every detail. It is thus possible to chart a line of maximum plausibility through the chaos of the sources and the tendentious distortions of much of the secondary literature.

Apis was the principal architect behind the plot, but the idea itself probably originated from his associate Rade Malobabić, a Serb born in Austria-Hungary who had worked for some years with the Narodna Odbrana as a spy, collecting information on Austrian fortifications and troop movements and bringing it to the Serbian frontier officers who doubled as Black Hand operatives and, through them, to Serbian military intelligence.
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Malobabić was a super-agent, a man of extraordinary dedication and cunning who knew the borderlands well and repeatedly evaded capture by the Austrian authorities. He is reported on one occasion to have swum across the virtually frozen Drina, from which he emerged covered in shards of ice, in order to report to his handlers on the Serbian side of the border.
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It was probably Malobabić who first informed Apis of the impending visit to Sarajevo by Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austrian throne, in June 1914.
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Exactly why Apis pressed for the assassination of the archduke is difficult to establish, since he left no straightforward account of his motivations. In early 1914, the hostility of the local activists in Bosnia was focused primarily on the person of Oskar Potiorek, the Austrian governor of Bosnia, a successor to Varešanin, whom Žerajić had failed to kill in June 1910. In turning their efforts towards Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Apis raised the political stakes. The assassination of a governor would stir things up, but it might easily be construed as a local affair, motivated by issues of regional governance. By contrast, an assault on the heir to the Habsburg throne, at a time when the reigning Emperor was well into his eighty-third year, was bound to be seen as an attack on the empire's very existence.

It should be emphasized that the archduke was not targeted on account of any alleged hostility to the Slavic minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but, on the contrary, because, to borrow the words of his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, ‘as future Sovereign he would have prevented our union by carrying through certain reforms'.
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Princip was alluding to the archduke's reputed support for structural reforms of the monarchy that would assign more autonomy to the Slavic lands. Many within the Serbian irredentist milieu recognized this idea as a potentially catastrophic threat to the reunificationist project. If the Habsburg monarchy were to transform itself successfully into a tripartite entity governed from Vienna along federal lines, with Zagreb, for example, as a capital with the same status as Budapest, there was the danger that Serbia would forfeit its vanguard role as the Piedmont of the South Slavs.
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The targeting of the archduke thus exemplified one abiding strand in the logic of terrorist movements, namely that reformers and moderates are more to be feared than outright enemies and hardliners.

The men selected to carry out the assassination of the archduke had all been formed in the world of the irredentist networks. It was the former
comitatji
Voja Tankosić who recruited the three Bosnian Serb youths who formed the core of the assassination unit that would be sent to Sarajevo. Trifko Grabež, Nedeljko Čabrinović and Gavrilo Princip were all nineteen years of age when Tankosić enrolled them in the conspiracy. They were good friends who spent much time in each other's company. Grabež was the son of an orthodox priest in Pale, about twelve miles to the east of Sarajevo, who had travelled to Belgrade to continue his high school education. Čabrinović had left school at the age of fourteen and subsequently drifted to Belgrade, where he found work as a print-setter for a firm specializing in anarchist literature. Princip, like Grabež, had left Sarajevo in order to attend school in Belgrade. All three were from poor families and unhappy households. Grabež and Čabrinović had suffered under and rebelled against the male authority figures in their own early lives. During his trial, Čabrinović told the court that his father had mistreated him at home because he made such poor progress at his school in Sarajevo; the boy was eventually expelled for slapping one of his teachers in the face. The tensions at home were aggravated by the fact that Čabrinović senior worked as a police informer for the hated Austrians – a stigma that the boy hoped to slough off through his engagement in the national cause. Grabež too had been thrown out of his grammar school in Tuzla for punching one of his professors.
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Money was scarce – only Princip had a regular income, in the form of a very modest allowance from his parents, but this was usually shared out among the friends or lent to impecunious acquaintances.
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Čabrinović later recalled that on arriving in Belgrade, he had for some days carried all his possessions around with him in a small suitcase, presumably because he had nowhere to stay.
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Unsurprisingly, the boys were not in the best of health. Princip in particular was thin and sickly; he was probably already tubercular. Illness had forced him to leave school early in Sarajevo. The protocol of his trial describes him as ‘a small fragile youth'.
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These boys had little in the way of bad habits. They were made of that sombre, youthful stuff, rich in ideals but poor in experience, that modern terrorist movements feed upon. Alcohol was not to their taste. Although they were heterosexual by romantic inclination, they did not seek the society of young women. They read nationalist poetry and irredentist newspapers and pamphlets. The boys dwelt at length on the suffering of the Serbian nation, for which they blamed everyone but the Serbs themselves, and felt the slights and humiliations of the least of their countrymen as if they were their own. A recurring theme was the economic degradation of their Bosnian countryfolk by the Austrian authorities (a complaint that overlooked the fact that Bosnia was in fact more industrialized and more prosperous in terms of per capita income than most of the Serbian heartland).
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Sacrifice was a central preoccupation, almost an obsession. Princip had even found the time to learn by heart the entirety of
The Mountain Wreath
, Petrović-Njegos's stirring epic celebration of the selfless tyrannicide Miloš Obilić.
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Princip stated to the court during his trial that in the days before the assassination, it had been his habit to go to the grave of the suicide assassin Bogdan Žerajić: ‘I often spent whole nights there, thinking about our situation, about our miserable conditions and about [Žerajić], and so it was that I resolved to carry out the assassination.'
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Čabrinović, too, reported that he had made his way to Žerajić's grave as soon as he had arrived in Sarajevo. Finding it neglected, he had laid flowers on it (a footnote to the Austrian trial transcript noted snidely that these blooms were stolen from other graves nearby). It was during these sojourns at Žerajić's resting place, Čabrinović declared, that he formed the intention to die as Žerajić had done. ‘I knew in any case that I would not live long. The thought of suicide was always with me; I was indifferent to everything.'
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Young Gavrilo Princip