abdicated the throne of Rumania, Carol made the third of his three marriages. His wife was the woman who had been his mistress for twenty-two years, Magda Lupescu.
In Europe, the early summer of 1914 was marked by glorious weather. Millions of men and women went off on holidays, forgetting their fears of war in the warmth of the sun. Kings and emperors continued to visit each other, dine at state dinners, review armies and fleets and bounce each other’s children on their knees. Beneath the surface, however, differences were detectable. The important visits took place between allies: King George V visited Paris; the Kaiser visited the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand; Raymond Poincare, President of France, visited the Tsar in St. Petersburg. In their entourages, the chiefs of state brought generals and diplomats who sat down quietly with their opposite numbers to compare plans and confirm understandings. Military reviews took on special significance. Troops on parade were carefully watched for signs of
An event of special symbolic importance took place at the end of June when the dashing British Admiral Sir David Beatty led the First Battle Cruiser Squadron of the Royal Navy up the Baltic on a visit to Russia. England, alarmed by the rapid building of the Kaiser’s powerful High Seas Fleet, was reluctantly abandoning a century of “splendid isolation.” A closer tie with Tsarist Russia, hitherto despised in press and parliament as the land of the Cossack and the knout, was part of Britain’s new diplomacy. On June 20, a blazing, cloudless day, Beatty’s four huge gray ships,
The following day, while thousands of Russians stared at the English ships swinging silently on the Baltic tide, Beatty and his officers visited Tsarskoe Selo. Beatty himself, the youngest British admiral since Nelson, made a tremendous impression. His youthful, clean-shaven face caused many Russians, accustomed to seeing admirals with beards to their waists, to mistake Beatty for his own flag lieutenant. But Beatty’s manner was unmistakably one of command. His square jaw and the jaunty angle at which he wore his cap suggested the sea dog. He spoke in a voice which would have carried over the howl of a gale. It was as if the solid reality of Britain’s enormous seapower, a thing few Russians understood, had suddenly been revealed in Beatty’s person.
After Beatty’s departure, the Imperial family boarded the
A hot Balkan sun shone down that morning on the white, flat-roofed houses of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The streets were crowded with people who had come from miles away to see the middle-aged Hapsburg prince who one day would be their emperor. Tall and fleshy, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not ragingly popular anywhere within the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had been ruled for sixty-six years by his aged uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph. Yet Franz Ferdinand was sufficiently enlightened politically to see—as his uncle and the government in Vienna did not—that unless something was done about the Slav nationalism burning inside the empire, the empire itself would disintegrate.
Austria-Hungary in 1914 was a hodge-podge of races, provinces and nationalities scattered across central Europe and the upper Balkans. Three fifths of these forty million people were Slavs—Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Bosnians and Montenegrins—yet the empire was ruled by its two non-Slavic races, the Austrians and the Magyars of Hungary. Not surprisingly, most of the Slavic peoples within the empire restlessly longed for the day they would be free.
On these turbulent Slav provinces within the empire, the small independent Slav kingdom of Serbia acted as a magnet. Inside Serbia, passionate Slav nationalists plotted to break up the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire and weld the dissident Slav provinces into a single Greater South Slav Kingdom. Serbia lacked the military strength to wrest the provinces away by force, but Belgrade, the Serb capital, became a fountainhead of inflammatory Slav nationalist propaganda. Belgrade also became the headquarters of a secret terrorist organization called the Black Hand, designed to strike at Austria-Hungary by sabotage and murder.
In Vienna, the Imperial capital, the disruptive influence of Serbia was greatly feared. Field Marshal von Conrad-Hotzendorf, Chief of the Austrian General Staff, described Serbia as “a dangerous little viper.” For years, Conrad-Hotzendorf had impatiently awaited orders to crush the Serb menace. But in 1914 the Emperor Franz Joseph was eighty-four. He had come to the throne in 1848; the years of his reign had been marked by tragedy. His brother Maximilian had become Emperor of Mexico and had been shot by a firing squad on a Mexican hillside. His only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, had died with his mistress in a love-pact suicide at Mayerling. His wife, Empress Elizabeth, had been struck down by an assassin’s knife. His nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, had defied his will and married a commoner, Countess Sophie Chotek. Before settling the succession on Franz Ferdinand, the old Emperor forced the Archduke to renounce the throne for any children he should have by Sophie. On public occasions, Sophie, wife of the heir, was forced to walk behind the least important ladies of the royal blood and to sit at a distant end of the Imperial table. She found the humiliations unbearable; the Archduke made violent scenes with his family, but the Emperor refused to give way. His last hope was to die in peace with his Imperial dignity and his empire intact.
Busy soothing his wife, absent from the court, Franz Ferdinand knew nevertheless that the Emperor would not live forever. Politically, he understood that the policy of drift could not continue. His proposal was to appease the Slavs within the empire by bringing them into active participation within the government: he foresaw an eventual broadening of Austro-Hungarian “dualism” into a “trialism” which would include in the government Austrians, Magyars and Slavs. His solution was opposed by all concerned: by Austrian and Magyar ministers who did not wish to share their power, and by Slav nationalists who feared that the plan’s success would destroy their own dreams of a South Slav kingdom. Yet Franz Ferdinand persisted. As a preliminary step, he decided that while he was watching Austrian army maneuvers in the Bosnian mountains, he would also pay a ceremonial visit to the provincial capital of Sarajevo. To expand this gesture of friendship, the Archduke brought his wife, the mother of his three disinherited children. In addition, he asked that the troops which normally lined the streets during an Imperial visit be dispensed with. Except for 150 local policemen, the crowds were to have free access to the Heir to the Throne.
Franz Ferdinand was dressed that day in the green uniform of an Austrian field marshal, with feathers waving from his military cap. As his six-car motorcade entered the town, he was in the open back seat of the second car with Sophie beside him. On the streets, he saw smiling faces and waving arms. Flags and bright-colored rugs hung as decorations, and from the windows of shops and houses his own portrait stared back at him. Franz Ferdinand was enormously pleased.
As the procession neared the city hall, the Archduke’s chauffeur glimpsed an object hurled from the crowd. He pressed the accelerator, the car jumped forward and a bomb which would have landed in Sophie’s lap bounced off the rear of the car and exploded under the wheels of the car behind. Two officers were wounded. The young Serb who had thrown the bomb ran across a bridge, but was apprehended by the police.
Franz Ferdinand, meanwhile, arrived at Sarajevo’s city hall. He was pale, shaken and furious. “One comes here for a visit,” he shouted, “and is welcomed by bombs!” There was a quick, urgent conference. One of the Archduke’s suite asked if a military guard could be arranged. The provincial governor replied acidly, “Do you think Sarajevo is filled with assassins?” It was decided to go back through the city by a different route. On the way, however, the driver of the first car, forgetting the alteration, turned into one of the prearranged streets. The Archduke’s chauffeur, following behind, was momentarily misled. He too started to turn. An official shouted, “Not that way, you fool!” The chauffeur braked, pausing to shift gears not five feet from the watching crowd. At that moment, a slim nineteen-year-old boy stepped forward, aimed a pistol into the car and fired twice. Sophie sank forward onto her husband’s breast. Franz Ferdinand remained sitting upright, and for a minute no one noticed that he had been hit. Then the governor, sitting in front, heard him murmur, “Sophie! Sophie! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” His body sagged and blood from a wound in his neck spurted across his green uniform. Sophie, the wife who could never become an empress, died first from a bullet in the abdomen. Fifteen minutes later, in a room next to the ballroom where waiters were preparing chilled champagne for his reception, the Archduke died. His last
