'If we must go under,' he had remarked more than once to an aide-de-camp, 'we better go under decently.' Mortality was an art in Austria, in 1913. Passing through his mortal eighties, the monarch was its leading adept. He did not show how the end was to be avoided. He showed how it was to be risked and approached: with composure and balance and a certain stoic grace. He walked along the Hauptstrasse, through the homage of his subjects, among mingled scents drifting from the Spa Park: lilac, jasmine, rose, spiced faintly with the perfume of perdition.
On June 30, 1913, the dispute between Serbia and Bulgaria over Macedonian territory reached its boiling point. Serbia, inveterate Habsburg foe, declared war on Bulgaria; Turkey, Greece, and Rumania joined the Serbian side. The Second Balkan War had started.
Throughout the first week of July, General Conrad belabored the telephone from Vienna to Ischl on behalf of yet another ultimatum to be fired at Belgrade. From the Belgian North Sea resort of Blankenberghe, the Crown Prince was on the wire, roaring for prudence and caution. And a cold rain kept coming down on the Alps around Ischl. The Emperor felt triply beleaguered.
'Dearest Friend,' said his letter brought by courier on July 9 from his Ischl residence to Frau Schratt's Villa Felicitas a mile away.
Dearest Friend:
Just a few lines to welcome you back at the Felicitas. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart that you came here despite the inclement skies in order to cheer me up… Let me ask if I may visit you as usual at 7 A.M. No reply will signify that you expect me. Therefore I will report to you tomorrow by telephone if I can come by foot or if the weather will force me into a carriage. In the former case, please leave the small door unlocked. In glad expectation of a much longedfor reunion.
Loving you most deeply, Franz Joseph
He loved her most deeply, and never touched more than the woman's shoulder. Under clearing skies the air remained chill in Ischl; he walked without aides or surcoat to Frau Schratt's villa. Couriers brought him more bulletins from the Balkan War. The telephone ringing in his adjutant's office did not respect either the Alpine idyll in the window or an old gentleman's need for rest. Each day demanded another decision.
He vetoed the bend-or-break demand on Serbia that his Chief of Staff requested. He did permit his Foreign Minister to send Belgrade a monitory letter. He also allowed Conrad to tighten enforcement of conscription laws and to shore up security in the South Slav province of Bosnia by the Serbian border. Through cloud or sun Franz Joseph steered a policy that was mannerly, stately, steady, decorative. He directed it at a world of rude and enigmatic chaos.
On General Conrad's orders, the crackdown on draft evaders now also included those already past conscription age but who, once caught, would have to serve retroactively. Under that category came one 'Hietler [sic], Adolf, last known address Mannerheim, Meldemannstrasse, Vienna, present whereabouts still unknown in ongoing investigation,' as the constable entrusted with the task had to report on August 22, 1913.
General Conrad also had three hundred suspected seditionists rounded up in Bosnia as well as Croatia. But instead of deterring, the action incited. At noon of August 18 a solemn Mass at the Zagreb cathedral celebrated the Emperor's birthday in the presence of the new Imperial Governor of Croatia, Baron No Skerletz. As the Baron walked out of church, a Croatian house painter named Stjepan Dojcic lunged forward with a pistol. A moment later Baron Skerletz lay on the cathedral step, his elbow shattered by a bullet, bleeding through his heavily braided sleeve. A month later Dojcic was sentenced to sixteen years of hard labor. The policemen who dragged him from court to jail could not stop his shout: 'After me will come others!'
They came and they kept coming. No sooner had Dojcic begun to serve his time than an informer's tip led to the arrest of a member of another terrorist group, also in Zagreb. One Lujo Aljinovic, a student at a local teacher's college, was seized with a revolver in his pocket as he boarded a train to Vienna. Interrogated by the police, he less admitted than proclaimed his intention 'to kill Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and Gen eral Conrad for preparing to attack Serbia… Franz Ferdinand is the enemy of all South Slavs and I wished to eliminate this garbage which is hampering our national aspiration.'
Unsettling news, disquieting fanatics, misunderstood Franz Ferdinand: 'this garbage' was the South Slavs' most potent friend. However, Aljinovic's venom showed that the Crown Prince and the General, those adversaries within the Emperor's innermost council, did have something in common, namely a would-be assassin. Therefore the Emperor forwarded Aljinovic's threats to the Crown Prince-they might mitigate his animus against the General who was, after all, a fellow target of the same terror. As if in reply Franz Joseph received a copy of a letter sent by the Crown Prince to Count von Berchtold, the Imperial Foreign Minister. It dealt with General Conrad's desire to intervene against Serbia in the Balkan War:
Excellency! Don't let yourself be influenced by Conrad-ever! Not an iota of support for any of his yappings at the Emperor! Naturally he wants every possible war, every kind of hooray! rashness that will conquer Serbia and God knows what else. The man's been driven even wilder by the Colonel Redl horror. Through war he wants to make up for the mess that's his responsibility at least in part. Therefore: Let's not play Balkan warrior ourselves. Let's not stoop to this hooliganism. Let's stay aloof and watch the scum bash in each others' skulls. It'd be unforgivable, insane, to start something that would pit us against Russia… Conrad is good and energetic in combat and in maneuvers, but when it comes to international politics in peacetime, the man is a harum- scarum maniac, unusable as an adviser because he sees his personal redemption only in a war which would be a disaster for the monarchy!
Hardly the sort of tone that created summer smiles in Ischl. The Crown Prince's letter set on edge what teeth were left to a very old and very civil Emperor. Franz Joseph was the realm's model of measured mannerliness. In this coarse new century, he felt, his empire endured as a last bastion of good form. Here leaders authenticated their position through their deportment. And this Crown Prince, this boor with his brawler's invective, refused to realize that Austrian statecraft had to be acted with propriety in order to be effectively executed.
'You know how he is,' Franz Joseph would sigh when talking about Franz Ferdinand. 'How' defined the angle of his complaint. To the Emperor's Viennese mind, the how of the man's actions superseded the what.
The what of the Crown Prince's letter happened to be a very astute view of Austria's international situation as well as of General Conrad's psychology-a view more insightful than that of any of the Emperor's other advisers. The how of the letter, though, was rough and raucous, and therefore cancelled its virtues. A messenger who did not perform the right bow before his Habsburg suzerain did not bring the right message.
'Don't let Conrad get out of hand!' bellowed the Crown Prince. 'Tighten the damn leash!' The Emperor, offended, loosened the reins. Since he could finely modulate even a refusal, he loosened them only a nuance or two. His Majesty still vetoed direct military action against Serbia. On the other hand, he let Conrad counter Slav pressure with new stratagems aimed at Serbia's big brother, Russia. They were covert moves that tiptoed-which is often history's way of creeping from whisper to thunder.
***
Conrad's General Staff suspected St. Petersburg of encouraging sedition in the Austrian provinces next to Serbia. Therefore Conrad-with the Emperor's sanction, despite the Crown Prince's protests-had long encouraged anti-Tsarist revolutionaries exiled on Habsburg soil. This explained the 'lethargy' of the Austrian police experienced so pleasantly by Trotsky. Toward Lenin the Austrian security apparatus was even more complaisant. In 1912 it had facilitated his move from France to Cracow in Austria, near the Russian border. Through this change of address, Habsburg intensified the undercover political warfare against Romanov.
Vienna instructed Cracow police: accommodate Lenin, infiltrate his conspirators not to hinder but to help him. In one of his earliest directives to the just-born St. Petersburg Pravda, Lenin had sponsored an article written by an Austrian agent. Now, in the summer of 1913, under All-Highest approval obtained from Ischl, clandestine operations like his were permitted to expand. The head of Conrad's Counter-Intelligence Bureau (once run by Colonel Redl), Colonel Oscar von Hrani- lovic, was in charge of smoothing things still further for Lenin.
This convenient Bolshevik leader was allowed to visit Vienna in July 1913. He always enjoyed his sojourns there. (In a letter he once called the Austrian capital 'a mighty, beautiful and vivacious city.') This time he came
