Most left in happy haste. For on the same night the Princess Croy-Sternberg presided over an excitingly new- fashioned benefit ball for the Red Cross in the new Konzerthaus. There a thicket of potted orange trees and tromp l'oeil screens, ablossom with orchids and bougainvillea, created the tango tropics in an Austrian winter.
Then midnight turned into the morning of February 25Ash Wednesday. Lent started. Carnival was over. But in contrast to the previous year, the carnival spirit lingered. In 1914 Vienna seemed to be clinging to fun. The weather gave a hand. After the longest frost in years, March blew in with mild, moist, yeasty breezes. All over the Vienna Woods yellow-pink crocuses leaped out of the ground, tiny harlequins unabashed by melting mounds of snow. In the Danube lagoons, larks trilled and swooped above trees not yet in bud.
Spring was ambushing the austerity of winter with little guerrilla galas here and there. And the capital's diplomats marked the end of the ball season with yet another event. It was an official, political, real-life costume party that lasted much longer than one evening. It was called Albania.
Vienna's albanian fling had had a prelude of some four hundred years. For that long the Albanians had lived and seethed under Turkish rule. Partly Christian, mostly Moslem, each of them intractable, they were mountain tribes roaming the interior of the Balkan peninsula on the Southern end of the Adriatic. When the Turkish sultanate began to collapse at the turn of the century, Albania became booty. Italy wanted a part of it as its foothold in the Balkans. Greece craved a piece. Belgrade coveted its coast line for access to the sea. And just because Belgrade wanted a section, Vienna wanted all of it: all of it in the form of a Habsburg client state, to show that Balkan hegemony would not be shared with Serbs but belonged to but one realm-Austria.
Still, a bit of sharing had to be tolerated. In 1913 a London conference of Europe's leading countries (the Central Powers as well as the Western Allies) had awarded the Albanian Kosovo region to Serbia. Some snippets went to Greece. The rest of the territory, with the major part of its inhabitants and its anarchy, was to be an independent nation.
The nationhood of that nation did not exist. But Vienna guaranteed the integrity of the phantom. After all, Austria was the illusionist among the great powers. The London Conference made Italy co-guarantor, a partnership Vienna largely, and politely, ignored. It did not want interference and certainly did not need help.
Shortly before New Year of 1914, Austria had persuaded the Conference to appoint William, Prince of Wied, ruler of Albania. The Albanian term for that office was mbret. The Prince of Wied did not know how to pronounce mbret. He was, however, very good at enunciating Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the royal house of Rumania to which he was related. A tall, fair-skinned Teuton lordling, he had never laid eyes on any of the swarthy goatherds and maize-growers who were now to be his people. He did not speak a syllable of their language. He had never set foot on their land. He had no idea of Albanian customs, traditions, politics, vendettas, difficulties. Most people of 'civilized' Europe shared his ignorance. Until it became an international controversy, Albania had been a terra incognita-a remote labyrinthine confusion of ragged chiefdoms. To 'guarantee' such a country under such a mbret meant to conjure it out of a plumed hat.
And just that was a chore congenial to the fabulists by the Danube. During the first three months of 1914, official Vienna conjured away with the skill born of experience. After all, the Habsburg domain had managed to disencumber itself of most connections to drab reality. By 1914 the Austrian Empire was a chimera ancient, iridescent, and almost plausible through its perennial re-invention. Since the Empire's survival depended on it, such self-fabrication was a very serious business. Fabricating 'Albania' was not-not quite. But the Albanian challenge tapped a talent the governing Viennese loved to exercise, and so they applied their gift to this game.
As the decorations for the last costume ball of carnival 1914 were dismantled, the city buckled down in earnest to the construction of the Albanian fantasy. Its hero, the Prince of Wied, planned to enter his fairyland in March. For his escort Vienna recruited an Albanian Volunteer Brigade for which a wonderfully imaginative uniform was devised; it combined hussar and dragoon motifs with the Balkan tang of a fez-like helmet. These colorful apparitions made a fetching background to another design, namely the monochrome elegance of the Prince's state dress: tunic, trousers, tassels, and braids shading from gray to black, setting off the blaze of medals on his breast, a few of which were also freshly concocted.
Vienna then proceeded to style special Albanian postage to welcome the new potentate. A stamp series displayed the Albanian double eagle (looking like a nephew of the Habsburg bird) superimposed on two dates: 1467 and 1914. The first designated the victory of Skanderbeg, Albania's legendary champion, who had vanquished the Turks back then; the second spoke of the national redeemer now, getting ready in his tassels of gray and black.
At the end of February 1914, the mbret still could not pronounce his title. On the other hand, he had a very successful last fitting. Therefore he was ready for statesmanship.
He began a triumphal progress south. The Austrian state yacht Taurus, guarded by three cruisers, floated him down the Adriatic. On March 7 he stepped onto a red-carpeted dock in the harbor of Durres; behind him, a retinue of sashes and cummerbunds that resembled a toy version of the Habsburg court.
At three that afternoon the mbret displayed himself on the balcony of the biggest local house that was still within the protective range of Austrian naval guns. A well-rehearsed crowd of Albanian folk-the men in starched white kilts, the women in very laundered babushkas-waved flags with the nephew-double-eagle and intoned Albanian hoorays. Flowers were tossed, white doves released, blessings uttered by mullahs and Greek Orthodox priests-all on cue. The chorus of Aida could not have done better.
After the enthusiasm subsided punctually, the mbret held his first State Council. It addressed three problems. (1) What were the best shoots in the most secure areas? (2) What game was there to shoot? (3) What European princes should be invited to the hunt?
Official Vienna smiled. Serbia was not amused. 'I saw,' said a skeptic among the witnesses, 'the beginning of a tragic operetta.'
A week after the Prince of Wied came to Albania, the Bosnian schoolboy Gavrilo Princip came to Belgrade. Wied's advent as mbret produced headlines all over Europe. Princip's arrival was noted only in the police registration form he filled out on March 13, 1914, in a cheap lodging house at 23 Carigradska Street. Very soon the Prince of Wied became forgotten news. Today, three quarters of a century later, Princip is celebrated as Yugoslavia's principal martyr; a bridge in the capital bears his name; a museum documents his life; his footprints preserve his memory in concrete.
But in March 1914, he professed to be just another student at the First Belgrade High School. He was preparing himself for his sixth-class examinations: that was the reason for his stay as stated on the police form. For that purpose his family paid his expenses. The weekly remittance they sent him was not a huge sum; still, it put a certain burden on what his father earned as village postman in Austrian Bosnia.
The postman had no idea that Gavrilo spent much of his money and his time at the Golden Sturgeon Cafe on Green Wreath Square, one of Belgrade's major marketplaces. The Golden Sturgeon served hot tea on rusty tables to a special breed of students; they sipped, huddled, whispered, and hardly ever bent over a copybook. Most were from Austrian Bosnia-beardless firebrands who had volunteered for Serbia during the Balkan wars. Now it would be dangerous to return. A sympathetic Serb government had extended scholarships to many of them-but school-bench sitting was dull for young men who had seen action. Study bored them. Politics consumed them.
They all hated the Austrian regime which they saw throttling their native land. They all pronounced 'Habsburg' with a hiss. But Gavrilo Princip's hiss came from a depth remarkable in a body so thin and small. He did not talk much. But his pale blue eyes could flash a light that stopped the talk of others. There was a hypnotic edge to his low voice, his quiet, constant movements, even to his silence. The friends he made at the Golden Sturgeon became a following.
One of them was Nedeljko Cabrinovic, formerly a student, currently an employee of the Belgrade State Printing Office. In the last week of March, Cabrinovic received a letter from Bosnia with no message inside the envelope-only a newspa per clipping. He met Princip for lunch to show it to him. It had been cut out of a Sarajevo daily and contained the news that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be visiting that city in the course of the June maneuvers.
Gavrilo Princip read the story. He said nothing, for a while. Then he asked Cabrinovic to meet him at the Golden Sturgeon again, in the evening. Cabrinovic did. Again they shared a rusty table. Princip ordered mint tea, which he sipped wordlessly, shifting slowly in his chair. After a few minutes he motioned Cabrinovic to walk with him into the adjacent park. He led his friend to a remote bench in the dark. They sat down. Princip spoke at last. Softly he asked his friend whether he would help him kill the Crown Prince of Austria. Silence. Cabrinovic nodded.
