Paris.
Of course the younger, slimmer crowd could better accom modate French couture. But quite a few of them were missing from the aristocrats' boxes or the haut bourgeois grandstands. They'd been seduced by another attraction of newer vogue. At Aspern Airfield an 'Aeronautical Parade' had drawn so many of the jeunesse doree that their Rolls-Royces, Austro- Daimlers, Graf & Stifts, and Mercedes-Benzes overflowed the parking space. They all watched the heavens that had become a stage. A fighter plane of the Imperial and Royal Air Force looped the loop, a double-decker towed a flock of gliders, a giant eight-passenger 'bus-plane' disgorged parachutists whose green-and-scarlet umbrellas floated down the sunshine.
The same Easter Sunday in Vienna also featured a third spectacle. It was a dual demonstration on the Ringstrasse against two kinds of unemployment. Some six thousand workers who had recently lost their jobs were marching with placards demanding work. Another crowd protested the dissolution of Parliament. Bickering between German and Czech deputies had slowed down legislative business. This had given Count Karl von StUrgkh, Prime Minister of the Austrian half the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the excuse to invoke the notorious Paragraph Fourteen of the realm's constitution. It allowed him to declare the parliamentarians unable to exercise their function and to suspend the Vienna (as distinct from the Budapest) parliament. Until new elections would be calledin the indefinite future-the Sturgkh administration would be answerable only to the Emperor.
Paragraph Fourteen had been invoked before. It had caused ructions before that had been shrugged off before, but never with the concision of the remark reportedly made on Easter Sunday at the Freudenau track. It was attributed to the Prime Minister himself and might be just flippant enough to be his. Count von Sturgkh had to watch the early races alone in his box; when the friend he had invited finally appeared, he blamed the lateness on a traffic back-up caused by demonstrators on the Ring. 'I suppose,' the Prime Minister was much quoted as saying, 'I gave them spring fever.'
Once Minister of Education, Count von Sturgkh had started his career as an academic, a frequent resort for impoverished nobility. He was rather pedantic by nature and perhaps for that reason often forced the sort of humor that would make him competitive with the cynical wit of his colleague, Count von Berchtold.
On that Easter Sunday at the track, Berchtold was spooning coffee ice cream a few boxes away in the Jockey Club enclosure. As we know, Count von Swrgkh was Prime Minister only of Austria while Count von Berchtold's office of Foreign Minister encompassed all of Austria-Hungary, with interests far beyond the yawps of complainers on the Ringstrasse. Perhaps it was a sign of how uncouth the times had become that professional concerns should intrude on his Sunday leisure.
Friends kept dropping by between races, always on some agreeable pretext. Ladies offered the Berchtolds chocolate truffles from silk-lined boxes; gentlemen kissed the Countess's hand and complimented her on the Capri blue feathers of her hat. And all along they touched on certain questions. The rumors, for example, about the Tsar's daughter being betrothed to the son of the Rumanian king. Would that align Rumania into Russia's pan-Slavic stance against Austria? And the stories about impending Russo-British naval exercises off German ports-was that to develop the encirclement of the Central Powers? And could one include in that category the 250 million francs France recently loaned Serbia for arma ments? And how serious was the Serb-fomented mutiny that had broken out against the mbret, Austria's friend on the Albanian throne? And was it true about a clash between Austrian and Italian advisers on the mbret's Inner Council? And speaking of Italy, in a confrontation between the Triple Entente (Russia, France, Britain) and the Triple Alliance (Austria, Germany, Italy), how reliable would Italy be?
'And who,' Count von Berchtold answered, 'will win the Prezednit handicap this afternoon?'
His friends laughed. His ice-cream-spooning sang-froid reassured them. The Foreign Minister leaned back in his box seat, in black top hat and gray topcoat, one slim knee crossed over another. A grandee with stables of his own, he knew how to document his racing judgment. Sacher (named after the torte) figured as winner of the handicap. The Foreign Minister, who always weighed the latest intelligence, had learned of a slight problem with the favorite's right foreleg. He bet on Radoteur.
Radoteur came in first. The Foreign Minister ate a chocolate truffle.
The next day, Monday, April 13, Count von Berchtold boarded his salon car in Panama hat and spats. He was off to a sub-tropical clime: Abbazia, the palm-dotted Habsburg resort on the Adriatic, not too far from Miramare where the Crown Prince had, unsuccessfuly, smoked a cigar with the Kaiser.
In Abbazia the Foreign Minister would be holding a more felicitous meeting-a conference with his Italian counterpart. A few little points needed to be discussed. One of them concerned Albania: Italy wished to participate in the industrial progress of that brand-new country but found Vienna a shade insensitive to its economic interests there. For its part, Vienna felt occasionally baffled by exaggerations in the Italian press about the 'oppression' of Italians in South Tyrol.
Count von Berchtold did not entirely succeed in smiling away all differences between himself and his colleague, the Marchese Antonio de San Giuliano. But the Count, an impeccable host, did treat the Marchese to a dirigible lunch that offered poached salmon, cold champagne, and the view of a long stretch of Illyrian coastline from the gondola of a Zeppelin cruising fifteen hundred feet high. The Count also gave a great garden party in the Marchese's honor, at a seaside villa hung with Chinese lanterns and filled with the music of strolling violins. To top it all off, he motored with the Marchese to the Imperial and Royal stud farm at Lippiza where the famed white Lippizaner horses performed the subtle arts of dressage for his Italian Excellency. After five days of gastronomy, scenery, and politesse, the Austrian Foreign Ministry could announce with satisfaction that Italy remained as firm a member of the Triple Alliance as ever. Then Count von Berchtold returned to Vienna on April 19, in time for another Sunday demonstration on the Ring.
But what country in Europe did not suffer such bouts of 'spring fever'? Austria's potential adversaries were hardly immune. In Serbia, the opposition withdrew all its deputies from the Belgrade parliament, alleging unconstitutional practices by the government in budget matters. In Russia, four thousand workers walked out of the Treugolnik rubber factory in St. Petersburg. They were joined by thousands more at the Siemens electric plant. Comrades in industrial installations in Moscow and Riga followed suit until the strikers numbered nearly one hundred thousand. In France, the elections set for May produced daily clashes between supporters of President Raymond Poincare, who wanted to keep the three-year conscription period, and the followers of the Socialist leader Jean Jaures who insisted on reducing it. Even England was losing the last of its Victorian seemliness in 1914. In April dozens of special Save Ulster! trains rolled almost daily into London. They brought demonstrators who flooded through the streets with shouts of 'Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right!' The Protestants' orange banners cursed the Catholic Irish for wanting to reduce Ireland to the Pope's footstool. In Dublin green cadres of the Feinians marched for self-government. By the Thames, Parliament shook with debates over the Home Rule Bill. The issue convulsed the British Isles.
By comparison, the disturbances in Vienna seemed almost minor. Most played out on the Ringstrasse where the architecture absorbed much of what tumult there was into the histrionics of the facades.
Spring absorbed the rest. Even the most bilious townsman couldn't help knowing that the Vienna Woods undulated only a few streetcar stops away. And here the lilacs exhaled their sweetness, the baby leaf waved its miracle green, and the zither called from the vintner's garden. Together they seduced politics into pleasure.
Soon the only enduring controversies appeared to be deliciously traditional: Was this year's wine as good as last season's? Had the Court Opera been right in turning down Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos? Could a soprano like Maria Jeritza, who made her mark as Elsa in Lohengrin, sing Adele in Die Fledermaus?
How pleasant, the answers. Yes, the new year's wine promised to match its predecessor. Yes, La Jeritza did prove to be a marvelous Adele. And something in Viennese logic justified the rejection of Ariadne. This logic concluded that the city's talent was not modernist like Richard Strauss; that the phrase 'Wien bleibt Wien' (Vienna remains Vienna) summed up the city's virtuosity; that timelessness, not timeliness, expressed its soul.
Princess Pauline Metternich seemed to prove the point. This grand dame was the ancient but ever-buoyant daughter-inlaw of the Chancellor who had been Napoleon's nemesis. At the end of April she gave an Alt-Wiener Jause, that is, an Old Viennese High Tea where select company in Biedermeier dress enjoyed delicacies and three- quarter time offered in the style of a century ago.
That was how the haut monde perpetuated Alt Wien. For the people at large another Alt Wein rose up in the Kaisergar- ten. The Emperor's garden was the Imperial Palace pleasance, and for the occasion His Majesty admitted the public to its lawns. Here they found highlights of a time that was no more, sculpted of papier-mache, meticulously reproduced in scaleddown size after old paintings or illustrations in yellowed books: razed landmarks like the original Court Theater, romanesque churches perished in wars, early baroque mansions consumed by fires.
