would not be memorialized today by two footprints sunk in concrete, the house at his back would not have become a museum enshrining Princip's heroism, the bridge to his left would not now be named Princip Bridge-if…
If two mistakes had not been made by the entourage of the Austrian Crown Prince. The first was nearly logical. Since Cabrinovic had thrown the bomb from the river side of the quay, an officer of the escort stood on the running board on the same side-not on Princip's side-to protect the Archduke with his body. The second mistake was as mysterious as fate itself. The chauffeur of the lead car, filled with police, had been clearly instructed on what route to take to the garrison hospital where the Archduke wished to visit his wounded aide. Nonetheless the chauffeur made the wrong turn on Appel Quay into the side street off Latin Bridge.
This mistake did not escape General Potiorek, who sat in the front seat of the second car, that of the Archduke. The General cupped his hands to shout to the first car, 'Turn back! Back to the Quay!' The chauffeur obeyed. To obey he must make a U-turn. To make a U-turn in the narrower side street he must come to a halt. Since he came to a halt, so must the drivers of the motorcade behind him. An inevitability decreed that the second car must stop at the corner, directly in front of a thin, small youth who was reaching inside his coat.
The many days Princip had spent on target practice, the weeks of training and rehearsal, the months of waiting, planning, of steeling himself and disciplining his crew, of patience, cunning, and perseverance-they all converged on this one moment, at 10:34 A.M., on this sunlit corner of the Appel Quay and Rudolf Street, in front of the Schiller Delicatessen Store.
The chauffeur had just begun to work the wheel for the U-turn. Count Harrach of the Archduke's escort stood on the running board, on the river side of the quay. There was nothing between Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg and Gavrilo Princip except five feet of translucent summer air. For this one moment the pale blue eyes of the son of a postman looked into the pale blue eyes of a lord descended from thirteen European dynasties. The next second the son of the postman realized he could not throw the bomb he was already gripping inside his coat: the Archduke was too close and the crowd too dense around him for hauling out his arm. Therefore he pulled out his Browning. He turned his head away (later he would say he had been confounded by the sight of the Duchess, a woman) and, perhaps to compensate for this lapse, pressed the trigger twice.
And then all was really over. After the two bangs Princip saw the car pull away fast, the Archduke still sitting upright, unaffected, unscathed, even after this final effort.
Princip put the pistol to his own head, but someone wrested it from his hand. He reached for the cyanide capsule, managed to get it between his teeth, bit it open, already felt a taste of bitter almonds, but a policeman's stick came down on his head and knocked the thing out of his mouth. From everywhere arms reached for him, gripped him and punished him, yet nothing punished him more in this nightmare tumult than the fact that he was still alive and so was the Archduke.
General Potiorek, the Military Governor of Bosnia, was under that same impression, but only for about five more seconds. After the explosions he looked back instantly at the august pair; the two sat erect and unruffled. But just as the car turned back onto the Quay, the Duchess began leaning oddly against the Archduke. The Archduke's mouth began to dribble red. Count Harrach on the running board, appalled, fumbled for his handkerchief and leaned over to wipe the blood from the Archduke's lips. The Duchess, leaning, cried at her husband, 'For heaven's sake, what has happened to you?' The Archduke, who usually roared at any irritation, sat stiffly and silently as he bled. The General shouted at the driver to proceed at top speed to his residence. The Archduchess's head had drooped onto her husband's knees. Blood from the wound in her abdomen soaked through her white silk dress and stained the red and white bouquet of roses clenched in her hand. The Archduke, still sitting stiffly, whispered with his blood-filled mouth: 'Sopherl, Sopherl, stirb nicht!.. Bleib am Leben fur unsere Kinder!' ('Little Sophie, little Sophie, don't die!.. Stay alive for our children!') Then he, too, began to droop forward. Count Harrach tried to hold him up as the car hurtled and veered. He asked, 'Is Your Highness in great pain?' The Archduke's head had slumped down onto the head of his wife resting on his knees. 'It's nothing,' he said, quite clearly even above the car engine's roar. 'It's nothing,' he said again. He kept saying it, more softly, seven more times, the last time just before the car stopped at the Governor's residence. When the two were lifted out of the automobile, her blood had mingled with his on the leather seat.
In the residence a doctor tore open the Archduke's collar to reach his smashed jugular. The gold collar had turned scarlet. Inside the collar seven amulets against seven evils became visible, all wrought of silver and gold. They, too, were dripping scarlet. By the time the church clocks of Sarajevo struck 11 A.M. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had both stopped breathing, she less than ten minutes before him. They died as they had lived, in unison.
History's will was done.
0073
THAT SUNDAY VIENNA'S SKIES WERE AS BRIGHT AND JOVIAL AS SARAJEVO'S. So were those of nearby Baden, a cozy Biedermeier spa where, on a bench under an oak tree, the writer Stefan Zweig was reading a biography of Tolstoy. Shortly after half past two in the afternoon, something made him look up from the page. Something had stopped happening. It took him a moment to realize just what: a few hundred feet away, in the band shell of the Spa Park, the musicians had broken off in the middle of a waltz.
At Aspern Airfield on Vienna's southern edge, a young summer-happy crowd under straw hats and flowered bonnets craned necks at an aeronautical display. At half past two the smartly kepi'd brass band launched into 'The Airmen's March.' They never finished it.
In Vienna itself all green spaces were teeming vivaciously. Everybody was outdoors, celebrating Peter and Paul, a favorite Saint Day of the town. The poor basked and munched bacon rind on the 'free' park benches. The less poor sliced cervelat on more comfortable chairs costing one heller each. The rich nibbled chocolate cake served prettily doilied on cafe terraces. All enjoyed the jasmine-scented air, the violins undulating in pergolas. Sometime before 3 P.M., policemen seemed to shoot out of the ground to whisper into the ears of orchestra conductors everywhere. Everywhere bows dropped away from strings. Flutes fell silent. The music stopped.
Never since the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf twenty-five years earlier had so much music stopped so suddenly in Vienna.
There was a difference, though. Back in 1889, Rudolf had been Austria's gracious and graceful young promise. His death had anguished the Empire, seeming to sever it from its future. Now, in 1914, Vienna was startled but not stricken. Franz Ferdinand's arctic image had thawed a bit lately, yet for most citizens he evoked neither hope nor youth nor grace. His public face was lined too grimly, his mustaches were too much like fixed bayonets. He augured oppression at home, abrasiveness abroad.
'If that Archduke had lived to sit on the throne,' Freud said the day after the assassination to his patient the Wolf Man, 'war with Russia would have been inevitable.' The truth was precisely the reverse. Yet most Viennese shared Freud's breezy misjudgment and his mistaken relief. This included the realm's highest councillors, who knew the Archduke well. They absorbed his death rather briskly. Many had been of fended by his un-Austrian, unmannerly directness, by his uncouth insights. The journal of Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold confides that during the first cabinet meeting after the outrage'. one noted, yes, consternation and indignation but also a certain easing of mood.'
One noted it in Franz Joseph, too, at his Alpine villa in Bad Ischl. The All-Highest summer holiday had started earlier than usual in order to elude an encounter with Franz Ferdinand. By going on vacation the Emperor avoided official business like the Archduke's personal report on the Bosnian maneuvers. No more danger of that now. Franz Joseph promptly returned to his capital to deal with the enormity that freed him from all further vexations by his nephew.
'Certainly Papa was shocked,' his daughter the Archduchess Valerie records in her diary, 'but I found him amazingly fresh. When I said that Karl [The Archduke Karl, Franz Ferdinand's nephew, just become the new Crown Prince] would acquit himself well, Papa said 'For me it is a great worry less.''
Throughout the Empire headlines screamed from front pages framed in black. But to his adjutant, the Emperor was candid about his composure. 'God will not be mocked,' he said. 'A higher power has put back the order I couldn't maintain.' Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand had disordered the hierarchy by inflating his wife's place in it. Now she had lost her life, and soon she would lose her inflated place.
At first, however, the Duchess's status seemed unchanged by her slaying. Cannons from the great fortress of Sarajevo had boomed to greet the live Crown Prince and his wife at their entry into the city on the morning of June 28. The cannons boomed again, twenty-one times, on the evening of June 29, to bid farewell to their embalmed remains. Though the funeral train puffed through the Bosnian night without halting, army regiments stood at
