attention at every station it passed. The train rolled on to the Adriatic coast where the foremost dreadnought of the Imperial fleet was waiting, the Viribus Unitis, on which the breathing Archduke has sailed toward Sarajevo just five days earlier. Now marines in dress uniforms sheltered the two caskets under a baldachin on the quarter deck and draped them with flags and flowers. Early on June 30, the huge man-of-war began to stream northward at a speed solemnly slow, under a hot sun, under black pennants and a flag at half-mast, followed by other battleships, cruisers, destroyers, civilian yachts, motorboats, fishing boats, even ferries, all with flags half-mast and flying black ensigns. This giant, wave-borne cortege moved close to the shore, where more cannons rumbled their mourning from the hills and priests stood in full vestments on the beaches, swung thuribles censing the corpses, and called out blessings for the souls of the faithful departed.
On the evening of July 1, the dolorous armada steamed into the harbor waters of Trieste. More cannons boomed, more regiments presented arms and lowered colors as the caskets were transferred from the black- garlanded ship to a blackgarlanded special train. Twenty-four hours later, on the night of July 2, it came to a halt in Vienna's South Terminal.
Here the responsibilities of the military ended. Here began the jurisdiction of Prince Montenuovo, First Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty, foe of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for life and beyond.
***
Neither Franz Joseph nor any member of the dynasty met the funeral train. There was just one exception. Only the new Crown Prince, the Archduke Karl, escorted his predecessor through the dark and empty streets.
Next morning the dead couple lay in state at the Palace Chapel from 8 A.M. to noon. Not one second longer. Some 50,000 people converged from every district of the town onto the Inner City. It was not so much affection that drew them as awe and curiosity. Most were turned away because of the absurd briefness of the viewing period. Those who managed to pass the chapel portals found something curious indeed.
The two coffins stood side by side, but their closeness only emphasized their inequality. Franz Ferdinand's was larger, much more ornate, and placed twenty inches higher than Sophie's. His bore the many insignia of his rank-the Archducal crown, the General's plumed helmet, the admiral's hat, his ceremonial sword, and all his principal decorations including the Order of the Golden Fleece. Her coffin was bare except for a pair of white gloves and a black fan. These were the emblems of a lady-in-waiting.
She had been a lady-in-waiting before her marriage. Her subsequent elevations to Princess and then to Duchess were now cancelled. Only a little over 100 hours earlier Franz Ferdinand had committed for her sake yet another disorderliness against the privileges of genealogy. He had carried her parasol before the honor guard at Sarajevo in order to lift her to his level before the world. Now his caparisoned coffin was used to push her down again, to exhibit her inferiority by contrast. The First Lord Chamberlain and the Serb schoolboy assassin, working in tandem, had put the woman back in her place.
There were many wreaths that morning, sent to the chapel from great notables like the American President Wilson down to humble folk like the Shoemakers' Guild of Lower Austria. There was no wreath from the Emperor or any other Habsburg.
At the stroke of noon the public was turned away. At 4 P.M. Franz Joseph appeared, accompanied by Archdukes and Archduchesses but not by any of Franz Ferdinand's children. Their mother was a morganatic corpse. They were morganatic orphans, hence not members of the Highest Family. No foreign dignitaries attended. Every monarch and president in Europe had wired his intention to come. By return cable the First Lord Chamberlain had advised them to 'kindly have your ambassador act as representative to avoid straining His Majesty's delicate health with the demands of protocol.' (The King and Queen of Rumania were politely stopped at the border.)
So the ambassadors came-and departed again almost immediately together with the Emperor. Vienna's Cardinal Piffl ran through the funeral services in less than fifteen minutes. At 4:15 P.M. the bodies were locked away. They had been brought to the chapel in the dark of the previous night. They were not taken out again until the new night was very dark again.
Vienna of the schone Leiche, of the corpse beautiful, where paupers scrimped and schemed to be buried like princes, now had a prince reduced to an impoverished and furtive funeral. None of the nobility had been invited to pay their final respects to the Heir Apparent or to accompany him on his last journey through the streets of the capital. But as the remains of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were rolled out of the chapel, a band of aristocrats pushed past the police. Led by the Archduke Karl and by Count Chotek, Sophie's brother, they made less lonely the scant procession behind the coffins moving to the West Terminal.
Near midnight a car coupled to a milk train took the dead sixty miles west along the Danube to the small town of Poch- larn. There only a delegation of local veterans saluted, in old uniforms wetted down by a sudden squall.
Two plain black hearses of the Vienna Municipal Undertaking Service transported the coffins onto a ferry. In midstream a thunderbolt frightened the horses into a panic that almost pitched the caskets into the Danube.
At 1 A.M. on July 4, the hearses gained the other shore. A few minutes later they stopped before the castle of Artstetten,[4] Franz Ferdinand's family manor. In its crypt the pair found the peace that now began to drain away from the world outside.
The next day all of Vienna was abuzz with that midnight in Artstetten. Some deplored its meanness. No one saw it as overture to vast, lethal chaos. On the contrary. The court considered that funeral a fitting end to dissonance. It recovered a harmony disturbed by the slain Crown Prince himself.
His very testament assaulted tradition. For centuries Habsburgs had been buried beneath the nave of Vienna's Capuchin Church. Franz Ferdinand, however, had anticipated that his Sophie would not be allowed to enter eternity among them. Since they would exclude her, he would exclude himself. His Last Will defied the custom of the house he had come so close to heading: He was to lie not with his kinsmen but with Sophie in the vault he had had built for them both in Artstetten.
As a result-in Palace eyes-their remains were inevitably subject to the consequences of his wilfulness. Since Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had died together, his final journey must share not only the destination but the limits of hers. Their funeral must not take on the grandeur his would have shown had he married suitably. The aberration he had visited on Habsburg while alive must not be ratified by their state funeral after his death. No: The ceremonies of his death must atone for the irregularity of his life. And the fact that a teenage zealot had killed him made not a scintilla of difference. The madness of a schoolboy must not change dynastic principle. That principle must override assassin and assassinated. In sum, the funeral was essential to Franz Joseph's 'restoration of order.'
Of course another source of disorder remained: Serbia. It was more dangerous than the man it had killed. Sarajevo proved that Serbia had been eating away far too long at the Empire's security, dignity, tranquillity. The First Lord Chamberlain's etiquette had disciplined the late Archduke. Next, Serbia must be punished. And for that purpose etiquette was not enough.
Within twenty-four hours of the murder, the Belgrade government wired condolences to Vienna, vowing that Serbia would'. certainly, most loyally do everything to prove that it would not tolerate within its borders the fostering of any agitation… calculated to disturb our already delicate relations with Austria-Hungary.' These sentiments came too late. They were not enough.
Belgrade's Prime Minister made a further gesture of appeasement that at the same time rebuked the ideology of Colonel Apis's Black Hand. The Prime Minister ordered all places of entertainment closed in Belgrade on the day of Franz Ferdinand's funeral. He also cancelled the rest of the weeklong celebrations of St. Vitus, the Saint's Day so sacred to the Serb national soul. It was not enough.
Throughout Bosnia, Habsburg-loyal Croats and Muslims smashed shops and inns and hotels owned by Serbs. In Bosnian schools, Serb students were beaten up. In Vienna, mobs kept attacking the Serb Embassy, barely stayed by police. It was not enough.
Not after Sarajevo. Not when Princip's initial interrogations established the fact that he had done the deed after a stay at Belgrade, probably with Belgrade's help. None of it was enough.
Order in Franz Joseph's sense could be restored only by a decisive act of the Habsburg government against Serbia. But an act of what kind? Of what force? Franz Joseph instructed his ministers to submit options.
At a cabinet meeting hastily called on June 29, four days before the funeral, Foreign Minister von Berchtold showed himself still guided by the pacifism of the late Crown Prince. He proposed relatively temperate demands: that Serbia dismiss its Minister of Police, jail all suspected terrorists, and dissolve extremist groups.
Prime Minister Tisza of Hungary sided with Berchtold for reasons of his own. Tisza could not be very furious
