Kingdoms Fall - The Laxenburg Message
Read Kingdoms Fall - The Laxenburg Message Online
Authors: Edward Parr
KINGDOMS
FALL
The Laxenburg Message
By
Edward Parr
“Kingdoms Fall - The Laxenburg Message”
as well as the text, characters, story and illustrations are © 2013 Edward J.
Parr, Jr. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons
living or dead are entirely coincidental.
To
learn more about the First World War, view photographs, documentaries, maps,
timelines, and videos, and explore more online resources, please visit this
novel’s companion website at
Contents
Map - Suvla Bay and Vicinity, 1915
In memory of the soldiers and civilians who fought and died
during the Great War
In Flanders
Fields
by John McCrae
In Flanders fields the
poppies blow
Between the crosses,
row on row,
That mark our place;
and in the sky
The larks, still
bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the
guns below.
We are the Dead. Short
days ago
We lived, felt dawn,
saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved,
and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel
with the foe:
To you from failing
hands we throw
The torch; be yours to
hold it high.
If ye break faith with
us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
G
avrilo Princip sat at a
small wooden table at the front window of
Schiller's
corner
café looking out towards the Miljacka River as it flowed slowly through Sarajevo.
The young man, sweating in his oversized trench coat, was exhausted. His eyes
were bloodshot and circled by dark rings. His right hand shook slightly as he
tapped a cigarette on the rim of his teacup and dropped ashes onto the spent
leaves. His other hand was deep in the pocket of his dark overcoat, gently
holding a small explosive device in his thin fingers; the fuse he kept
separately in his right pocket. Outside the window, the late June morning was
cool and cloudy, and finely dressed ladies and gentlemen chatted gaily as they
strolled back from Town Hall and across the Ladina Bridge on their way home.
Princip pursed his lips together tightly: His plan had failed. No, that
was not correct. It was Cabrinovich who had failed. Cabrinovich had thrown his
bomb but it had glanced off the sedan’s bonnet and detonated in the street, and
then Cabrinovich had been captured alive. The fool had leapt into the river
where it was now only two feet deep! The Sarajevo gendarmes would be on high
alert, and each of the conspirators was certain to be arrested at any moment.
Princip knew it wasn’t safe to return to their house. He doubted he could make
his way back to Serbia on his own. He had nowhere else to go.
Princip
was born in a poor region of Bosnia in 1894. His parents could not care for
their large family, so he was sent to live with an older brother in Zagreb. At
that time, the entire region was controlled and occupied by the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Emperor Franz Joseph had seized many of the southern
Slav provinces in the Balkans after they had slipped from the grasp of the
Ottoman Turks, and he was gradually incorporating them into his Pan-Germanic
empire. Like many southern Slavs, Princip hoped that one day those provinces
would be united with Serbia into an independent Slavic nation, a “Greater
Serbia” aligned with their Slav brothers to the north and in Russia. But in
1908, when Franz Joseph formally annexed the whole of Bosnia into the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the hopes of the Slavs were dashed. During the
Annexation Crisis, Serbia and its ally Russia had come to the very brink of war
with Austria-Hungary; Princip’s brother left to join the Serbian army and
Gavrilo was sent to school in Sarajevo. Although Russia had ultimately failed
the Slavs, Princip took part in many of the political demonstrations against
Emperor Franz Joseph during the following years, until in 1912 he was arrested
and expelled from school.
Princip
next journeyed to Belgrade where he fell in with members of the Young Bosnia
movement. In the parks and cafés in Serbia, he met other Slavs, including
Cabrinovich, who were also striving for Bosnian independence. Princip tried to
join the Serbian guerilla fighters living in the mountains, the notorious
Chetniks
,
but the Serbian officer in charge had flatly rejected him: Princip
was too small and frail, he was told.
He
returned to his friends in Belgrade desperate to prove his worth and to serve
the cause of Greater Serbia. The Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 had shifted the
borders yet again, and the grip of Emperor Franz Joseph upon the southern Slav
provinces became even tighter. He was clearly intent on annexing Serbia next
and incorporating its territory into his sprawling empire. The Emperor was as
dismissive as ever of the demands of the southern Slavs for independence, even
though most Austrians, it seemed, despised the Slavs that already inhabited
their territory. And there was no doubt that Franz Joseph’s government was
undermining the elected government of Serbia and its great Premier, Nikola
Pashitch. The Austrian Emperor’s fear of his neighbor Russia was the only thing
that stayed his hand.
Princip
and his comrades were determined to show the Emperor that the Slavs would not
be ruled by an Austrian dictator. The Hapsburg autocrat had to see that it
would be impossible to control the Slavs or dictate to the Serbian government.
And how better to oppose an ailing 83-year-old Emperor, they thought, than to
assassinate his heir apparent – the merciless, war-mongering Archduke who despised
the Slavs and their ambitions for self-rule? Who better to kill than the Crown
Prince, and at the very moment before his grand entrance onto the stage of
Europe, a man whose sole qualification to become “All Highest” was his
aristocratic heritage? Princip and his conspirators were determined to tear
down the Hapsburg dynasty just as others had attacked the thrones of Italy and
Greece when King Umberto and King George were assassinated. Only by disrupting
the stability of the Hapsburg succession would the southern Slavs be able to
secure their independence from the grip of the Emperor.
Princip
and his associates had traveled back to Sarajevo in secret, carrying weapons
they had obtained in Serbia, and with one desperate goal in mind:
Assassination. Now their plan had come to ruin because of the fool Cabrinovich,
and Princip was stuck on the path to arrest and a speedy execution.
From
the window of the noisy café, Princip saw the crowds outside abruptly halt and
turn to face the Appel Quay Boulevard. He heard the grand
Gräf & Stift
automobiles as they rumbled up the street from Town Hall. Princip stood and
hurried towards the door of the café. The Archduke’s motorcade was speeding
past, and Princip watched frustrated and disgusted, a man who could do nothing
now that the Archduke was rushing from the city. The motorcade sped around the
corner. The automobiles were already halfway down the block by the time Princip
reached the street. Then the motorcade stopped. It stopped! The automobiles
were backing up, reversing slowly to where Princip was standing in the bustling
crowd. His hand, shaking with sudden nervousness, grasped the explosive device
in his coat pocket tightly. There were too many people and no time to act. He
could not possibly take out his bomb and attach the fuse in the midst of the
crowd. The
Gräf & Stift
automobile bearing the Archduke quickly
approached the corner.
Desperately,
Princip’s right hand lunged into his coat and gripped the handle of the pistol
wedged in his belt. He pushed violently forward through the crowd, pulled the
gun from his coat and immediately fired once, twice. The crowd screamed. People
were running. Women were crying out. Princip was tackled to the ground and the
gendarmes leapt on top of him, forcing the air from his lungs, kicking his
sides, grasping his hands, and pushing his face down into the street.
Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, and his wife
Sophie were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
Austrian investigators believed that the conspirators had been assisted by the
Black
Hand
, a secret society of Serbian military officers. Mindful of the threat
from Russia to the east, Emperor Franz Joseph first secured the support of
Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, before demanding
unconditional access to Serbia to investigate, capture and punish the
perpetrators of the assassination as well as the members of all other
anti-Austro-Hungarian political groups. Serbia flatly denied that it had been
involved in the assassination and rejected the Emperor’s demands that clearly
infringed on Serbia’s sovereignty.
Emperor
Franz Joseph declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. Tsar Nicholas II
immediately ordered the Russian armies to mobilize. In light of the Kaiser
Wilhelm’s support for Austria-Hungary and the threat it posed on Russia’s
western border, the Russian Tsar also requested that his ally France mobilize
its armies in the belief that the double threat against the Kaiser would keep
Germany from commencing any military action. But the Kaiser had a long-prepared
battle plan ready for just such a threat. He promptly declared war on France
and German troops immediately stormed through Belgium towards Paris expecting to
quickly crush their ancient Gaul enemies before turning all their might on the
ponderous Russian bear to the east. Great Britain, which had long promised to
defend neutral Belgium and was allied with France and Russia, immediately
declared war on Germany.
Before
the end of August, war had spread through Europe. The Tsar’s troops suffered a
terrible defeat at the town of Tannenberg near its massive border with Germany
and retreated back into Russian territory. In early September, at the Marne
River just to the east of Paris, the French army put an end to Germany’s plan
to quickly conquer France. The armies of France and Britain raced against the
army of Germany to outflank one another, resulting in a line of trenches and
defensive fortifications that spread over two hundred miles from Switzerland to
the North Sea. In October, the Ottoman Turkish Empire, hoping to recover some
of the territory it had previously lost in the Balkans, joined Germany and
Austria-Hungary in attacking the Russian army. In November, Great Britain and
France declared war on Turkey.
In
the next four years, the war would spread around the globe. Battles would be
fought by these great empires on the oceans and in their colonies in Asia and
Africa and all along the Western and Eastern Fronts, six great nations who
would become deadlocked in battle: Great Britain, whose navy had dominated the
oceans since the Battle of Trafalgar and whose colonies spanned from Australia
and New Zealand to India, Africa, the Caribbean and Canada; France, with vast
colonies in Africa and Asia, and where legends of Napoleon's victories and vast
empire still inspired its citizen-soldiers; Austria-Hungary, a nation of ethnic
rivalries held together by an ancient and autocratic Hapsburg dynasty; Turkey,
the last remnant of the Ottoman Empire that had dominated Asia Minor, the Near
East and North Africa for centuries; Russia, a vast nation rich in raw
materials and men yet still at heart a feudal society dominated by the
Romanov’s and the wealthy; and Germany, once torn apart by Protestantism and
reunited only forty-five years earlier by the House of Hohenzollern, the
rebirth of the Holy Roman Empire, the Second Reich, and perhaps the most
powerful industrial nation on Earth.
Sixty-five
million men would take up arms before the end of the war, more than
thirty-eight million soldiers and civilians would be wounded or die, and of the
great kingdoms that had ruled the world for centuries, some would disappear
forever.
Bay
T
he British troops
climbed over the railing of HMS
Grampus
in threes and fours, struggling
in the dark to place their feet onto the cargo nets that led down to the
“beetle boats” that would take them to shore. The men were quiet, excited, and
nervous. Although the night was calm and a warm breeze was blowing, Turkish
artillery was shelling the shoreline and beginning to extend their range to the
British troop ships and destroyers in Suvla Bay.
Grampus
and the new
battleships were bombarding the Turkish-held ridges in reply. This was no light
arms fire, but the roar of huge guns disgorging fire, smoke, and iron.