The Sleepwalkers (70 page)

These vignettes, insignificant in themselves, hint at a divergence of responses and perspectives that would bedevil the July Crisis of 1914. In Germany, according to the British ambassador to Berlin, the news of the assassinations caused general consternation. The Emperor had only just returned from a visit to the archduke at Konopischte (today Konopiště), his residence in Bohemia, and the ‘intimacy' between the two men was ‘a matter of common knowledge as well as of great satisfaction to Germans'. Then there was the sympathy felt in Germany for the elderly Emperor.
²
For Germans, as for Austrians, the impact of the event manifested itself in countless personal impressions, like that of the historian Friedrich Meinecke, who felt everything turning black before his eyes as he read the headlines posted on the offices of a newspaper.
³

In Romania, too, the regret at the news was deep and widely felt, despite the recent political alienation between Bucharest and Vienna. The Romanian press was unanimous in praising the dead man as a ‘protector of minorities and supporter of national aims' within his empire.
⁴
The Russian envoy in Bucharest reported that Romanians on both sides of the Carpathian mountains had seen in Franz Ferdinand the driving force behind the recent efforts to broker a compromise between the Magyar administration and the Romanians of Transylvania; there were many ‘statesmen and politicians', he noted, who had hoped that the accession of the archduke would open the doors to a restoration of good relations with Vienna. The Serbian envoy in Bucharest also noted ruefully that Romanian reactions to the murders were ‘much less friendly to Serbia than we might have expected'.
⁵

Elsewhere, the picture was different. The crassest contrast was with Serbia itself, where the British ambassador reported ‘a sensation of stupefaction rather than one of regret' among the populace.
⁶
In neighbouring Montenegro, the Austrian legation secretary Lothar Egger Ritter von Möllwald reported that while there were expressions of sympathy for the deaths at Sarajevo, the Austrians were blamed for bringing the disaster upon themselves.
⁷
In the little town of Metalka, just across the Austrian border with Montenegro, festive flags were still flying on 2 July; enquiries by the Austrians revealed that the flags had gone up only on 30 June – they were not there to mark Kosovo Day, but to taunt the Austrian border troops stationed nearby.
⁸
From St Petersburg, the headstrong Serbian minister Spalajković reported on 9 July that the news of Franz Ferdinand's assassination had been greeted ‘with pleasure'.
⁹

In Italy, Austria's ally and rival, the death of the archduke and his consort prompted mixed feelings. The archduke had been almost as hostile to the Italians in Austria-Hungary as he was to the Magyars. Amid all the official expressions of regret it was obvious, wrote the British ambassador in Rome, Rennell Rodd, ‘that people in general have regarded the elimination of the late archduke as almost providential'. The Austrian ambassador's reports and those of the Serbian minister confirmed this impression.
¹⁰
According to a report from the Russian ambassador, the Sunday afternoon crowds in an overfilled Rome cinema had greeted the news with cheers and calls for the orchestra to play the national anthem – ‘
Marcia reale! Marcia reale!
'. When the orchestra complied, there was wild applause. ‘The crime is horrific,' Foreign Minister San Giuliano remarked to the Ambassador Sverbeyev, ‘but world peace will be no worse off.' In a conversation with the Serbian minister in Rome, one Italian journalist summarized his feelings in the words: ‘Grazie Serbia!'
¹¹

In Paris, the news from Sarajevo was pushed off the front pages by a scandal of momentous proportions. On 16 March 1914, Madame Caillaux, wife of the former prime minister Joseph Caillaux, had walked into the office of Gaston Calmette, editor of
Figaro
, and fired six bullets into him. The reason for the murder was the campaign the newspaper had waged against her husband, in the course of which Calmette had published love letters she had written to Joseph Caillaux while he was still married to his first wife. The trial was due to open on 20 July and the public interest in this story, which combined sexual scandal and a
crime passionel
by a woman highly visible in French public life, was naturally intense. As late as 29 July, the reputable
Le Temps
devoted twice as many column inches to Madame Caillaux's acquittal (on the grounds that the provocation to her honour justifed the crime) as it did to the crisis brewing in Central Europe.
¹²
Inasmuch as the Parisian press did respond to the news from Sarajevo, the predominant attitude was that Vienna had no right to accuse the Serbian government of complicity in the murders – on the contrary, French papers blamed the Viennese press for stirring up anti-Serbian emotion.
¹³

From London, by contrast, the Serbian minister reported with dismay that the British press appeared to be ‘following the propaganda of the Austrians' and blaming Serbia for the assassination: ‘They are saying these were the actions of a Serbian revolutionary and that he had ties with Belgrade; this is not good for Serbia.'
¹⁴
A leader in
The Times
of 16 July declared that the Austrians had every right to insist on vigorous investigation of all the ramifications of the plot and to demand that Serbia henceforth suppress irredentist agitation against the monarchy.
¹⁵

As these variations suggest, attitudes to the murders were refracted through the geopolitics of the relations between states. Romania is an interesting case. Public opinion had in general been well disposed towards the dead archduke, who was known for his pro-Romanian outlook. But King Carol, the man at the centre of Romania's recent realignment towards the Entente powers, adopted a pro-Belgrade view; he was confident that the Serbian government would carry out a full and rigorous investigation of the crime and that Austria therefore had no right to impose demands on Belgrade.
¹⁶

A much more ominous development was the accumulation of a fabric of assumptions that minimized the significance of the event and thereby delegitimized it as a potential
casus belli
. First there was the claim, widely echoed in the diplomatic traffic of the Entente powers and their Italian sleeping partner, that the dead archduke had been at the head of an Austro-Hungarian war party – a view that was at variance with the truth. The emphasis on the victim's unpopularity served to cast doubt on the authenticity of Austria's sense of outrage at the crimes, while supporting the claim that the plot reflected the local unpopularity of the Habsburg dynasty among the South Slavs of the monarchy and therefore had nothing whatsoever to do with Serbia. Then there was the highly adventurous assumption – asserted as if it were the fruit of long and deep research – that official Serbia was completely uninvolved in the attacks at Sarajevo. According to a dispatch of 13 July 1914 from the Serbian minister in Berlin, the Russian ministry of foreign affairs had informed the Russian ambassador in Berlin that there was ‘no Serbian involvement in the assassination at Sarajevo' – this at a time when the Austrian investigation, for all its lassitude, had already produced clear evidence to the contrary. From St Petersburg, Miroslav Spalajković approvingly reported that, despite the dossier of evidence forwarded by the Austrian Korrespondenz-Bureau to the Russian press, the papers in St Petersburg were following the Russian government line and treating the Sarajevo incident as a ‘purely internal Austrian affair'.
¹⁷

If we follow this theme through the Russian dispatches, we can see how these viewpoints fused into an argument that denied Vienna the right to counter-measures and turned the murders into a manufactured pretext for an action whose real motivations must be sought elsewhere. Franz Ferdinand had in recent years been little more than a stooge of the Kaiser, Ambassador Shebeko reported from Vienna. Inasmuch as there was any genuine anti-Serbian feeling in Vienna after the assassinations, this was the work of ‘German elements' (Shebeko made no mention of the important role played by Croats in the anti-Serbian demonstrations that followed the assassinations, though in a later dispatch he added mysteriously that ‘Bulgarian elements' were also involved). The German ambassador Heinrich von Tschirschky in particular, Shebeko reported on 1 July, was doing his best to ‘exploit the sad event' by stirring up public opinion against Serbia and Russia (in fact Tschirschky was at this time doing exactly the opposite: he was urging caution on all and sundry, much to the chagrin of the Emperor in Berlin; only later did he change tack).
¹⁸

From Belgrade, Hartwig reported to St Petersburg that all the claims of the Austro-Hungarian authorities were false: there was no
schadenfreude
in Serbia, on the contrary, the entire Serbian nation was moved to sympathy by the appalling murders at Sarajevo; the Belgrade-based networks that had supposedly helped the terrorists in their plot against the archduke did not exist; Čabrinović had not obtained his bombs or his weapons from the Kragujevac armoury and so on. The allegation that the Austrians were manufacturing evidence was important, not just because it recalled the scandal of the Friedjung trials, still unforgotten in Serbia (see
chapter 2
), or because it was false (though it certainly was), but because it implied that Vienna was deliberately manipulating the shootings at Sarajevo into the pretext for an assault on Belgrade motivated by predatory expansionism.
¹⁹
And behind all these machinations, supposedly, were the Germans, who, as the Russian envoy in Sofia remarked, might well see in the current events the chance to launch a preemptive attack on their eastern neighbour and thereby halt the growing military preponderance of the Franco-Russian Alliance.
²⁰
A chain of arguments was born – weeks before the war had even broken out! – that would enjoy a long afterlife in the historical literature.

From all this it naturally followed, in the eyes of the Russian policy-makers, that Austria had no right to take measures of any kind against Serbia. Axiomatic to the Russian position was the contention that a sovereign state could not be made responsible for the actions of private persons on foreign soil, especially as those in question were ‘immature anarchists' – the Russian sources scarcely ever refer to the Serbian or South Slav nationalist orientation of the assassins.
²¹
It would be wrong and mistaken to hold an entire race responsible for the misdeeds of individuals committed on foreign soil.
²²
It was ‘unfair', Ambassador Shebeko told a British colleague in Vienna on 5 July, for the Austrians even to accuse Serbia of having ‘indirectly favoured by her antipathy the plot to which the Archduke fell victim'.
²³
A conversation of 8 July between Sazonov and the Austrian chargé d'affaires in St Petersburg, Ottokar von Czernin, reveals how short was the tether Russian policy was prepared to allow Vienna after Sarajevo. Czernin had mentioned the ‘possibility' that the Austro-Hungarian government might ‘demand the support of the Serbian government in an investigation within Serbia of the latest assassination'. Sazonov's response was to warn the Austrian diplomat that this step would ‘make a very bad impression in Russia'. The Austrians should drop this idea, ‘lest they set their foot upon a dangerous path'.
²⁴
In a conversation of 18 June with Austrian ambassador Fritz Szapáry, who had meanwhile returned to St Petersburg after a period of leave spent nursing his dying wife in Vienna, Sazonov asserted the same view in even more trenchant terms, announcing that ‘no proof that the Serbian government had tolerated such machinations would ever be produced'.
²⁵

This framing of events was important, because it was part of the process by which Russia decided how to respond in the event of Austrian measures against Serbia. The blood-deed at Sarajevo, whose morally abhorrent character could be accepted as a given, was to be surgically separated from its Serbian context in order to expose Austria's putative intention to ‘exploit the crime for the purpose of delivering a mortal blow against Belgrade'.
²⁶
This was, of course, a very Russian view of events, pervaded with historic sympathy for the heroic struggle of the Serbian ‘little brothers'. But since it was the Russians who would determine whether and when the Austro-Serbian quarrel justified their own intervention, it was their view of the question that counted most. And there was little reason to expect that the other Entente powers would insist on a more rigorous form of arbitration. The French government had already granted St Petersburg
carte blanche
in the matter of an Austro-Serbian conflict. Without having looked into the matter himself, Poincaré adamantly denied any link between Belgrade and the asassinations. In an interesting conversation on 4 July 1914 with the Austrian ambassador in Paris, the French president compared the murders at Sarajevo with the assassination of the French president Sadi Carnot by an Italian anarchist in 1894. It was a gesture that seemed to express fellow feeling, but was in fact intended to frame the Sarajevo outrage as the act of an aberrant individual for which no political agency, and certainly no sovereign state, could be held liable. The Austrian replied by reminding the president – in vain – that the assassination of Carnot had borne ‘no relation to any anti-French agitation in Italy, whereas one must now admit that in Serbia they have been agitating against the Monarchy for years using every permitted and illicit means'.
²⁷