Prologue

      SARAJEVO

      The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest. Rather than providing an authentic ‘cause’ for the First World War, the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was exploited to justify unleashing forces already in play. It is merely a trifling irony of history that a teenage terrorist killed a man who, alone among the leaders of the Hapsburg Empire, would probably have used his influence to try to prevent a cataclysm. But the events of that torrid day in Sarajevo exercise a fascination for posterity which must be indulged by any chronicler of 1914.

      Franz Ferdinand was not much loved by anyone save his wife. A corpulent fifty-year-old, one of the Hapsburg Empire’s seventy archdukes, he became heir to the throne after his cousin Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself and his mistress at Mayerling in 1889. The Emperor Franz Joseph resented his nephew; others considered him an arrogant and opinionated martinet. Franz Ferdinand’s ruling passion was shooting: he accounted for some 250,000 wild creatures to his own gun, before ending his days in Gavrilo Princip’s threadbare little gamebag.

      In 1900 the Archduke conferred his affections on a Bohemian aristocrat, Sophie Chotek. She was intelligent and assertive: at army manoeuvres she once scolded the presiding officers for the imprecision of their men’s marching. But lack of royal blood rendered her in the eyes of the imperial court ineligible to become empress. The monarch insisted that their marriage, when he grudgingly consented to it, should be morganatic. This placed them beyond the social pale of most of Austria’s haughty aristocracy. Though Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were blissfully happy with each other, their lives were marred by the petty humiliations heaped upon her, as an unroyal royal appendage. Franz Ferdinand named a favourite walk at his Bohemian castle of Konopiště ‘Oberer Kreuzweg’ – ‘the upper Stations of the Cross’. At court functions, he followed the Emperor in precedence – but without his wife; he nursed a loathing for the lord chamberlain, Alfred Prince Montenuovo, who orchestrated such insults.

      Franz Ferdinand’s status as heir apparent nonetheless ensured that he and his wife entertained generals, politicians and foreign grandees. On 13 June 1914, Germany’s Kaiser visited them at Konopiště, accompanied by Grand-Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, a rose-fancier who was keen to see the castle’s famous borders. Wilhelm II was prone to social mishaps: on this occasion his dachshunds, Wadl and Hexl, disgraced themselves by killing one of Franz Ferdinand’s exotic pheasants. The Kaiser and the Archduke appear to have discussed trivia, rather than European or Balkan politics.

      Next day, Sunday the 14th, Austria’s foreign minister and most important politician, Count Leopold Berchtold, visited Konopiště with his wife. The Berchtolds were fabulously rich, and lived the smart life to the full. They were enthusiastic racehorse-owners, and that spring one of their yearling fillies had won the prized Con Amore handicap at Freudenau. Nandine, the Countess, was a childhood friend of Sophie Hohenburg. The visitors arrived at the castle for breakfast, spent the day looking at the garden and paintings, of which the Count was considered a connoisseur, then caught an evening train back to Vienna, never to meet their hosts again.

      The Archduke’s political and social views were conservative and vigorously expressed. After attending Edward VII’s 1910 funeral in London, he wrote home deploring the boorishness of most of his fellow sovereigns, and the alleged impertinence of some politicians present, notable among them ex-US president Theodore Roosevelt. It is sometimes suggested that Franz Ferdinand was an intelligent man. Even if this was so, like so many royal personages into modern times, he was corrupted by position, which empowered him to express opinions unenlightened even by contemporary standards.

      He loathed Hungarians, telling the Kaiser: ‘the so-called noble, gentlemanly Magyar is a most infamous, anti-dynastic, lying, unreliable fellow’. He regarded southern Slavs as sub-humans, referring to the Serbians as ‘those pigs’. He hankered after recovering Lombardy and Venetia, lost to Italy in his lifetime, for the Hapsburg Empire. Visiting Russia in 1891, Franz Ferdinand declared that its autocracy offered ‘an admirable model’. Tsar Nicholas II recoiled from Franz Ferdinand’s intemperance, especially on racial matters. Both the Archduke and his wife were strongly Catholic, favouring Jesuits and professing hostility towards Freemasons, Jews and liberals. Such was Sophie’s religious fervour that in 1901 she led two hundred fashionable women on a Catholic march through Vienna.

      The Archduke nonetheless cherished one prudent conviction: while many Austrians, notably including army chief of staff Gen. Conrad von Hötzendorf, detested Russia and welcomed the prospect of a battlefield showdown with the Tsar, Franz Ferdinand dissented. He was determined, he said repeatedly, to avoid a clash of arms. Desiring a ‘concord of emperors’, he wrote: ‘I shall never lead a war against Russia. I shall make sacrifices to avoid it. A war between Austria and Russia would end either with the overthrow of the Romanovs or with the overthrow of the Habsburgs – or perhaps the overthrow of both.’ He once wrote to Berchtold: ‘Excellency! Don’t let yourself be influenced by Conrad – ever! Not an iota of support for any of his yappings at the Emperor! Naturally he wants every possible war, every kind of hooray! rashness that will conquer Serbia and God knows what else … Through war he wants to make up for the mess that’s his responsibility at least in part. Therefore: let’s not play Balkan warriors ourselves. Let’s not stoop to this hooliganism.