The Sleepwalkers (64 page)

A picturesque view unfolded before the couple as the motorcade swung on to the Appel Quay, a broad boulevard that runs along the embankment of the river Miljačka through the centre of Sarajevo. On either side of the river, which gushes from a gorge just above the town to the east, steep hills rise to a height of over 5,000 feet. The hillsides were dotted with villas and houses standing in orchards. Further up were the cemeteries with their glowing spots of white marble, crowned by dark firs and buffs of naked rock. The minarets of numerous mosques could be seen rising from among the trees and buildings along the river, a reminder of the city's Ottoman past. At the heart of the town just to the left of the Appel Quay was the bazaar, a labyrinth of lanes lined with shaded wooden booths backing on to warehouses of solid stone. Carpet traders, greengrocers, saddlers, coppersmiths, dealers in every craft, worked their trades here, each in their allotted quarter. A small house at the centre of the bazaar dispensed coffee free of charge to the poor at the expense of the
waqf
, an Ottoman charitable foundation. The previous day had been cool and rainy, but on the morning of 28 June the city was bathed in hot sunshine.

Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in Sarajevo, 28 June

The Austrians had chosen an unlucky date for the visit. On this day, St Vitus's Day, in the year 1389, Ottoman forces had destroyed a Serb-led army on the Field of Blackbirds (Kosovo), putting an end to the era of Serb empire in the Balkans and creating the preconditions for the later integration of what remained of Serbia into the Ottoman Empire. The commemorations across the Serb lands were set to be especially intense in 1914, because this was the first St Vitus's Day since the ‘liberation' of Kosovo during the Second Balkan War in the previous year. ‘The holy flame of Kosovo, which has inspired generations [of Serbs] has now burst forth into a mighty fire,' the Black Hand journal
Pijemont
announced on 28 June 1914. ‘Kosovo is free! Kosovo is avenged!'
¹
For Serb ultra-nationalists, both in Serbia itself and across the Serbian irredentist network in Bosnia, the arrival of the heir apparent in Sarajevo on this of all days was a symbolic affront that demanded a response.

Seven terrorists organized in two cells gathered in the city during the days preceding the visit. On the morning of the archduke's arrival, they positioned themselves at intervals along the Quay. Strapped around their waists were bombs no bigger than cakes of soap with detonator caps and twelve-second chemical fuses. In their pockets were loaded revolvers. The surplus of weapons and manpower was essential to the success of the undertaking. If one man were searched and arrested or simply failed to act, another stood by to take his place. Each carried a paper packet of cyanide powder so that he could take his own life when the deed was done.

Official security precautions were conspicuous by their absence. Despite warnings that a terrorist outrage was likely, the archduke and his wife travelled in an open car along a crowded and entirely predictable route. The espalier of troops who usually lined the kerbs on such occasions was nowhere to be seen, so that the motorcade passed virtually unprotected in front of the dense crowds. Even the special security detail was missing – its chief had mistakenly climbed into one of the cars with three local Bosnian officers, leaving the rest of his men behind at the railway station.
²

The archducal couple were strikingly unconcerned about their own safety. Franz Ferdinand had spent the last three days with his wife in the little resort town of Ilidze, where he and Sophie had seen nothing but friendly faces. There had even been time for an impromptu shopping visit to the Sarajevo bazaar, where they had walked unmolested in the narrow crowded streets. What they could not know was that Gavril Princip, the young Bosnian Serb who would shoot them dead just three days later, was also in the bazaar shadowing their movements. At a dinner in Ilidze on the last night before they took the train to Sarajevo, Sophie happened to meet the Bosnian Croat leader Dr Josip Sunarić, who had warned the local authorities against bringing the couple to Bosnia at a time of heightened national emotion for the local Serbs. ‘Dear Dr Sunarić,' she told him, ‘you are wrong after all [. . .]. Everywhere we have gone here, we have been treated with so much friendliness – and by every last Serb too – with so much cordiality and unsimulated warmth that we are very happy about it!'
³
Franz Ferdinand was in any case known for his impatience with security procedures and wanted this last part of his Bosnian journey to have a distinctly relaxed and civilian flavour. He had spent the past few days playing the role of inspector general at the army manoeuvres in the nearby Bosnian hills; now he wished to go among his future subjects as the heir to the Habsburg throne.

Most important of all: Sunday 28 June was Franz Ferdinand's and Sophie's wedding anniversary. Despite the many obstacles thrown in their path by Habsburg court etiquette, the archduke and his wife had since their marriage established an extremely contented family life. Marrying ‘my Soph' was the most intelligent thing he had done in his life, Franz Ferdinand confided to a friend in 1904. She was his ‘entire happiness' and their children were his ‘whole delight and pride'. ‘I sit with them and admire them the whole day because I love them so.'
⁴
There is no reason to believe that the warmth of this relationship – unusual in the context of dynastic marriages in this era – had in any way diminished by the time they came to visit Sarajevo. Sophie had insisted that she be allowed to remain at Franz Ferdinand's side during the anniversary day and there was doubtless a special pleasure in the fact that in this attractive and exotic outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they could officiate together in a way that was often impossible in Vienna.

The cars rolled past houses and shops decked with Habsburg black-and-yellow and Bosnian red-and-yellow banners, towards the Sarajevan Muhamed Mehmedbašić, who had taken up a position by the Ćumurija Bridge. As the cheers rose from around him he prepared to prime and throw his bomb. It was a tense moment, because once the percussion cap on the bomb was cracked – an action that itself generates a loud report – there was no going back, the bomb would have to be thrown. Mehmedbašić managed to free his bomb from its swaddling, but at the last moment he thought he sensed someone – a policeman perhaps – stepping up behind him and was paralysed by terror, just as he had been when he aborted the mission to kill Oskar Potiorek on the train in January 1914. The cars rolled on. The next assassin in line, and the first to go into action, was the Bosnian Serb Nedeljko Čabrinović, who had placed himself on the river side of the Quay. He freed his bomb and broke the detonator against a lamppost. Hearing the sharp bang of the percussion cap, the archduke's bodyguard, Count Harrach, assumed that a tyre had blown out, but the driver saw the bomb flying through the air towards the car and stepped on the accelerator. Whether the archduke himself saw the bomb and managed to bat it away with his hand, or whether it simply bounced off the folded fabric of the roof at the back of the passenger compartment, is not clear. At any rate, it missed, fell to the ground and exploded beneath the car behind, wounding several of the officers inside and gouging a hole in the road.

The archduke responded to this mishap with astonishing sang-froid. Looking back, he could see that the third vehicle had ground to a halt. The air was thick with dust and smoke and still ringing with the force of the explosion. A splinter had cut Sophie's cheek, but otherwise the couple were unharmed. The passengers in the third car were wounded but alive; some were attempting to dismount. The most seriously injured was General Potiorek's adjutant, Colonel Erik von Merizzi, who, though conscious, was bleeding heavily from a head wound. A number of bystanders had also been hurt.

As soon as Čabrinović had thrown his bomb, he ingested the cyanide powder he was carrying and threw himself over the parapet into the Miljačka. Neither of these actions had the intended result. The poison was of inferior quality, so that it seared the young man's throat and stomach lining, but did not kill him or even knock him out. And the river was too low in the summer heat to drown him or carry him away. Instead he merely fell twenty-six feet to the exposed sand at the side of the riverbed, where he was quickly captured by a shopkeeper, a barber armed with a handgun and two police officers.

Instead of leaving the danger zone immediately, the archduke saw to the treatment of the wounded and then ordered that the cavalcade should continue to the Town Hall in the centre of the city and then pass back along the Appel Quay, so that he and his wife could visit the wounded in hospital. ‘Come on,' he said. ‘That fellow is clearly insane; let us proceed with our programme.' The motorcade lurched back into motion, with the rearmost drivers picking their way around the smoking wreck of the fourth car. The remaining assassins, still waiting at their posts, were thus given every opportunity to complete their task. But they were young and inexperienced; three of them lost their nerve when the car and its passengers came within close range. Vaso Čubrilović, the youngest of the terrorists, froze like Mehmedbašić at the last moment – apparently because he was put off by the unexpected sight of the archduke's wife beside him in the imperial car. ‘I did not pull out the revolver because I saw that the Duchess was there,' he later recalled; ‘I felt sorry for her.'
⁵
Cvijetko Popović, too, was undone by fear. He remained at his station ready to throw his device, but was unable to do so because he ‘lost [his] courage at the last moment when [he] caught sight of the archduke'.
⁶
When he heard the report of Čabrinović's bomb, Popović sprinted to the building of the Prosvjeta, a Serb cultural society, and hid his own bomb behind a box in the basement.

Gavrilo Princip was at first caught off guard. Hearing the explosion, he assumed that the plot had already succeeded. He ran towards Čabrinović's position, only to see him being borne away by his captors, bent over in agony as the poison burned his throat. ‘I immediately saw that he had not succeeded and that he had not been able to poison himself. I intended to shoot him quickly with my revolver. At this moment the cars drove by.'
⁷
Princip abandoned the plan to kill his accomplice and turned his attention to the motorcade, but by the time he could see the archduke – unmistakable in his helmet adorned with brilliant green ostrich feathers – the car was moving too fast for him to get a clear shot. Princip stayed calm, an extraordinary feat under the circumstances. Realizing that the couple would soon be returning, he took up a new position on the right side of Franz Joseph Street, along the publicly advertised route by which the motorcade was to leave the city. Trifko Grabež had left his post to look for Princip, and had been caught up in the heaving of the crowd after the first explosion. When the motorcade passed him, he too failed to act, probably from fear, though he later claimed that the crowd had been so thick that he was unable to extract his bomb from under his clothes.

At first, it seemed the archduke was right to have insisted on continuing the programme. The motorcade reached its destination in front of the Sarajevo Town Hall without further incident. There followed a tragicomic interlude. It fell to the mayor, Fehim Effendi Čurčić, to deliver the usual speech of welcome to the august visitors. From his vantage point at the front of the motorcade, Čurčić knew that the day had already gone very wrong and that his innocuous text was now grossly inadequate to the situation, but he was far too nervous to improvise an alternative or even to modify his words so as to take account of what had just happened. In a state of high agitation and perspiring heavily, he stepped forward to deliver his speech, which included such gems as the following: ‘All of the citizens of the capital city of Sarajevo find that their souls are filled with happiness, and they most enthusiastically greet Your Highness's most illustrious visit with the most cordial of welcomes . . .' Hardly had he got underway, but he was interrupted by a furious expectoration from the archduke, whose rage and shock, pent up since the attack, now burst forth. ‘I come here as your guest and you people greet me with bombs!' In the horrified silence that followed, Sophie could be seen whispering into her husband's ear. Franz Ferdinand regained his calm: ‘Very well. You may speak.'
⁸
Once the mayor had struggled through to the end of his address, there was another pause when it was discovered that the sheets bearing the text of Franz Ferdinand's own prepared reply were wet with the blood of the injured officer in the third car.
⁹
Franz Ferdinand gave a graceful address, in which he made tactful mention of the morning's events: ‘I thank you cordially, Mr Mayor, for the resounding ovations with which the population has received me and my wife, the more so as I see in them an expression of pleasure over the failure of the assassination attempt.'
¹⁰
There were some closing remarks in Serbo-Croat, in which the archduke asked the mayor to convey his best regards to the people of the city.