The Sleepwalkers (65 page)

After the speeches, it was time for the couple to separate. Sophie was scheduled to meet with a delegation of Muslim women in a room on the first floor of the City Hall. Men were barred from the chamber so that the women could remove their veils. The room was warm and close and the Duchess appeared sombre and preoccupied with thoughts of her children – seeing a little girl who had accompanied her mother to the gathering, she said: ‘You see this girl is just about as tall as my Sophie.' At another point she declared that she and her husband were looking forward to rejoining their children – ‘we have never left our children alone for so long.'
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In the meanwhile, the archduke had dictated a telegram to the Emperor assuring him that both of them were well and was being shown the vestibule of the City Hall. The shock of the morning's events seemed to be catching up with him. He was speaking in a ‘funny, thin voice', a local eyewitness later recalled. ‘He was standing quite grotesquely, he was lifting his legs high as if he were doing the goosestep. I suppose he was trying to show he was not afraid.'
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There was some taunting of Potiorek, whose security arrangements had so manifestly failed.

How should the visit now proceed? The original plan had been to drive a short distance back down the Quay and then turn right just after the bazaar into Franz Joseph Street to the National Museum. The archduke asked Potiorek whether he thought a further attack was likely. According to his own testimony, Potiorek made the disheartening reply that he ‘hoped not, but that even with every possible security measure, one could not prevent such an undertaking launched from close quarters'.
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To be on the safe side, Potiorek proposed cancelling the rest of the programme and driving straight out of the city back to Ilidze, or alternatively to the governor's residential palace, the Konak, and from there to the Bistrik railway station on the left bank of the river. But the archduke wanted to visit Potiorek's wounded adjutant, now recovering in the garrison hospital on the western outskirts of the city. It was agreed that the tour of the museum should be cancelled, and that the motorcade should proceed straight back down the Appel Quay rather than up Franz Joseph Street, as any further prospective assassin would presumably be expecting. The original plan had foreseen that the couple would separate at this point, the archduke proceeding to the museum and his wife to the governor's palace. But Sophie took the initiative and announced to her husband in front of the entire retinue: ‘I will go with you to the hospital.'
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For good measure, Count Harrach decided to stand on the running-board on the leftward side of the car (towards the river), in case there should be a further attack.

The motorcade rolled back through the city in the gathering heat, westwards now, away from the City Hall. But no one had informed the drivers of the changed itinerary. As they passed the bazaar district, the lead vehicle swung to the right into Franz Joseph Street and the car carrying Franz Ferdinand and Sophie made to follow suit. Potiorek upbraided the driver: ‘This is the wrong way! We are supposed to take the Appel Quay!' The engine was disengaged and the car (which had no reverse gear) pushed slowly back on to the main thoroughfare.

This was Gavrilo Princip's moment. He had positioned himself in front of a shop on the right side of Franz Joseph Street and he caught up with the car as it slowed almost to a stop. Unable to disentangle in time the bomb tied to his waist, he drew his revolver instead and fired twice from point-blank range, while Harrach, standing on the running board, looked on in horror from the left. Time – as we know from Princip's later testimony – seemed to slow as he left the shade of the shop awnings to take aim. The sight of the Duchess gave him momentary pause: ‘as I saw that a lady was sitting next to him, I reflected for a moment whether to shoot or not. At the same time, I was filled with a peculiar feeling . . .'
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Potiorek's recollection conveys a similar sense of unreality – the governor remembered sitting stock still in the car, gazing into the face of the killer as the shots were fired, but seeing no smoke or muzzle flash and hearing only muted shots, that seemed to come from far away.
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At first it appeared the shooter had missed his mark, because Franz Ferdinand and his wife remained motionless and upright in their seats. In reality, they were both already dying. The first bullet had passed through the door of the car into the Duchess's abdomen, severing the stomach artery; the second had hit the archduke in the neck, tearing the jugular vein. As the car roared away across the river towards the Konak, Sophie teetered sideways until her face was between her husband's knees. Potiorek initially thought she had fainted with shock; only when he saw blood issuing from the archduke's mouth did he realize something more serious was afoot. Still straddling the running-board and leaning into the passenger compartment, Count Harrach managed to hold the archduke upright by clutching his collar. He heard Franz Ferdinand speaking in a soft voice words that would become famous throughout the monarchy: ‘Sophie, Sophie, don't die, stay alive for our children!'
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The plumed helmet, with the green ostrich feathers, slipped from his head. When Harrach asked him if he was in pain, the archduke repeated several times in a whisper ‘It's nothing!' and then lost consciousness.

Behind the retreating vehicle, the crowd closed in around Gavrilo Princip. The revolver was knocked from his hands as he raised it to his temple to take his own life. So was the packet of cyanide he endeavoured without success to swallow. He was punched, kicked and beaten with walking sticks by the surrounding mob; he would have been lynched on the spot if police officers had not managed to drag him off into custody.

Sophie was already dead by the time they reached the Konak palace and the couple were rushed into two rooms on the first floor. Franz Ferdinand was comatose. His valet, Count Morsey, who had run all the way from the scene of the shooting to rejoin the archduke, tried to ease his breathing by cutting his uniform open at the front. Blood splashed up, staining the yellow cuffs of the valet's uniform. Kneeling beside the bed, Morsey asked Franz Ferdinand if he had a message for his children, but there was no reply; the archduke's lips were already stiffening. It was a matter of minutes before those present agreed that the heir apparent was dead. The time was just after 11 a.m. As the news fanned out from the palace, bells began to toll across Sarajevo.

The assassination first announced itself to Stefan Zweig as a disruption in the rhythm of existence. On the afternoon of 28 June he was holidaying in Baden, a little spa town near Vienna. Finding a quiet place away from the crowds in the Kurpark, he settled down with a book, an essay on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky by the St Petersburg Symbolist Dmitrii Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky. He was soon deeply immersed in his reading,

but the wind in the trees, the twittering of the birds and the music floating across from the park were at the same time part of my consciousness. I could clearly hear the melodies without being distracted, for the ear is so adaptable that a continuous noise, a roaring street, a rushing stream are quickly assimilated into one's awareness; only an unexpected pause in the rhythm makes us prick our ears. [. . .] Suddenly the music stopped in the middle of a bar. I didn't know what piece they had played. I just sensed that the music had suddenly stopped. Instinctively, I looked up from my book. The crowd, too, which was strolling through the trees in a single flowing mass, seemed to change; it, too, paused abruptly in its motion to and fro. Something must have happened.
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The Sarajevo murders, like the murder of President John F. Kennedy at Dallas in 1963, were an event whose hot light captured the people and places of a moment and burned them into memory. People recalled exactly where they were and whom they were with when the news reached them.
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The Viennese freethinker and feminist Rosa Mayreder happened to be travelling in Germany with her husband Karl, a chronic depressive, when they saw the news of the murders posted up in the window of a Dresden department store across the street from their hotel bedroom.
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Half a century after the event, Prince Alfons Clary-Aldringen remembered stalking roebuck in a Bohemian forest with his Kinski relatives. At dusk, as the hunters gathered on the road at the edge of the wood, the cook from the Kinski estate arrived on a bicycle bearing a message from the local postmaster.
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For the parliamentarian Joseph Redlich, it was the telephone that brought the shocking news; the rest of his afternoon was spent in a hectic sequence of calls to friends, relatives and political associates. The dramatist Arthur Schnitzler, who had dreamt only four weeks before that the Jesuit order had commissioned him to murder the archduke, also learned of the murders by telephone.
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Joint Finance Minister Leon Biliński felt the shock of the news even before it had arrived. On the morning of 28 June, he was at home in Vienna reading the
Neue Freie Presse
. The horses were waiting in front of his house to take him to eleven o'clock mass. His eye happened to fall on an article outlining the arrangements for the archduke's visit to Bosnia.

Leon Biliński

To this day, I remember exactly the sensation of genuine physical pain that I felt while reading the details of this journey [into Sarajevo]. But not being aware of any rational cause for this pain, I had to persuade myself that I had no reason to be resentful of the Archduke on account of this festivity. A few moments later the telephone rang.
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The news seemed so horrific, the Russian ambassador in Vienna reported, that many at first refused to believe it. Only in the evening, when extra editions of the papers appeared and the first mourning flags were seen on public buildings, did the truth sink in. ‘The residents of the capital gathered on the streets, discussing the terrible event deep into the night'.
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Within twenty-four hours, the news was everywhere, even in the fictional Prague guest-house where Mr Å vejk, Czech
idiot savant
and accredited trader in mongrel dogs, sat rubbing embrocation into his rheumatic knee. In the imagined world of Jaroslav Hašek's picaresque post-war masterpiece
The Good Soldier Å vejk
, it is the news of the archduke's death – delivered by the charwoman Mrs Müller – that nudges the narrative into motion by eliciting from the hero a guileless political monologue (the first of many) that lands him in gaol on charges of sedition and then in a lunatic asylum on suspicion of imbecility.

‘They bumped him off at Sarajevo, sir, with a revolver, you know. He drove there in a car with his Archduchess.'

‘Well, there you have it, Mrs Müller, in a car. Yes, of course, a gentleman like him can afford it, but he never imagines that a drive like that might finish up badly. And at Sarajevo into the bargain! That's in Bosnia, Mrs Müller. I expect the Turks did it. You know, we never ought to have taken Bosnia and Herzegovina from them.'
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The news from Sarajevo would echo for years in the literary imagination of the vanished Empire, from the ominous clamour of telephones in Karl Kraus's
Last Days of Mankind
, to Joseph Roth's Lieutenant Trotta von Sipolje, who received the ill tidings as ‘the enactment of something he had often dreamed'.
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Assessing the contemporary impact of the archduke's assassination on his Austro-Hungarian contemporaries is difficult. The ‘most outstanding feature' of Franz Ferdinand's public persona, one expert has written, ‘was his pronounced unpopularity at all levels of public life'.
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Franz Ferdinand was no crowd-pleaser. He was uncharismatic, irritable, prone to sudden outbursts of anger. The pudgy, immobile features were unendearing to those who had never seen how his face could come to life, lit up by intensely blue eyes, in the company of his family or his closest friends. Contemporaries remarked on a constant craving for respect and affirmation. He was appalled by the slightest hint of insubordination. On the other hand, he hated grovellers, so he was difficult to please. He was, as his political ally and admirer Count Ottokar Czernin observed, ‘a good hater' who never forgot an ill turn. So fearsome were his rages that ministers and senior officials ‘rarely waited on him without beating hearts'.
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He had few truly close friends. Distrust was the dominant emotion in his dealings with other people: ‘I take everyone I meet for the first time to be a common scoundrel,' he once remarked, ‘and only gradually allow myself to be persuaded to the contrary.'
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His obsession with the hunt, which was extreme even by contemporary standards, occasioned much negative comment, especially in the valleys around his hunting lodge Schloss Blühnbach – in order to protect the local game reserves from any risk of disease, Franz Ferdinand sealed off the estate around the castle, to the fury of middle-class alpinists, who were denied access to the popular local trails, and of the local peasants, who could no longer pasture their goats in the mountains above their villages.
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In a diary entry written on the day of the assassinations, the dramatist Arthur Schnitzler noted how quickly the ‘first shock' of the murders had worn off, tempered by recollections of the archduke's ‘appalling unpopularity'.
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