The Sleepwalkers (66 page)

There was thus no outpouring of collective grief when the news of the assassinations became known. This helps to explain why the assassinations have always been named for the place where they occurred, rather than for the victims. (By contrast, no one refers to the murder of John F. Kennedy as the ‘Dallas Assassination'.
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) Historians have sometimes inferred from the unpopularity of the archduke that his murder was not in itself an important trigger of events, but at best a pretext for decisions whose roots lay in a more remote past. But this conclusion is misleading. First there is the fact that, whether he was popular or not, the energy and reforming zeal of the heir to the throne were widely acknowledged. Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian minister in Constantinople told his Serbian colleague, was a man of ‘rare dynamism and strong will' who was utterly dedicated to affairs of state and would have wielded great influence.
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He was the man who had gathered around him all ‘those who understood that only a complete change of course in the sphere of domestic policy' could safeguard the continued existence of the empire.
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Moreover, it was not just the extinction of the person Franz Ferdinand that mattered, it was the blow to what he stood for: the future of the dynasty, of the empire and the ‘Habsburg State Idea' that unified it.

Franz Ferdinand's reputation was in any case transfigured by the manner of his death, a process accomplished above all, and with incredible speed, by the print media. Within twenty-four hours of the assassination, most of the familiar Sarajevo narrative was in place, from Čabrinović's abortive bomb-throw and subsequent leap into the river Miljačka to the archduke's stoical refusal to call off the tour after the first bomb, his solicitude for the injured in the fourth car, his intemperate exchange with Mayor Čurcić, the fateful wrong turn at Franz Joseph Street, and even the last words of the dying archduke to his unconscious wife.
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Newspaper coverage generated an overpowering sense of occasion. The thick stripes of mourning black on the front pages found an echo in the black flags and pennants that transformed the streets and buildings of the monarchy's cities – even the trams were decked out in black. Leader-writers dwelt on the energy and political foresight of the deceased archduke, the violent termination of a loving marriage, the grief of three orphaned children, the resigned dismay of an elderly emperor who had already suffered more than his fair share of bereavements.

For the first time, moreover, the private person and domestic life of the archduke were exposed to public view. One characteristic passage from the
Reichspost
of 30 June cited the archduke on the subject of his family: ‘When I return to the circle of my family after a long and burdensome day of work, and see my wife at her sewing amongst my playing children, I leave all my cares behind the door and can scarcely absorb all the happiness that surrounds me.'
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These authentic snippets reported by close associates of the dead man broke open the barrier that had separated the private individual from the rebarbative public persona, generating emotions that were no less real for the fact that they were media-induced. As Karl Kraus put it just two weeks after the murders, what had remained silent in Franz Ferdinand's life became eloquent in his death.
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Nevertheless, the meaning of the assassination was for most people essentially political rather than sentimental. Leader writers quickly built up a sense of the event's epochal significance. The
Neue Freie Presse
, journal of the educated Viennese bourgeoisie, spoke of a ‘stroke of destiny' (the term ‘
Schicksalsschlag
' can be found all over the press in the days following the assassination).
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When the ‘horrific event [. . .] became known', the editors declared, ‘it was as if a storm were sweeping through the monarchy, as if History had inscribed the hideous axiom of a new epoch with a blood-red pen'. The
Innsbrucker Nachrichten
wrote of ‘a unique event in the history of Austria'. With the death of the archduke, the editors of the
Reichspost
observed, the monarchy had lost not merely its prospective sovereign, but a uniquely energetic and determined public figure, ‘upon whom the peoples of the Habsburg Empire had hung all their hopes, all their future'.
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These were Austrian voices, of course. The picture was rather different in Budapest, where many greeted with a sense of furtive relief the news that the nemesis of Magyardom had perished. But even here, the bourgeois press framed the event as a world-historical moment and fulminated against the suspected authors of the outrage.
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Only the most introverted natures can have failed altogether to register the concentration and darkening of the public mood. The case of Franz Kafka in Prague, whose diary passed over the political events of that day in silence to dwell instead on a chronicle of purely private misfortunes – getting lost en route to an assignation, catching the wrong streetcar and missing a telephone call – was exceptional.
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The judicial inquiry into the assassination began as soon as Princip fired his shots. Within hours of the event, Gavril Princip, sick from the half-swallowed cyanide and covered in bruises and cuts from his near-lynching on Franz Joseph Street, faced Leo Pfeffer of Sarajevo, an Austrian judge. ‘The young assassin,' Pfeffer later recalled, ‘was undersized, emaciated, sallow, sharp-featured. It was difficult to imagine that so frail-looking an individual could have committed such a serious crime.' At first Princip seemed unable to speak, but when Pfeffer addressed him directly, he answered ‘with perfect clarity in a voice that grew steadily stronger and more assured'.
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Over the following days he made heroic efforts to prevent the Austrians from reconstructing the background to the crime. In his first interrogation on the afternoon of 28 June, he claimed that he had been acting entirely on his own and denied any link whatsoever with Čabrinović. ‘When I heard the explosion [of the bomb thrown by Čabrinović],' Princip declared, ‘I said to myself: here is someone who feels as I do.' On the following day, he added a further detail to bolster the authenticity of his account: he had been so taken aback by the noise of Čabrinović's explosion that he had forgotten to shoot at the archduke as he passed down the Appel Quay and was forced to find a new position from which to launch his attack. Čabrinović at first confirmed this view of the matter. On the afternoon of the assassination, he too claimed that he had acted without accomplices, using a bomb acquired from an ‘anarchist' in Belgrade whose name he could not remember.

The assassins in court

On the following morning, Monday 29 June, however, Čabrinović suddenly changed his story. He now admitted that he and Princip were accomplices who had planned the crime together in Belgrade. The weapons had come from ‘former partisans' in the city, men who had fought in the Balkan Wars and kept their weapons after demobilization. Pressed to identify these ‘partisans' Čabrinović named the railway orderly Ciganović, the lowest link in Apis's chain of command. When Princip was confronted with these details on Monday morning, he too admitted that the two were co-conspirators.

It is conceivable that the investigation might have come to a standstill at this point. The two young men had agreed on a plausible and self-contained story. Pfeffer was not an especially aggressive or searching interrogator. There was no physical intimidation of the prisoners, and no use of extra-judicial threats. Pfeffer seems to have been reluctant even to pressure each suspect with incriminating or contradictory details of the other's statements, because he saw independent and uncoerced testimony as the only sound means of getting at the truth. In reality there could be no question of independent testimony, since Čabrinović and Princip were able in their separate holding cells to communicate with each other using a system of coded knocks they had read about in a Russian novel.
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What pushed the investigation further was not the testimony of the bomber and the shooter, but the widening dragnet of routine police arrests, driven by the suspicion that there must be other accomplices.
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Among those who fell into the hands of the police by this means was none other than Danilo Ilić. The police had no hard evidence against Ilić. They knew only that he was an associate of Princip and that he was affiliated with Serb nationalist circles. Ilić, on the other hand, had no idea how much the police knew and must have suspected that either Princip or Čabrinović or both of them had already incriminated him. When the police brought him before Judge Pfeffer on Wednesday 1 July, Ilić panicked and proposed a plea bargain. He would reveal everything he knew if the investigating judge would undertake to protect him from the death penalty. Pfeffer could make no binding promises, but he did advise Ilić that Austrian law viewed the provision of state evidence as a mitigating circumstance.

That was enough for Ilić. His statement blew open Princip's and Čabrinović's story and pushed the investigation into new territory. The bomber and the shooter had not been acting alone, Ilić stated. They were members of a seven-man team, three of whom had come from Belgrade. Ilić himself had recruited the other three. He named every member of the group and offered intelligent guesses as to their current whereabouts. Electrified by these revelations, Pfeffer rushed from the interrogation room to the telephone. Orders went out to arrest all the persons named.

Arrest of a suspect

The first to be found was Trifko Grabež, the third member of the Belgrade cell. After Princip had fired his shots, Grabež had taken elaborate precautions to avoid arousing suspicion. He walked slowly from the scene to the house of an uncle in Sarajevo, where he hid his gun and his bomb. He then strolled across town to the house of another uncle, a deputy in the Bosnian Diet, where he ate lunch and spent the night. On the next morning, he took the train to Pale, his home town, from where he hoped to escape into Serbia. He was captured in a small town near the Serbian border. Within nine days of the assassinations, Čubrilović and Popović had also been arrested. Only Mehmedbašić remained at large. He had already crossed the border into Montenegro and was thus, for the moment, beyond the reach of the Austrian police. But even without Mehmedbašić in custody the Sarajevo police had plenty to go on. Ilić's confessions incriminated a crowd of further accomplices, including the schoolteacher, the smuggler and the various hapless peasants who had helped the boys along their way, either by putting them up for the night or by transporting or concealing their weapons.

Reconstructing the links with Serbia was more difficult. The weapons themselves were of Serbian make; the revolvers were manufactured under Serbian licence and the recovered bombs hailed from the Serbian state armoury at Kragujevac. On 29 June, Čabrinović named Ciganović as the man who had supplied the team with their guns and bombs in Belgrade. But Ciganović was a lowly figure in the network and in any case a Bosnian exile. Implicating him did not in itself point in the direction of official Serbian complicity. If Ciganović was, as the Italian historian Albertini concluded, working as Nikola Pašić's agent and informant within the Black Hand,
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this role was informal and would have eluded even the most thorough investigation. The situation was different for Major Voja Tankosić, a Serbian national who was prominent in the partisan movement, and a personal aide to Apis, the chief of Serbian Military Intelligence. His name was volunteered by Ilić, who stated that Tankosić had not only provided the assassins with weapons, but had also trained them in marksmanship in Belgrade and issued the instruction that they should kill themselves rather than be taken alive. The Belgrade boys initially denied any knowledge of Tankosić; only after they were confronted one by one with Ilić (one of the very few occasions in which prisoner confrontations were used to elicit confessions) did Princip, Čabrinović and Grabež concede that Tankosić had been involved in the preparation of the plot.