The Sleepwalkers (67 page)

By this time, however, over two weeks had elapsed and the Austrians were getting no nearer to Apis, the real author of the conspiracy. Looking over the witness statements, it is hard not to agree with the historian Joachim Remak that Princip, Grabež and Čabrinović pursued a strategy of deliberate obfuscation that led ‘by way of splendid confusion from initial denial to reluctant – and incomplete – admission'.
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All three took pains to limit the damage done by Ilić's revelations and to prevent as far as possible the inculpation of official circles in Belgrade. None made any mention of the Black Hand; instead they hinted at links between Ciganović and the Narodna Odbrana, a red herring that would lead the Austrian investigators far from the true trail. And Judge Pfeffer's rather languorous mode of proceeding gave the imprisoned assassins plenty of time to harmonize their stories, thereby ensuring that a fuller picture was slow to emerge.

The ponderous progress of the police investigation did not, of course, prevent the Austrian leadership from intuiting a link to Belgrade, or from forming a view of the broader background to the plot. Telegrams fired off by Governor Potiorek of Bosnia within hours of the assassinations already hinted at Serbian complicity. The ‘bomb-thrower' Čabrinović, he reported, belonged to a Serbian socialist group ‘that usually takes its orders from Belgrade'. The ‘Serbian-Orthodox' school student Princip had been studying for some time in the Serbian capital, and police searches had revealed ‘an entire library of nationalist-revolutionary publications of Belgrade origin' in the house of Princip's older brother in Hadzici.
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From the Austrian embassy in Belgrade came a coded telegram reporting that Čabrinović had been employed at a publishing house in Belgrade until a few weeks before the assassination. In a longer report, dispatched on 29 June, the Austrian minister observed that the boys had received their ‘political education' in Belgrade and linked the murders to the culture of Serbian national memory. Of particular significance was the celebrated medieval suicide-assassin Miloš Obilić, who ‘passes for a hero wherever Serbs live'.

I would not yet be so bold as to accuse the Belgrade [government] directly of the murder, but they are surely indirectly guilty, and the ring-leaders are to be found not just among the uneducated masses, but in the Propaganda Department of the [Serbian] Foreign Ministry, among those Serbian university professors and newspaper editors who for years have sown hatred and now have reaped murder.
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Governor Potiorek was even less restrained. In a coded telegram to the minister of war, he noted that the killers had admitted receiving their arms in Belgrade. But even without a confession, the governor was ‘fully convinced' that the true causes of the outrage were to be sought in Serbia. It was not his business to judge which measures should be taken, but his personal view was that only ‘firm action in the domain of foreign policy would restore peace and normality to Bosnia-Herzegovina'.
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The shock of the event still resonates in these early reports: ‘we have still not recovered from the crushing impact of yesterday's catastrophe', wrote the Austrian minister in Belgrade, ‘so that I find it difficult to assess the bloody drama in Sarajevo with the necessary composure, objectivity and calm . . .'
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Vengeful rage, hostile underlying assumptions about Serbian objectives and a growing body of circumstantial evidence shaped official Austrian perceptions of the crime from the first hour, in a process that was only obliquely linked to the discoveries generated by the legal investigation itself.

Especially close attention was paid in Austria to Serbian reactions to the crime. The Belgrade government made an effort to observe the expected courtesies, but from the outset Austrian observers discerned a gaping discrepancy between the show of official condolence and the jubilation felt and expressed by most Serbs. The Austrian minister in Belgrade reported on the day after the event that a celebration scheduled for the evening of 28 June in memory of the assassin Miloš Obilić had been cancelled. But he also passed on reports from informers that there had been private expressions of satisfaction throughout the city.
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From the fields of Kosovo, where massive celebrations of St Vitus's Day had been planned, the Austrian consul reported that the news from Sarajevo was greeted by the ‘fanaticised mass' with expressions of elation ‘that I can only describe as bestial'.
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A preliminary announcement that the Serbian court would observe six weeks of state mourning was subsequently corrected: there would be only eight days of official mourning. But even this modest acknowledgement belied the reality that the streets and coffee-houses were full of Serb patriots rejoicing at the blow to the Habsburgs.
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Austrian doubts were further reinforced by the continuing vituperations of the Serbian nationalist press. On 29 June, the mass distribution in Belgrade of pamphlets decrying the alleged ‘extermination' of the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina by ‘hired masses', while the Habsburg authorities sat back ‘with folded hands', annoyed the staff of the Austrian embassy, as did a leader article in the nationalist organ
Politika
on the following day blaming the Austrians themselves for the murders and denouncing the Vienna government for manipulating the situation to propagate the ‘lie' of Serbian complicity. Other pieces praised the assassins as ‘good, honourable youths'.
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Articles of this stripe (and there were many of them) were regularly translated and excerpted in the Austro-Hungarian press, where they helped to stir popular resentment. Particularly dangerous – because they contained an element of truth – were articles claiming that the Belgrade government had formally warned Vienna in advance of the plot against the archduke. A piece published under the title ‘An Unheeded Warning' in the Belgrade newspaper
Stampa
stated that Jovan Jovanović, the Serbian minister in Vienna, had passed details of the plot to Count Berchtold, who had been ‘very grateful' for the minister's confidence and had alerted both the Emperor and the heir to the throne.
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There was a morsel of truth in this claim, which cut in two directions because it implied Austrian negligence on the one hand and Serbian government foreknowledge on the other.

There was, of course, little that Serbian leaders could have done to avoid these recriminations. The Belgrade government could not forbid merrymakers to celebrate the murders in the coffee-houses, nor could they control the behaviour of the crowds at Kosovo Field. The press was a grey area. From Vienna, Jovanović recognized the threat posed by the more intemperate Belgrade papers and repeatedly urged Pašić to take action against the worst offenders in order to avoid the exploitation of extremist statements by the Viennese press.
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The Austrians too communicated their displeasure, and warnings to rein in the press were heard from the Serbian foreign legations.
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But the Pašić government was formally correct in insisting that it lacked the constitutional instruments to control the organs of the free Serbian press. And Pašić did in fact instruct the head of the Serbian press bureau to urge caution upon Belgrade's journalists.
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It is also notable that stories about an official warning to Vienna by the Belgrade government quickly evaporated after Pašić's official denial on 7 July.
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Whether Pašić could have used emergency powers to moderate the tone of the newspapers is another question – at any rate he chose not to, possibly because he judged tough measures against the nationalist press to be politically inopportune so soon after the bitter conflict of May 1914 between the Radical cabinet and the praetorian elements in the Serbian army. New elections were scheduled, moreover, for 14 August; in the heated atmosphere of an election campaign, Pašić could hardly afford to offend nationalist opinion.

There were other, more avoidable lapses. On 29 June, Miroslav Spalajković, the Serbian minister in St Petersburg, issued statements to the Russian press justifying Bosnian agitation against Vienna and denouncing the Austrian measures against Serbian subjects suspected of involvement with irredentist groups. For years, Spalajković told the
Vecherneye Vremya
, the political leadership in Vienna had been manufacturing anti-Austrian organizations, including ‘the so-called “Black Hand”, which is an invention'. There were no revolutionary organizations whatsoever in Serbia, he insisted. In an interview granted on the following day to
Novoye Vremya
, the Serbian diplomat denied that the murderers had received their weapons from Belgrade, blamed the Jesuits for stirring up a feud between Croats and Serbs in Bosnia and warned that the arrest of prominent Serbs in Bosnia might even provoke a military assault by Serbia against the monarchy.
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Spalajković had a long history of rancorous relations with his Austrian diplomatic counterparts and a reputation for excitability. Even the Russian foreign minister Sazonov, a friend of the Serbian envoy, described him as ‘unbalanced'.
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But these public utterances, which were conveyed immediately to the decision-makers in Vienna, helped to poison the atmosphere in the early days after the assassinations.

Pašić, too, muddied the waters with ill-judged displays of bravado. In a speech held in New Serbia on 29 June, attended by several cabinet ministers, twenty-two members of the Skupština, numerous local functionaries and a delegation of Serbs from various regions of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Pašić warned that if the Austrians should attempt to exploit the ‘regrettable event' politically against Serbia, the Serbs ‘would not hesitate to defend themselves and to fulfil their duty'.
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This was an extraordinary gesture at a time when the feeling generated by the event was still so fresh. In a circular sent to all the Serbian legations on 1 July, Pašić took a similar line, juxtaposing the honest and strenuous efforts of the Belgrade government with the nefarious manipulations of the Viennese press. Serbia and its representatives must resist any attempt by Vienna to ‘seduce European opinion'. In a later communication on the same theme, Pašić accused the Viennese editors of deliberately misrepresenting the tone of Serbian press coverage and rejected the notion that the Belgrade government should act to curb what were in effect justified reactions to Austrian provocations.
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In short, there were moments when Pašić seemed closer to leading the Serbian papers into the fray than tempering the tone of their coverage.

Pašić's contacts with Austrian ministers and diplomats had never been easy; they were especially awkward during the first days after the assassinations. On 3 July, for example, during an official requiem in Belgrade in memory of the archduke, Pašić assured the Austrian minister that Belgrade would treat this matter ‘as if it concerned one of their own rulers'. The words were doubtless well meant, but in a country with such a vibrant and recent history of regicide they were bound to strike his Austrian interlocutor as tasteless, if not macabre.
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More important than Pašić's tone was the question of whether he or his government could be depended upon to collaborate with the Austrians in investigating the roots of the conspiracy to kill the heir apparent and his wife. Here, too, there was ample reason for doubt. On 30 June, the Austrian minister in Belgrade, Ritter von Storck, met with the secretary-general of the Serbian foreign ministry, Slavko Gruić, and enquired as to what the Serbian police had been doing to follow up the threads of the conspiracy which, it was well known, led into Serbian territory. Gruić retorted with striking (and possibly disingenuous) naivety that the police had done nothing whatsoever – did the Austrian government wish to request such an investigation? At this point Storck lost his temper and declared that he regarded it as an elementary duty on the part of the Belgrade police to investigate the matter to the best of their ability, whether Vienna requested it or not.
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Yet, despite official assurances, the Serbian authorities never conducted an investigation proportionate to the gravity of the crime and the crisis to which it had given rise. At Gruić's prompting, Interior Minister Protić did, to be sure, order Vasil Lazarević, chief of police in the Serbian capital, to look into the assassins' links with the city. A week later, Lazarević closed his ‘investigation' with a cheerful announcement to the effect that the assassination in Sarajevo had no connection whatsoever with the Serbian capital. No one by the name of ‘Ciganović', the chief of police added, ‘existed or had ever existed' in Belgrade.
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When Storck solicited the assistance of the Serbian police and foreign ministry in locating a group of students suspected of planning a further assassination, he was provided with such a muddle of obfuscation and contradictory information that he concluded that the Serbian foreign ministry was incapable of operating as a trustworthy partner, despite the assurances of Nikola Pašić. There was no pre-emptive crackdown against the Black Hand; Apis remained in office; and Pašić's tentative investigation of the border regiments involved in smuggling operations fell far short of what was needed.

Instead of meeting the Austrians halfway, Pašić (and the Serbian authorities more generally) fell back on customary postures and attitudes: the Serbs themselves were the victims in this affair, both in Bosnia-Herzegovina and now after Sarajevo; the Austrians had it coming to them anyway; the Serbs had the right to defend themselves, both with words and, if necessary, with armed force, and so forth. As Pašić saw it, this was all in keeping with his view that the assassination had nothing whatsoever to do with ‘official Serbia'.
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Seen from this perspective, any independent measure against persons or groups implicated in the assassination would have implied an acceptance of Belgrade's responsibility for the crime. A posture of cool aloofness, by contrast, would send out the message that Belgrade regarded this issue as a purely domestic Habsburg crisis that unscrupulous Vienna politicians were endeavouring to exploit against Serbia. In keeping with this view, Serbian official communications depicted Austrian recriminations as an utterly unprovoked assault on Serbia's reputation, the appropriate response to which was haughty official silence.
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All of this made sense when viewed through the lens of Belgrade politics, but it was bound to infuriate the Austrians, who saw in it nothing but insolence, deceitfulness and evasion, not to mention further confirmation of the Serbian state's co-responsibility for the disaster. Above all, the glib denials from Belgrade suggested that the Serbian government was not, and would not perform the role of, a partner or neighbour in resolving the urgent issues raised by the assassinations. There was nothing surprising in this for Vienna, which had come to expect evasion and duplicity in its dealings with Belgrade, but it was important nonetheless, because it made it very difficult to imagine how relations could be normalized after the outrage without some measure of external coercion.