The Sleepwalkers (68 page)

The impact of the murders on the Austro-Hungarian decision-making elite was immediate and profound. Within a few days of the assassinations of 28 June, a consensus formed among the key Austrian decision-makers that only military action would solve the problem of the monarchy's relations with Serbia. Something must be done to answer the provocation. More numerous and united than ever before, the hawks pressed in on Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold with demands for swift action. ‘Last year I took the liberty of writing to you to say that we would have to learn how to tolerate Serbian impertinences without resorting to war,' Ritter von Storck told Berchtold on 30 June. ‘Now,' he wrote, ‘the matter has acquired an entirely different aspect'.

In answering the question of peace or war, we must no longer be led by the thought that we cannot gain anything through a war with Serbia, but rather we must seize the first opportunity for a pulverising blow against the kingdom without giving any consideration to such scruples.
⁶⁹

Prince Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, a senior diplomat who had already been appointed to succeed the long-serving Szögyényi as Austrian minister in Berlin, confronted Berchtold on the morning after the murders. If serious measures were not taken now, Hohenlohe threatened, with an insolence verging on insubordination, he would refuse to take up his Berlin posting.
⁷⁰
That evening, after an afternoon in which Berchtold must have endured many similar conversations, Conrad arrived. Freed by the assassinations at Sarajevo of the most formidable restraint on his political influence, the chief of the General Staff launched into his familiar refrain. Now was the time to take action: mobilization should be ordered without any further negotiations with Belgrade. ‘If you have a poisonous adder at your heel, you stamp on its head, you don't wait for the deadly bite.' The staff chief's advice could be summarized, Berchtold later recalled, in three words: ‘War! War! War!'
⁷¹
Much the same was heard from Minister of War Krobatin, freshly returned from a tour of inspection in South Tyrol, who met with Berchtold and Conrad on the morning of Tuesday 30 June. The army was ready for action, Krobatin declared; war was the only way out of the monarchy's current predicament.
⁷²

Leon Biliński, the joint finance minister, joined the chorus. As one of the three joint ministers who constituted what passed for an imperial government in Austria-Hungary, he would play an important role in formulating policy during the crisis. Biliński was no Serbophobe. As the minister responsible for the administration of Bosnia, he had been known for the supple and approachable manner of his dealings with the national minorities in the province. He taught himself how to read and understand Serbo-Croat and spoke Russian rather than German with his South Slav colleagues; it was easier for them to follow and drew attention to their shared Slav heritage. Meetings were conducted in a markedly informal and friendly fashion, and debates were lubricated with large helpings of strong black coffee and a plentiful supply of good cigarettes.
⁷³
Until the events at Sarajevo, Biliński had continued to work on building a constructive long-term relationship with the national minorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Even after the assassinations, he opposed the efforts of the martinet
Landeschef
Potiorek to impose repressive measures in Bosnia.
⁷⁴

On the question of external relations with Serbia, Biliński had veered between conciliatory and bellicose views during the recent Balkan turbulence. He was warlike during the stand-off over northern Albania in May 1913, and again during the Albanian crisis of October, though he warned on this occasion that since neither the Emperor nor the heir apparent would agree to an all-out war, Vienna should probably stop short of ordering a mobilization.
⁷⁵
On the other hand, he cultivated excellent relations with Jovanović, the Serbian minister in Vienna, and used these effectively to help bring the dispute over Serbian–Albanian border rectifications to a harmonious resolution. During the second Balkan War, he opposed the policy of backing Bulgaria against Belgrade, pressing instead for a rapprochement with victorious, expanding Serbia. He consistently and vehemently opposed Conrad's idea of deliberately engineering a war against the neighbouring state, on the grounds that this would stigmatize Austria-Hungary as the aggressor and isolate it among the great powers.
⁷⁶

The assassinations put an abrupt end to this equivocation. From the afternoon of 28 June, Biliński was an unstinting advocate of direct action against Serbia. He had never been especially close to Franz Ferdinand, but found it hard to shake off a sense that he had failed in his duty of care to the victims of the assassination. In retrospect, it is clear that he was entirely blameless. He had not been informed by Potiorek of the plan to bring the archduke and his wife into the city – hence the attack of nausea he suffered when he read the details of the projected visit in the newspaper. Nor had he been consulted on the security arrangements. Yet the minister spent his first post-Sarajevo meetings with the Emperor and with Berchtold pedantically defending himself – with documentary evidence – against the imagined accusation that he had been negligent in discharging his duties.
⁷⁷

One of the fiercest hawks was Biliński's subordinate, Potiorek. Unlike Biliński, the governor had ample reason to accuse himself of negligence. It was Potiorek who had pressed to have the manoeuvres conducted in Bosnia in the first place. He had been responsible for the risible security arrangements on the day of the visit. And it was he who had mishandled the archduke's departure from the city after the reception at the Town Hall. But if he experienced pangs of self-reproach, Potiorek masked them with a posture of impetuous bellicosity.
⁷⁸
In reports dispatched from Sarajevo to the General Staff and the ministry of war, Potiorek pressed for a rapid military strike against Belgrade. Time was running out for the monarchy. Bosnia would soon be rendered ungovernable by the operations of the Serb irredentist networks, to the extent that it would become impossible to deploy large troop units there. Only by cracking down on Serbian national organizations in the province and eliminating the root of the problem in Belgrade would the monarchy resolve its Balkan security problem. Potiorek was not a decision-maker of the inner circle, but his reports were important nonetheless. Franz Ferdinand had always argued that the fragility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire categorically ruled out any consideration of war with an external foe. Potiorek turned this argument on its head, asserting that war would resolve, not exacerbate, the Empire's domestic problems. This rather contrived appeal to what historians would later term the ‘primacy of domestic politics' helped Conrad and Krobatin to overturn the objections of some of their civilian colleagues.

The upper tiers of the foreign ministry were quick to embrace a militant policy. As early as 30 June, the German minister in Vienna, Baron Tschirschky, reported that his contacts – most of them foreign ministry people – were expressing the wish for a ‘thorough settling of accounts with Serbia'.
⁷⁹
The motivations for embracing a militant policy varied to some extent from one individual to the next: Baron Alexander von Musulin, the self-proclaimed Foreign Office ‘Serbia expert' who would later draft the ultimatum to Belgrade and took part in several important early meetings at the Foreign Office, was a Croat deeply hostile to greater-Serbian nationalism who saw in the post-Sarajevo crisis the last opportunity to halt the advance of pan-Serbianism with the support of the empire's Croats.
⁸⁰
Frigyes (‘Fritz') Szapáry, the Austrian minister in St Petersburg, who happened to be in Vienna during the first fortnight after the assassination because of his wife's illness, was mainly concerned with the deepening grip of the Russians on the Balkan peninsula. Count Forgách, head of the foreign ministry's Political Section from October 1913, had not forgotten his miserable years in Belgrade or his rancorous dealings with Spalajković. A militant group-think seized hold of the ministry. Underlying the preference for a policy of confrontation was the familiar topos of the active foreign policy – seen as the polar opposite of the passivity and muddling-through that had supposedly dogged Austrian policy. Aehrenthal had argued his case in these terms during the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908–9, contrasting his own proactive approach with the ‘fatalism' of his predecessors. Forgács, Count Alexander (‘Alek') Hoyos (Berchtold's
chef de cabinet
), Szapáry, the department chief Count Albert Nemes and Baron Musulin were all enthusiastic disciples of Aehrenthal. During the Balkan crises of 1912 and 1913, these men had repeatedly pressed Berchtold not to give way either to Russian intimidation or to Serbia's ‘growing impertinence' and privately lamented what they saw as his excessively conciliatory approach.
⁸¹

Sarajevo did not just stir the hawks to war. It also destroyed the best hope for peace. Had Franz Ferdinand survived his visit to Bosnia in 1914, he would have continued to warn against the risks of a military adventure, as he had done so often before. On his return from the summer manoeuvres, he would have removed Conrad from his post. This time there would have been no coming back for the bellicose staff chief. ‘The world has no idea that the archduke was always against war,' a senior Austrian diplomat told the politician Joseph Redlich in the last week of July. ‘Through his death he has helped
us
find the energy that
he
would never have found as long as he lived!'
⁸²

No one was under more pressure during the first few days after the assassinations than the Austro-Hungarian joint foreign minister Leopold von Berchtold. He was personally deeply affected by the news from Sarajevo. He and Franz Ferdinand were close in age and had known each other since childhood. For all the differences between the hot-tempered, confident, opinionated archduke and the refined, sensitive and effeminate count, the two men had respected each other deeply. Berchtold had ample opportunity to acquaint himself with the vivacious, impulsive individual behind the cantankerous public persona of the heir apparent. And there was a broader familial dimension to the relationship: Berchtold's wife Nandine had been the intimate childhood friend of Sophie Chotek and the two had remained close ever since. Berchtold was speechless when he received the news during a charitable event near his castle at Buchlau and rushed by train to Vienna, where he was immediately swept up in a frenzy of meetings. ‘The shadow of a dead man, of a great dead man, lay upon these discussions,' Berchtold later recalled. ‘I found them unbearably painful. Always I seemed to see before me the image of him who had been blamelessly slain, [. . .] the large shining eyes blue as water beneath the dark resolute brow . . .'
⁸³

Did Berchtold have to be pushed into accepting the case for war against Serbia? Certainly the hawks who besieged him with advice on the morrow of the assassination presumed that the foreign minister would need to be bullied into adopting a policy of confrontation. Although Berchtold had on occasion taken up firm positions (over Albania, for example), he was still widely viewed as a man of prudence and conciliation, and thus a soft touch on foreign affairs. Berchtold, one senior Habsburg ambassador claimed in May 1914, was a ‘dilettante', whose ‘inconsequentiality and lack of will' had deprived the monarchy's foreign policy of any clear sense of direction.
⁸⁴
In order to goad the minister into action after Sarajevo, the most hawkish colleagues coupled their advice on the current crisis with biting critiques of Austro-Hungarian policy since the death of Aehrenthal in 1912. Conrad, as ever, was the most forthright. It was thanks to Berchtold's hesitancy and caution during the Balkan Wars, Conrad told the minister on 30 June, that Austria-Hungary now found itself in this mess.

In fact, however, it seems that Berchtold himself made an early, and probably independent, commitment to a policy of direct action. The man of manoeuvre and restraint became overnight an unshakably strong leader.
⁸⁵
He had an opportunity to set out his view of the crisis at his first post-Sarajevo audience with the Emperor in Schönbrunn Palace at one o'clock on the afternoon of 30 June. This encounter was of crucial importance; in his unpublished memoirs, Berchtold later recalled it in detail. It is worth noting that he found the Emperor deeply grieved by the murders at Sarajevo, notwithstanding his difficult relationship with the archduke and his morganatic wife. Breaking with protocol, the 83-year-old monarch took the minister's hand in his own and asked him to sit down. His eyes became wet as they discussed the recent events.
⁸⁶
Berchtold declared – and the Emperor agreed – that the monarchy's ‘policy of patience' had exhausted its plausibility. If Austro-Hungary were to show weakness in such an extreme case as this, Berchtold warned, ‘the neighbours to the south and the east would become even more confident of our impotence and pursue their work of destruction with ever more determination'. The empire now found itself in a ‘position of constraint'. The Emperor, Berchtold recalled, seemed extremely well informed on the current situation and fully accepted the need for action. But he also insisted that Berchtold agree any further steps with Count István Tisza, the prime minister of Hungary, who was at that time staying in Vienna.
⁸⁷

Here was the germ of a potentially serious problem: Tisza fiercely objected to any policy designed to engineer an immediate conflict. Tisza, prime minister during the years 1903–5 and again from 1913, was the dominant figure in Hungarian politics. This exceptionally energetic and ambitious man, a fervent admirer of Bismarck, had built up his power though a combination of electoral corruption, the ruthless police intimidation of political opponents, and modernizing economic and infrastructural reforms designed to appeal to the Magyar-speaking middle classes and assimilationist elements in the other national elites. Tisza embodied the Compromise system created in 1867. He was a nationalist, but he believed deeply in the union with Austria, which he saw as indispensable to the future security of Hungary. He was utterly determined to uphold the hegemony of the Magyar elite and thus firmly opposed to any broadening of the restrictive franchise that kept the non-Magyars out of politics.