Макс Хейстингс – Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 (страница 7)
In May, Princip and two fellow conspirators travelled to Belgrade. The city was capital of a young and volatile country, fully independent from the Ottoman Empire only since 1879, a constitutional monarchy that was heart and soul of the pan-Slav movement. Princip knew Serbia well, having lived there for two years. The ‘Young Bosnians’ were provided with four Browning semi-automatic pistols and six bombs by Maj. Vojin Tankosić of
The group was led by the thirty-six-year-old head of military intelligence Col. Dragutin Dimitrijević, familiarly known as ‘Apis’, after the Egyptian bull god. He was the principal personality in one of three factions engaged in a struggle for Serbian domestic mastery. The other two elements were led respectively by Alexander, the Prince Regent – who hated the colonel because he refused to defer to the royal family – and Nikola Pašić, the prime minister. Apis looked the part of a revolutionary fanatic: pale, bald, heavy, enigmatic – like ‘a giant Mongolian’, in the words of a diplomat. He never married, devoting his life to the movement which boasted a hooded initiation ritual and a seal engraved with a skull-and-crossbones flag, a dagger, a bomb and poison. Murder was his business: he had been prominent among a group of young army officers who conducted the 1903 butchery of King Alexander of Serbia and Queen Draga in their own palace bedroom.
The Black Hand’s influence pervaded many Serbian institutions, notably including its army. Pašić, a sixty-nine-year-old of venerable appearance with his white hair and beard, was an inveterate enemy of Apis, some of whose associates in 1913 discussed murdering him. The prime minister and many of his colleagues regarded the colonel as a threat to his country’s stability and even existence; internal affairs minister Milan Protić spoke of the Black Hand to a visitor on 14 June as ‘a menace to democracy’. But in a society riven by competing interests, the civilian government lacked authority to remove or imprison Apis, who was protected by the patronage of the army chief of staff.
Beyond guns, bombs and cyanide suicide capsules, there is no hard evidence about what further support or direction Princip and his comrades received in Belgrade. The assassins went to their graves denying Serbia’s official complicity. It seems overwhelmingly probable that the Black Hand incited and instructed the Young Bosnians for the archducal murder; but all that is certain is that its agents provided them with means to commit terrorist acts in Hapsburg territory. Princip conducted pistol practice in a Belgrade park, then on 27 May enjoyed a farewell dinner with his two co-conspirators, Trifko Grabež and Nedeljko čabrinović, before starting what became an eight-day journey to Sarajevo. Part of Princip’s and Grabež’s route was covered on foot across open country, assisted by a frontier officer instructed by the Black Hand. Yet if Apis was wholly committed to the assassination plot, it is puzzling that the embryo assassin had to pawn his overcoat for a few dinars shortly before leaving Belgrade, to pay his expenses.
Who else knew what? Russia’s ambassador in Belgrade was a fanatical pan-Slavist and friend of the Black Hand, Nikolai Hartwig; it is possible that he was party to the plot. But claims that St Petersburg had prior knowledge of the assassination are unsupported by a shred of evidence, and are hard to credit. The Russian government was strongly hostile to Austria-Hungary because of its persecution of its Slav minorities, but the Tsar and his ministers had no plausible reason to want Franz Ferdinand dead.
The Bosnian peasant who guided Princip and Grabež back into Hapsburg territory – their other partner, čabrinović, travelled independently – was a Serbian government informer, who passed word about their movements, and about the bombs and pistols in their luggage, to the Interior Ministry in Belgrade. His report, which the prime minister read and summarised in his own hand, made no mention of a plot against Franz Ferdinand. Pašić commissioned an investigation, and gave orders that the movement of weapons from Serbia into Bosnia should be stopped; but he went no further. A Serbian minister later claimed that Pašić told the cabinet at the end of May or the beginning of June that some assassins were on their way to Sarajevo to kill Franz Ferdinand. Whether or not this is true – no minutes were taken of cabinet meetings – Pašić appears to have instructed Serbia’s envoy in Vienna to pass on to the Austrian authorities only a vague general warning, perhaps because he was unwilling to provide the Hapsburgs with a fresh and extremely serious grievance against his country.
Serbians played something of the same violent role on the margin of the Hapsburg Empire as did Irish factions in the affairs of Britain at several periods of the twentieth century, though the latter proved more resilient. Chronic Serb brutality towards their own minorities, especially Muslims, was a poor advertisement for the state. Some historians believe that its rulers were so intimately involved in terrorism, and explicitly in the conspiracy against Franz Ferdinand, that the country should be considered a rogue state. This view, once again, relies upon circumstantial evidence and speculation. Given the hostility between Apis and Pašić, it seems unlikely that they would have forged a common front to encompass the death of the Archduke.
Even without forewarning from Belgrade, the Austrian authorities had the strongest reasons to anticipate violent protest or some murderous attempt against Franz Ferdinand, who himself fully recognised the danger. Leaving his estate at Chlumetz on 23 June, he and his wife were obliged to begin their trip to Bosnia in a first-class compartment of the Vienna express, because the axles of his automobile were overheating. He said crossly: ‘Our journey starts with an extremely promising omen. Here our car burns, and down there they will throw bombs at us.’ The pre-1914 era was characterised by endemic acts of terrorism, especially in the Balkans, which were the butt of condescending British humour: a
For the Hapsburgs, such matters were commonplaces. Franz Joseph’s semi-estranged wife, the Empress Elisabeth, had been stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist while boarding a steamer at Geneva in 1898. Ten years later in Lemberg, a twenty-year-old Ukrainian student assassinated the governor of Galicia, Count Potocki, crying out, ‘This is your punishment for our sufferings.’ The judge at the trial of a Croat who shot at another Hapsburg grandee asked the terrorist, who had been born in Wisconsin, if he thought killing people was justified. The man replied: ‘In this case it is. It is the general opinion in America, and behind me are 500,000 American Croats. I am not the last among them … These actions against the lives of dignitaries are our only weapon.’ On 3 June 1908 Bogdan Žerajić, a young Bosnian, intended to shoot the Emperor in Mostar, but relented at the last moment. Instead he travelled to Sarajevo, fired several times at Gen. Marijan Varešanin, then – wrongly supposing that he had killed him – shot himself with his last bullet. It was later alleged, though never proven, that the Black Hand had provided the revolver. The Austrian police sawed off the terrorist’s head for preservation in their black museum.
In June 1912 a schoolboy shot at the governor of Croatia in Zagreb, missing his target but wounding a member of the imperial administration. In March 1914 the vicar-general of Transylvania was killed by a time-bomb sent through the post by Romanians. Yet Franz Ferdinand was capable of seeing the funny side of the threat: while watching military manoeuvres one day, his staff succumbed to panic when a dishevelled figure suddenly sprang from a bush clutching a large black object. The Archduke laughed heartily: ‘Oh, let him shoot me. That’s his job – he’s a court photographer. Let him make a living!’
There was nothing comic, however, about the obvious threat in Bosnia. The Austrian police had detected and frustrated several previous conspiracies. Gavrilo Princip was known to be associated with ‘anti-state activities’. Yet when he registered himself in Sarajevo as a new visitor, nothing was done to monitor his activities. Gen. Oskar Potiorek, governor of Bosnia, was responsible for security for the royal visit. The chief of his political department warned about the threat from the Young Bosnians, but Potiorek mocked the man ‘for having a fear of children’. Officials were later said to have devoted more energy to discussing dinner menus, and the correct temperature at which to serve the wines, than to the guest of honour’s safety. Official negligence alone gave Princip and his friends their chance.