Why 1914?

by Derek Robinson

Genres: War & Military

Synopsis

Short, brisk and highly readable, this account stands out from the flood of books written for the Centenary of the Great War. In Why 1914?, Derek Robinson - trained as a historian, shortlisted for the Booker Prize - applies his novelist's skills to asking how and why Europe hurried into such a massive disaster. He captures a world of kings and Kaisers, generals and infantrymen. None of them knew what a big European war meant. All the combatant nations assumed it would be short, and each expected to win. The roots of such folly began in the nineteenth century. Robinson traces the earliest warning signs, leading to a sudden crisis and an impulsive war that went massively wrong from the start. This book is the ideal introduction to the key question of the Great War: why did Europe explode?

Release date: September 18, 2014

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 191

Sample

Many people who know anything at all about the Great War (as it was known from the start) would say it was caused by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The more cautious might say that Gavrilo Princip (who undoubtedly shot the Archduke) lit the fuse that ignited the Great War. Both statements suggest that Princip, or the men behind him, knew that pulling the trigger would result in a major European war, or even a minor one. The evidence suggests otherwise.

What seems probable is that, with or without Princip, there would have been some sort of European war in 1914 or 1915 or 1916, for the simple and depressing reason that many people on every side wanted a war, and they all believed it would be quick and exciting, and they would win.

*

Gavrilo Princip was a short, thin teenager from a remote Bosnian village. His father was a postman. The boy was one of nine children; six died in infancy. Even so, his parents could not afford to raise him and they sent him to Zagreb, to live with an elder brother. Gavrilo suffered from tuberculosis. No wonder he was small and thin.

1912 found him in Belgrade, capital of Serbia, where he went to school. (Who financed him, nobody seems to know.) Like many of his student friends, he was passionately interested in the Pan-Slav movement to unite Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were provinces of Austria-Hungary, with Serbia, an independent state, and thus escape the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was the goal of a secret society in Serbia known as the Black Hand.

In 1914, the visit of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Bosnia was announced. As heir to the Emperor Franz Josef, he was automatically regarded in the Balkans as the enemy of the Slavs. He would arrive on June 28. This was Vidovdan, the most holy day in the Serbian calendar, dedicated to Saint Prince Lazar and the Serbian martyrs who, on this date in 1389, gave their lives to defend their faith against the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Kosovo. The timing was perfect.

The Black Hand recruited Gavrilo Princip and two others to murder the Archduke. All three young men had incurable tuberculosis and they were willing to die for the nationalist cause. What’s more, they were ordered to kill themselves when the Archduke was dead, thus erasing any link with the Black Hand. Phials of cyanide were handed out. No doubt in anyone’s mind: this was a suicide mission.

When they reached Sarajevo they met more conspirators; now the squad was seven strong. What could possibly go wrong? In the event, almost everything. Especially the cyanide.

*

Franz Ferdinand went to Sarajevo to show off his wife. The correct form for an heir was unquestionable: he must marry someone whose family was listed in the royal family’s book of rules, the Hapsburg House Law. The Archduke broke the rules. He fell in love with a countess, Sophie von Chotkovato, far below him in the pecking order, and they married. The Austrian court was appalled. It could do nothing about the marriage or about her courtesy title of Duchess of Hohenberg, reluctantly granted by the Emperor; but it treated her like a commoner. On ceremonial occasions she must not appear at her husband’s side. She could not be deleted, so she was made semi-invisible.

For Franz Ferdinand, this was a permanent insult. Sophie was beautiful and he wanted the world to applaud his choice. There was one loophole. His many titles included that of Inspector-General of the Austrian army, and when he reviewed his troops, Sophie could be beside him, the world could applaud. In 1914 the army’s summer manoeuvres would be in Bosnia. That was what took the couple to Sarajevo: not politics but love.

Love alone would not guarantee security. There had been a foiled plot to assassinate the Emperor himself three years earlier. Only three months before the visit, a plan to kill a different Austrian archduke had been discovered. Now the Governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, General Potiorek, had charge of the heir’s safety. He met the train and escorted Franz and Sophie to their limousine.

There was to be an official reception at the City Hall. The best route was along a broad avenue, Appel Quay, beside the River Miljacka. Franz Ferdinand approved. The car had no roof. This would improve the crowd’s view of the happy couple and his view of the happy crowd. For the same reason, a scattering of policemen had replaced the troops who would normally line the route. There were bright flags and smiles everywhere, a holiday air: just what he wanted. He looked regal: black trousers with a red stripe, light blue tunic, a peacock green cockade on his hat; and of course the proud moustache. Unmistakably the heir to the throne.

The seven assassins were at separate points, mingling with the spectators. Each man had a revolver, one or two bombs or grenades, and the inevitable cyanide phial. The motorcade processed unhurriedly along Appel Quay. As it approached the first conspirator he took fright and failed to throw his bomb because (he said later) a policeman was standing beside him. The royal car went past. The second man stepped forward and threw a grenade at the archduke. The chauffeur glimpsed the threat and accelerated fast. The grenade bounced off the vehicle and exploded under the next car. The conspirator swallowed his cyanide and jumped into the Miljacka to make sure of his death. The poison made him sick and the river was only four inches deep. Four detectives pulled him out. By now the royal car was racing along Appel Quay: an impossible target. The remaining five assassins gave up. Another Black Hand plot had failed.

Franz Ferdinand was short-tempered at the best of times. Now his day had been ruined. His reply to the official reception was very sour. The remainder of his visit must take place, of course, and someone suggested a military escort. General Potiorek had none of it. Two bomb-throwers in one day? Absurd. “Do you think Sarajevo is filled with assassins?” he asked.

The grenade that wrecked the following car had caused serious casualties. Franz Ferdinand insisted on visiting the hospital. They travelled in the same car as before, with the same driver, and the man made a wrong turning. Potiorek knew at once. “This is the wrong way!” he shouted. The driver stopped, began to reverse and stalled the engine, five feet from Gavrilo Princip. He had been idling, killing time, and now the royal couple were in front of him and going nowhere. He stepped onto the running-board and shot the archduke and the duchess; they died almost immediately. He tried to shoot himself and failed, swallowed cyanide and survived.

Within hours, newspapers across the Austro-Hungarian Empire had heavy headlines: Heir To The Throne Assassinated in Sarajevo. Everyone knew that Serbia was behind it; who else could it be? Austria investigated and could prove nothing, which was not surprising: the Serbian Army’s Chief of Military Intelligence, Dragutin Dimitrijevic, was head of the Black Hand. He had sent the assassination squad into Bosnia, and he made sure that no trail of evidence led back to Serbia. But everybody knew. Princip was tried and convicted. He was 27 days short of his twentieth birthday and by law could not be executed. He was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. For Princip, it was a slower death sentence.

A man needed a strong physique and good stamina to survive conditions in a Bosnian jail. For a tubercular and underdeveloped youth (the Black Hand had once rejected Princip as being “too small and too weak’), prospects were bleak. He was permanently in chains. TB infected the bones of an arm, which was amputated. He died in 1918 at the age of 23. By then, the Great War had killed men by the millions. Except in the Balkans, the name of Princip meant nothing.

*

To modern eyes, the surprising thing about the assassination is how unsurprising it was. It shocked Austria-Hungary but the shock quickly passed. There was no mass mourning in Vienna. The Wiener Prater, the biggest amusement park in the country, carried on eating, drinking and making merry without interruption.

Outside Austria, the assassination was a tremor, not a bombshell, and often not even a tremor. “Nothing to cause anxiety,” was the comment by Le Figaro in Paris. By the standards of the age, the Archduke’s death was not extraordinary. Citizens of the Balkans often shot, bombed or stabbed their leaders. Throughout Europe, monarchs were especially at risk. A bomb killed Tsar Alexander II and gunshots wounded the first German Kaiser. Their heirs were never free from threat. There were seven attempts on the life of Queen Victoria. In the twenty years before the Great War, the heads of state in several nations were murdered: France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Serbia, Austria (the Empress, visiting Geneva in 1898, was stabbed by an Italian for no good reason). And there were many failed attempts, some of them very near misses. In 1900, if a Belgian anarchist had been a better shot, Edward VII would never have inherited the British throne: the attacker fired four times from six feet; all missed. And the assassinations of dukes and princes, prime ministers and governors, were too many to mention. It was not abnormal that Franz Ferdinand should be a target in 1914, nor that it should happen in the Balkans.

Even in death, Franz Ferdinand made sure that love conquered all. His will rejected a state funeral and made it clear that Sophie and he were to be buried side by side, not in the imperial vault but in his own family vault. It was a low-key ceremony. On his coffin lay his crown and all his Orders; on hers lay a pair of gloves and a fan, the symbols of a lady-in-waiting. Foreign royalty took their cue from the Emperor and stayed away. Nobody marched in the streets, demanding revenge. Vienna was that sort of city. The Viennese were annoyed by Sarajevo and something would have to be done about the malcontents in Serbia, but there was no rush to action. It was summer. Vienna enjoyed the good life.

One of the what-ifs of history centres on Prince Rudolf, son and heir of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. Of all the Hapsburg family, he was the most attractive and the most interesting: intelligent, imaginative, cheerful, charming, liberal, open to new ideas about the future of Europe. His tragedy – and that of Austria-Hungary – was that he knew the Empire, like all empires, could not survive without large change and that he was not the man to change it. If he inherited, the dead weight that lay on any Emperor’s shoulders would crush him. He was a romantic; he believed in happiness and fate denied it to him.

His father was no help: managing the affairs of a huge racial conglomerate left him no time for his son’s problems. So it’s hard to explain why Rudolf – lively, quick-witted, popular – chose to befriend and encourage his cousin, who was the opposite.

Franz Ferdinand seems to have been born angry. He was an “awkward, glowering, morbidly sensitive youth… always on the edge of exploding in black fury“. Rudolf was five years older, and good looking; Franz was heavy-set, clumsy, with a suspicious face; but Rudolf was like a brother to him, and a good brother at that. He sought to humanise his cousin, to show him that tact and generosity made more friends than grim hostility. He tried to persuade him that there was much to be enjoyed in this world; all men were not his enemies. Some advice got through. Much did not.

There was nothing that Franz Ferdinand could offer in return. Probably he never understood Rudolf’s dilemma, the fact that his debonair style masked a growing anxiety. Year by year, Rudolf faced the terrible prospect of inheriting an autocratic monarchy which he believed was dated and unsuitable and wrong. Yet he was a loyal son and he honoured his father. He was a patriot; he could not deny the Emperor’s wishes. The conflict agonised him: conscience against duty.

His first duty was to perpetuate the succession. He must have a wife and, God willing, a son. Franz Josef arranged the first part, with no consideration for the bride and groom, and the marriage failed miserably. Not only was there no love, there was no son. Stephanie, daughter of Leopold II of Belgium, was very young and not very bright. Rudolf made an effort to like his wife and to please his father, but it was hopeless. The harder he tried, the more miserable he made himself. He was quicksilver, she was lead. He was trapped between an impossible future and an intolerable present.

Drink helped to hide the reality, and drugs, and the charms of other women. The last of these was a seventeen-year-old, Baroness Marie Vetsera, beautiful but immature enough to agree that the ultimate romantic gesture would be for them to die together. In 1889 they went to his fairy-tale hunting lodge at Mayerling. He shot her and then himself. Now Franz Ferdinand was heir to the Empire.

Nobody cheered his succession: there was nothing princely about Franz Ferdinand. Almost immediately he fell ill, took a trip around the world for the sake of his sickly lungs, and recovered, to the disappointment of many. It was no secret that his ambition was to restore the pride and power of the Empire by governing it entirely from Vienna, firmly, with no nonsense from the many minorities. He planned to be an Emperor who could stand alongside the Tsar and the Kaiser and form a power bloc, a Dreikaiserbund, to dominate Europe. This could happen only if the old man would do the decent thing and die. Meanwhile, Franz Ferdinand, in a typically rebellious gesture, fell in love with Sophie, an outsider.

Franz Josef tried long and hard to make him change his mind. The marriage would be wrong: wrong for the Hapsburgs, wrong for the country, wrong for the couple. For a start, it would mean that any children would be disqualified from inheriting the monarchy. Leading members of the nobility harangued the Archduke. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Vienna added his weight. Nothing worked. Franz and Sophie wed.

From now on, whenever the Court assembled for special occasions and Franz Ferdinand walked at or near the head of the procession, Sophie had to tag along behind the forty-four Hapsburg Archduchesses. To the world she was minimised. To Franz Ferdinand, this treatment only served to underline his love for her, which was real. If anything, it intensified his ambition: when he was Emperor he would show them! But the years went by, and 1914 marked his twenty-fifth year as heir to the Empire. He was 51. His uncle was 84, and looked it, and obstinately refused to die.

A year earlier, Franz Ferdinand had developed a plan by which, when he became Emperor, he would reverse the Dual Monarchy which linked Hungary with Austria. In effect he would seize Hungary and absorb its powers into imperial Austria. Hungary would still be a monarchy but it would no longer be governed by Magyars.

Simultaneously, he planned to create a Triad regime: Austria, Hungary and a new third partner, a kingdom of the southern Slavs made up of Bosnia, Serbia and other elements restless for change. He, of course, would be monarch of each separate part and therefore Emperor overall.

He believed the Triad would strengthen the Empire without annexing Serbia. There were too many troublesome Slavs already in the Empire; he didn’t want more. The Triad was one of those solutions that look good on paper. What it failed to understand was the unstoppable force of nationalism.

The Slavs wanted the freedom to creat. . .