Cigars finished, the Crown Prince accompanied the Kaiser on an inspection tour of an Austrian battleship. Time for the Hohenzollern to steam on to Corfu. Wilhelm kissed Sophie's hand good-bye. Austrian cannon boomed their salute while Wilhelm was piped aboard his yacht. Then Franz Ferdinand could rid himself of his German Grand Admiral's uniform. He could toss away the "carving knife." He could not shed his frustration.
In Vienna's Hofburg a few days later Franz Ferdinand briefed his monarch on what he called, unsmiling, "an interesting meeting, more fruitful on some difficulties than on others, such as the awful Hungarian problem." Franz Joseph's answer was a cough. He had a cold. He did not ask for amplifications. He did not consider Hungary a more awful problem now than it had been for, say, the last forty years. His nephew was always throwing at him "problems," "difficulties," "awfulnesses." It was one thing for Franz Ferdinand to keep preaching peace with Serbia. That was serviceable. It offset the war cries of General Conrad. But must he preach peace so turbulently? Problematizing Hungary? Exaggerating Serb complications? Discomfiting Franz Joseph's old age? His nephew always rushed at him with one direness or another, no matter how kind Franz Joseph tried to be. Right now he had been kind again: Despite Montenuovo's advice, he had invited the Crown Prince's morganatic family to stay at the Imperial Palace.
They did not stay there long. At first they planned to remain until the opening of the racing season on Easter Sunday. But within forty-eight hours the Crown Prince had had enough of Vienna; enough of the impassivity of its Emperor; enough of the myopia of its government; enough of the snideness of its court. He summoned his Lord Chamberlain who in turn mobilized his footmen and chauffeurs. Then the Crown Princely caravan of automobiles roared off to Konopiste. They left behind nothing but a dark fierce cloud of dust.
Vienna's first turf gala of 1914 proceeded without the heir Apparent glooming in the Imperial Box at Freudenau. That in itself added to the verve of the occasion. What's more, the weather smiled. April 12 turned out to be an idyllic Easter Sunday. Not one cloud flawed a sky that was only a nuance paler than the dominant fashion color that spring: Capri blue. The Princess Montenuovo, wife of His Majesty's First Lord Chamberlain, displayed the hue delightfully in her ensemble: a blue gown trimmed with white moire and tango-yellow ribbons, topped by a collar of snowy lace. Many thought it brave of her to subject her generous figure to the narrow cut mandated by Paris.
Of course the younger, slimmer crowd could better accom modate French couture. But quite a few of them were missing from the aristocrats' boxes or the haut bourgeois grandstands. They'd been seduced by another attraction of newer vogue. At Aspern Airfield an "Aeronautical Parade" had drawn so many of the jeunesse doree that their Rolls-Royces, Austro- Daimlers, Graf & Stifts, and Mercedes-Benzes overflowed the parking space. They all watched the heavens that had become a stage. A fighter plane of the Imperial and Royal Air Force looped the loop, a double-decker towed a flock of gliders, a giant eight-passenger "bus-plane" disgorged parachutists whose green-and-scarlet umbrellas floated down the sunshine.
The same Easter Sunday in Vienna also featured a third spectacle. It was a dual demonstration on the Ringstrasse against two kinds of unemployment. Some six thousand workers who had recently lost their jobs were marching with placards demanding work. Another crowd protested the dissolution of Parliament. Bickering between German and Czech deputies had slowed down legislative business. This had given Count Karl von StUrgkh, Prime Minister of the Austrian half the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the excuse to invoke the notorious Paragraph Fourteen of the realm's constitution. It allowed him to declare the parliamentarians unable to exercise their function and to suspend the Vienna (as distinct from the Budapest) parliament. Until new elections would be calledin the indefinite future-the Sturgkh administration would be answerable only to the Emperor.
Paragraph Fourteen had been invoked before. It had caused ructions before that had been shrugged off before, but never with the concision of the remark reportedly made on Easter Sunday at the Freudenau track. It was attributed to the Prime Minister himself and might be just flippant enough to be his. Count von Sturgkh had to watch the early races alone in his box; when the friend he had invited finally appeared, he blamed the lateness on a traffic back-up caused by demonstrators on the Ring. "I suppose," the Prime Minister was much quoted as saying, "I gave them spring fever."
Once Minister of Education, Count von Sturgkh had started his career as an academic, a frequent resort for impoverished nobility. He was rather pedantic by nature and perhaps for that reason often forced the sort of humor that would make him competitive with the cynical wit of his colleague, Count von Berchtold.
On that Easter Sunday at the track, Berchtold was spooning coffee ice cream a few boxes away in the Jockey Club enclosure. As we know, Count von Swrgkh was Prime Minister only of Austria while Count von Berchtold's office of Foreign Minister encompassed all of Austria-Hungary, with interests far beyond the yawps of complainers on the Ringstrasse. Perhaps it was a sign of how uncouth the times had become that professional concerns should intrude on his Sunday leisure.
Friends kept dropping by between races, always on some agreeable pretext. Ladies offered the Berchtolds chocolate truffles from silk-lined boxes; gentlemen kissed the Countess's hand and complimented her on the Capri blue feathers of her hat. And all along they touched on certain questions. The rumors, for example, about the Tsar's daughter being betrothed to the son of the Rumanian king. Would that align Rumania into Russia's pan-Slavic stance against Austria? And the stories about impending Russo-British naval exercises off German ports-was that to develop the encirclement of the Central Powers? And could one include in that category the 250 million francs France recently loaned Serbia for arma ments? And how serious was the Serb-fomented mutiny that had broken out against the mbret, Austria's friend on the Albanian throne? And was it true about a clash between Austrian and Italian advisers on the mbret's Inner Council? And speaking of Italy, in a confrontation between the Triple Entente (Russia, France, Britain) and the Triple Alliance (Austria, Germany, Italy), how reliable would Italy be?
"And who," Count von Berchtold answered, "will win the Prezednit handicap this afternoon?"
His friends laughed. His ice-cream-spooning sang-froid reassured them. The Foreign Minister leaned back in his box seat, in black top hat and gray topcoat, one slim knee crossed over another. A grandee with stables of his own, he knew how to document his racing judgment. Sacher (named after the torte) figured as winner of the handicap. The Foreign Minister, who always weighed the latest intelligence, had learned of a slight problem with the favorite's right foreleg. He bet on Radoteur.
Radoteur came in first. The Foreign Minister ate a chocolate truffle.
The next day, Monday, April 13, Count von Berchtold boarded his salon car in Panama hat and spats. He was off to a sub-tropical clime: Abbazia, the palm-dotted Habsburg resort on the Adriatic, not too far from Miramare where the Crown Prince had, unsuccessfuly, smoked a cigar with the Kaiser.
In Abbazia the Foreign Minister would be holding a more felicitous meeting-a conference with his Italian counterpart. A few little points needed to be discussed. One of them concerned Albania: Italy wished to participate in the industrial progress of that brand-new country but found Vienna a shade insensitive to its economic interests there. For its part, Vienna felt occasionally baffled by exaggerations in the Italian press about the "oppression" of Italians in South Tyrol.
Count von Berchtold did not entirely succeed in smiling away all differences between himself and his colleague, the Marchese Antonio de San Giuliano. But the Count, an impeccable host, did treat the Marchese to a dirigible lunch that offered poached salmon, cold champagne, and the view of a long stretch of Illyrian coastline from the gondola of a Zeppelin cruising fifteen hundred feet high. The Count also gave a great garden party in the Marchese's honor, at a seaside villa hung with Chinese lanterns and filled with the music of strolling violins. To top it all off, he motored with the Marchese to the Imperial and Royal stud farm at Lippiza where the famed white Lippizaner horses performed the subtle arts of dressage for his Italian Excellency. After five days of gastronomy, scenery, and politesse, the Austrian Foreign Ministry could announce with satisfaction that Italy remained as firm a member of the Triple Alliance as ever. Then Count von Berchtold returned to Vienna on April 19, in time for another Sunday demonstration on the Ring.