Part rumor, part fact, such things sifted through the mists shrouding the group. In April 1914, Gavrilo Princip knew one thing for sure. He must reach Apis or at least one of his men. They would help him achieve his purpose.
Just before the month ended, he made contact. Through an intermediary he met an authentic agent of the Black Hand, the Serbian Army Major, Voislav Tankosic. The encounter began awkwardly on the terrace of the Acorn Garland. As soon as the two shook hands, they recognized each other. Twenty months earlier, during the First Balkan War, Princip had come to Belgrade to volunteer for the Major's guerrilla force operating against the Turks. Tankosic had turned down the sixteenyear-old schoolboy for being too young, too short, and too frail. Now Princip was eighteen; despite the adult mustache he had grown, he was as short as ever and looked even thinner. But his light blue eyes did not blink as he explained, softly and calmly, that he would need guns and bombs to blast away the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo.
This time Major Tankosic did not reject the stripling out of hand. He told him to stand by. "Someone" would have to be consulted.
"Someone"-obviously Apis-took his time. A week passed. Princip relayed his impatience to the Major. Tankosic sent back a message: "the boy" should read the newspapers; Franz Joseph had fallen mortally sick, and Franz Ferdinand, as the new monarch, would have better things to do than bother with summer maneuvers in Sarajevo. The whole thing was off.
"The boy," Princip, sent back a note: He did not give a fig about the Emperor's illness. He would kill Franz Ferdinand whether he wore the crown or not, whether he came to Sarajevo or not. Nothing was off. Now, what about the weapons?
Shortly thereafter a runner came with a second message to Princip's room: "You and your friends, go to Topcider Park now." Princip rounded up Graben and Cabrinovic, shepherded them to Topcider, one of Belgrade's more deserted parks. The three were easy to spot-a thin little youth, flanked by two older, taller companions. As the trio approached the park's main entrance, a man waiting there raised his hand slightly.
He led them to a remote spot in the greenery. He gave them a wooden box containing three revolvers and a cardboard box filled with ammunition. He pointed to the stump of an oak tree shaped rather like a human body. He showed them how to load; how to aim; how to fire.
He showed them day after day. The sun shone, the pistols blazed, the Park echoed, the oak stump splintered. When the two weeks' course was over, Princip emerged as the best student. From a standing position "the boy" scored six hits out of ten shots at a distance of more than 200 yards. At a distance of 60 yards he scored eight absolutely perfect hits. And he was almost as sharp a marksman while running. Graben and Cabrinovic did not match his skill but had become fair shots.
After their last class the three went to the Golden Sturgeon cafe for a discreet celebration. Since Princip enforced abstinence, they ordered mineral water. His blue eyes did not blink and he did not smile when he asked his friends to raise their glasses to the health of the old Emperor of Austria. His Majesty's recovery would bring Franz Ferdinand into convenient range. At least on one coffeehouse terrace in Belgrade, it was an exciting spring.
In Sarajevo, Danilo Ilic nursed the same murderous hope for Franz Joseph's recuperation. Ilk, Gavrilo Princip's earliest co-conspirator, was awaiting his fellow-assassins' arrival in the Bosnian capital.
Meanwhile he began to write for Zvono, a new Socialist paper with avant-garde leanings. Though only a very junior comrade, he lost no time in attacking the Socialist Party leadership in Bosnia. "It is strange," he wrote, "that the words of our Party bosses should accord with those of the Austrian Foreign Minister who favors independence for Albania while denying the same right to the South Slavs… The consequence of such foolish Socialist leadership is a diminishing Socialist consciousness.
Now, the bosses of Bosnia's small Socialist Party received their cues from headquarters of the much larger movement in Vienna. Which is to say, they were guided by Viktor Adler, doyen of working-class opposition throughout the Habsburg Empire. In assailing "the bosses," Ilk really assailed Adlernot quite fairly.
Adler's ArbeiterZeitung often did mock the farce of Albanian independence. It often did deplore the suppression of South Slav autonomy. But in 1914, Austrian Socialism also felt the need to combat the spread of unemployment, the pauperization of the employed in their slums, the acceleration of armament production everywhere. In this press of problems, Adler's support of Slav rights was incidental rather than insistent. Ilia felt it was inexcusably casual.
There were other differences between Ilk and Adler; between the Sarajevo Socialist itching to get an Archduke into his gun sights, and the Vienna Party chief championing, but not forcing Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. Ilk was the son of a cobbler; Adler, the scion of a stockbroker. Ilk was twenty-four; at sixty-two Adler was the Emperor's junior by more than twenty years and yet, in Ilk's eyes, also a worn dynast ruling his domain too long. Ilia, always in white shirt and black tie, was an unrelentingly neat rebel. Adler, on the other hand, with his gray mane uncombed, his thick glasses loose on his nose, his perpetually strained voice (whose cracked eloquence struck Trotsky)-Adler must have seemed to Ilk like the Herr Professor of a passe revolution.
Yet Ilia and Adler had surprisingly much in common. Nationalism with a Nietzschean twist had launched them both into politics. Ilia had joined Young Bosnia, the student group of teetotalers. Their South Slav "Will to Power," fueled by Nietzsche, troubled Austrian authorities in 1914. Nearly forty years earlier Austrian authorities had been troubled by Adler's friends for similar reasons. In Vienna, police agents had monitored a student organization that mixed vegetarianism, populism, and a pan-German weltanschauung into a radical brew. At its meetings young Gustav Mahler had pounded out "Deutschland, Deutschland fiber Alles" on the piano, young Viktor Adler had declaimed insurrectionary verse, but its lodestar-like Young Bosnia's decades later-had been Friedrich Nietzsche, then still alive and unwell, seething brilliantly among his sleeping potions and headache pills. Indeed on Nietzsche's birthday, October 18, 1877, Viktor Adler had signed a letter to the master, acclaiming him as "our luminous and transporting guide."
What had inspired Adler's group in the 1870s appealed to Princip and Ilia in 1914-Nietzsche's pronunciamento that for the fulfilled life man needed to be doubly divine: divine like Dionysus, god of the orgiastic joy harvested from the heroic deed (a deity often represented by an Apis-like bull!); divine also like Apollo, god of the serenity harvested from contemplative reason.
Now, in the spring of 1914, Ilic's friend Princip acted out the Dionysian principle of his favorite Nietzsche poem:
Everything that I have becomes coal.
Flame am I, surely…
Dionysian bullets were singing through a man-shaped tree stump in a Belgrade Park. In Munich, Adolf Hitler-another young temperance fanatic-was burning to lead a Dionysian master race. (Hitler's last birthday gift to Mussolini in 1943: The Collected Works of Nietzsche.) In Vienna during the Great War, Viktor Adler's son Friedrich-named after Friedrich Nietzsche-would commit a Dionysian crime; he would shoot and kill the Austrian Prime Minister von Stdrgkh at the restaurant Meissl & Schadn. Adler Senior, however, as befits an elderly asthmatic revolutionary of middle-class origins, had fallen back on Nietzsche's more sedate Apollonian aspects. By 1914, he no longer saw the superman as the hero of some magically wild folk poem but as a rational social being, no longer as the superb Teuton but as the emancipated proletarian. To help the worker liberate his brethren, the Party must give him an education.