Konopiste. The esplanade leading to the rose garden at Archduke Franz Ferdinand's castle. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek
June 28, 1914, ten minutes before the assassination: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife leave Sarajevo City Hall. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek
The death car: Franz Ferdinand and his wife in the back seat with Count Harrach standing on the running board. Bildarchiv d. Ost. Nationalbibliothek
The assassin Princip just after his arrest. Culver Pictures, Inc.
But the arithmetic of the militarism alarming Colonel House was indeed awesome. Despite Socialist resistance, the Berlin parliament had raised the peacetime strength of the German military establishment from 660,000 to nearly 800,000. The three-year conscription period added enormous striking power to the French army. Within four years Russia's preparedness program had increased her forces by 500,000 men to 1,300,000, and her forces were growing still. In a similar span Austria had expanded her army from 400,000 to half a million. "We spend half as much on armaments as Germany," wrote the Socialist ArbeiterZeitung soon after the Generals' High Tea at Carlsbad, "yet Austria's gross product is only one-sixth of Germany's. In other words, we spend proportionately three times as much on war as Kaiser Wilhelm. Must we play Big Power at the cost of poverty and hunger?"
As these words were published on May 29, a cold spell shivered through the Vienna Woods. Twenty-four hours later the sun returned. Again lilacs flashed, cuckoos called, kites soared above apple blossoms in the hills wreathing the city. At almost the same time the First Lord Chamberlain made a smiling announcement at Schonbrunn Palace. The congestion in His Majesty's lungs had cleared. Most signs of pneumonia were gone and so was the fever. The august patient was making a strong recovery. In fact, His Majesty's physicians had reason to hope that he would be able to return to a normal schedule in about two weeks.
***
The legend of Franz Joseph could continue, perhaps, forever, in the flesh. And from the trivial to the crucial, everything seemed to change for the better along the Danube. Nevetle, a yearling from the stable of Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold, came in first at the Freudenau races in Vienna. This brightened the wit of upper officials supping at Meissl & Schadn. They were familiar with certain perfumed coaches often waiting at a side entrance of the Minister's offices at the Ballhausplatz. To them the fact that his filly had won the Con Amore handicap signified that-with the Emperor improved-the Count's continued tenure would also continue his luck in the conduct of affairs, be they foreign or female.
Indeed, private sport aside, the Foreign Minister could point with satisfaction to news important to the world at large. At a meeting with legislative leaders he quoted a statement just made by the French Prime Minister: It expressed deep admiration for the wisdom with which Franz Joseph-so recently restored-guided the destiny of the realm. Count von Berchtold also mentioned that the King of England had confirmed his intention to hunt with Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in Austria come fall. For Serbia the Count had words of hope and moderation. (Of Albanian complexities he said nothing, possibly because they were simply too complex: On the one hand, the insurrection against the mbret had caused half his government to resign and himself to seek refuge on the Italian warship Misurata; on the other hand, the mbret had created yet another decoration, the Order of the White Star of Skanderbeg, whose glitter on the breasts of some disorderly majors re-ordered things to the point where the mbret could slink back to his capital again.) On the whole the Austrian Foreign Minister was happy to conclude that Cassandra wails about the imminence of war were as unfounded as earlier evil rumors about the imminence of the monarch's death.
Berchtold was not the only one to exude optimism. Early in June his Berlin colleague Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg sent the German ambassador in London a note whose cheer contrasts with the grimness of the generals at Carlsbad just a couple of weeks before. The German Chancellor said that he could not blame Russia for wanting a stronger voice in the Balkans and that "I do not believe that Russia is planning an early war against us. Whether it will come to a general European conflagration will depend entirely on the attitude of Germany and England. If we two stand united as guarantors of European peace… then war can be averted."
A few days later, on June 24 (three days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand's arrival in Sarajevo), the German ambassador reported a most amiable chat with Sir Edward Grey, the English Foreign Secretary: "The Secretary said that it was his endeavour to go hand in hand with us [Germans] into the future and to remain in close contact over all the questions that might arise… As regards Russia, he had not the slightest reason to doubt the peaceful intentions of the Russian government. Nothing could take place that would give this relationship [between Russia and England] an aggressive point against Germany. He believed moreover that lately a less apprehensive frame of mind on the question had been gaining ground with us in Germany. " The Foreign Ministers kept soothing, the chimneys of gun factories kept smoking.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Vladimir Lenin did not anticipate war. When the Socialist International had called an Emergency Conference in Basel in 1912 on the threat of a worldwide conflict, he had not bothered to attend. Soon afterward he'd written to Gorki: "A war between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the revolution in all of Eastern Europe, but it is not likely that Franz Joseph and [Tsar] Nikolosha will give us that pleasure."
Now, in May 1914, Lenin had no eye for international clouds. It was not war between nations that was on his mind but the battle between factions within Socialism. He spent his huge energies on carving out an ever stronger Bolshevik position vis-a-vis the milksop Mensheviks and all other rivals contending for leadership of the revolutionary movement. From Poronin in the Galician mountains, on the Habsburg side of the Austrian-Russian frontier, Lenin's letters and couriers kept streaming into the Tsar's territory. They carried instructions on how to increase still further the circulation gains of the St. Petersburg Pravda that had put the Menshevik paper Luch out of business; how to spread Bolshevik control of the Metal Workers' Brotherhood so that Bolsheviks would dominate related trade unions as well; how to encourage a trio of Moscow millionaires-who hoped to liberalize the Tsar by encouraging pressure from the savage left-in the financing of Bolshevik activities. Lenin's chief purpose that spring: to present an array of Bolshevik voices as powerful as possible at the Unity Conference of all Russian Socialist Party segments set for July 1914 in Brussels, and then to march fully mobilized into the Congress of the Socialist International to open in Vienna on August 26.
Meanwhile Dr. Sigmund Freud girded for intramural grapeshot at his Congress-that of the International PsychoAnalytical Association scheduled for September 1914 at Dresden. Now, three months earlier, it was apple-blossom time in Vienna and at Berggasse headquarters "war" meant "Jung."
After all, relentless pressure from Freud's forces had just pushed the Swiss psychiatrist out of the presidency of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. Some sort of counterblow from Zurich must be expected. Yet June started the way May ended-quite clemently.
For one thing, evaluation had been completed of the tests Freud had undergone-with excellent news. There was no sign whatsoever of any intestinal tumor. Soon afterward Freud's symptoms subsided. His fear of cancer vanished together with his Emperor's pneumonia. As for the Freud-Jung front, the first salvo from the enemy was subtle rather than searing. Jung fired it by way of his address to the British Medical Association in Aberdeen: "The Unconscious in Psycho-Pathology." The speech abolished psychoanalysis, at least in Jung's vocabulary: He didn't so much as mention the word. But except through omission he didn't attack Freud's movement either; at one point he even credited his former mentor with calling attention to the importance of dreams.