History's will was done.
0073
THAT SUNDAY VIENNA'S SKIES WERE AS BRIGHT AND JOVIAL AS SARAJEVO'S. So were those of nearby Baden, a cozy Biedermeier spa where, on a bench under an oak tree, the writer Stefan Zweig was reading a biography of Tolstoy. Shortly after half past two in the afternoon, something made him look up from the page. Something had stopped happening. It took him a moment to realize just what: a few hundred feet away, in the band shell of the Spa Park, the musicians had broken off in the middle of a waltz.
At Aspern Airfield on Vienna's southern edge, a young summer-happy crowd under straw hats and flowered bonnets craned necks at an aeronautical display. At half past two the smartly kepi'd brass band launched into "The Airmen's March." They never finished it.
In Vienna itself all green spaces were teeming vivaciously. Everybody was outdoors, celebrating Peter and Paul, a favorite Saint Day of the town. The poor basked and munched bacon rind on the "free" park benches. The less poor sliced cervelat on more comfortable chairs costing one heller each. The rich nibbled chocolate cake served prettily doilied on cafe terraces. All enjoyed the jasmine-scented air, the violins undulating in pergolas. Sometime before 3 P.M., policemen seemed to shoot out of the ground to whisper into the ears of orchestra conductors everywhere. Everywhere bows dropped away from strings. Flutes fell silent. The music stopped.
Never since the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf twenty-five years earlier had so much music stopped so suddenly in Vienna.
There was a difference, though. Back in 1889, Rudolf had been Austria's gracious and graceful young promise. His death had anguished the Empire, seeming to sever it from its future. Now, in 1914, Vienna was startled but not stricken. Franz Ferdinand's arctic image had thawed a bit lately, yet for most citizens he evoked neither hope nor youth nor grace. His public face was lined too grimly, his mustaches were too much like fixed bayonets. He augured oppression at home, abrasiveness abroad.
"If that Archduke had lived to sit on the throne," Freud said the day after the assassination to his patient the Wolf Man, "war with Russia would have been inevitable." The truth was precisely the reverse. Yet most Viennese shared Freud's breezy misjudgment and his mistaken relief. This included the realm's highest councillors, who knew the Archduke well. They absorbed his death rather briskly. Many had been of fended by his un-Austrian, unmannerly directness, by his uncouth insights. The journal of Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold confides that during the first cabinet meeting after the outrage". one noted, yes, consternation and indignation but also a certain easing of mood."
One noted it in Franz Joseph, too, at his Alpine villa in Bad Ischl. The All-Highest summer holiday had started earlier than usual in order to elude an encounter with Franz Ferdinand. By going on vacation the Emperor avoided official business like the Archduke's personal report on the Bosnian maneuvers. No more danger of that now. Franz Joseph promptly returned to his capital to deal with the enormity that freed him from all further vexations by his nephew.
"Certainly Papa was shocked," his daughter the Archduchess Valerie records in her diary, "but I found him amazingly fresh. When I said that Karl [The Archduke Karl, Franz Ferdinand's nephew, just become the new Crown Prince] would acquit himself well, Papa said 'For me it is a great worry less.'"
Throughout the Empire headlines screamed from front pages framed in black. But to his adjutant, the Emperor was candid about his composure. "God will not be mocked," he said. "A higher power has put back the order I couldn't maintain." Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand had disordered the hierarchy by inflating his wife's place in it. Now she had lost her life, and soon she would lose her inflated place.
At first, however, the Duchess's status seemed unchanged by her slaying. Cannons from the great fortress of Sarajevo had boomed to greet the live Crown Prince and his wife at their entry into the city on the morning of June 28. The cannons boomed again, twenty-one times, on the evening of June 29, to bid farewell to their embalmed remains. Though the funeral train puffed through the Bosnian night without halting, army regiments stood at attention at every station it passed. The train rolled on to the Adriatic coast where the foremost dreadnought of the Imperial fleet was waiting, the Viribus Unitis, on which the breathing Archduke has sailed toward Sarajevo just five days earlier. Now marines in dress uniforms sheltered the two caskets under a baldachin on the quarter deck and draped them with flags and flowers. Early on June 30, the huge man-of-war began to stream northward at a speed solemnly slow, under a hot sun, under black pennants and a flag at half-mast, followed by other battleships, cruisers, destroyers, civilian yachts, motorboats, fishing boats, even ferries, all with flags half-mast and flying black ensigns. This giant, wave-borne cortege moved close to the shore, where more cannons rumbled their mourning from the hills and priests stood in full vestments on the beaches, swung thuribles censing the corpses, and called out blessings for the souls of the faithful departed.
On the evening of July 1, the dolorous armada steamed into the harbor waters of Trieste. More cannons boomed, more regiments presented arms and lowered colors as the caskets were transferred from the black-garlanded ship to a blackgarlanded special train. Twenty-four hours later, on the night of July 2, it came to a halt in Vienna's South Terminal.
Here the responsibilities of the military ended. Here began the jurisdiction of Prince Montenuovo, First Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty, foe of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for life and beyond.
***
Neither Franz Joseph nor any member of the dynasty met the funeral train. There was just one exception. Only the new Crown Prince, the Archduke Karl, escorted his predecessor through the dark and empty streets.
Next morning the dead couple lay in state at the Palace Chapel from 8 A.M. to noon. Not one second longer. Some 50,000 people converged from every district of the town onto the Inner City. It was not so much affection that drew them as awe and curiosity. Most were turned away because of the absurd briefness of the viewing period. Those who managed to pass the chapel portals found something curious indeed.
The two coffins stood side by side, but their closeness only emphasized their inequality. Franz Ferdinand's was larger, much more ornate, and placed twenty inches higher than Sophie's. His bore the many insignia of his rank-the Archducal crown, the General's plumed helmet, the admiral's hat, his ceremonial sword, and all his principal decorations including the Order of the Golden Fleece. Her coffin was bare except for a pair of white gloves and a black fan. These were the emblems of a lady-in-waiting.
She had been a lady-in-waiting before her marriage. Her subsequent elevations to Princess and then to Duchess were now cancelled. Only a little over 100 hours earlier Franz Ferdinand had committed for her sake yet another disorderliness against the privileges of genealogy. He had carried her parasol before the honor guard at Sarajevo in order to lift her to his level before the world. Now his caparisoned coffin was used to push her down again, to exhibit her inferiority by contrast. The First Lord Chamberlain and the Serb schoolboy assassin, working in tandem, had put the woman back in her place.
There were many wreaths that morning, sent to the chapel from great notables like the American President Wilson down to humble folk like the Shoemakers' Guild of Lower Austria. There was no wreath from the Emperor or any other Habsburg.
At the stroke of noon the public was turned away. At 4 P.M. Franz Joseph appeared, accompanied by Archdukes and Archduchesses but not by any of Franz Ferdinand's children. Their mother was a morganatic corpse. They were morganatic orphans, hence not members of the Highest Family. No foreign dignitaries attended. Every monarch and president in Europe had wired his intention to come. By return cable the First Lord Chamberlain had advised them to "kindly have your ambassador act as representative to avoid straining His Majesty's delicate health with the demands of protocol." (The King and Queen of Rumania were politely stopped at the border.)