So the ambassadors came-and departed again almost immediately together with the Emperor. Vienna's Cardinal Piffl ran through the funeral services in less than fifteen minutes. At 4:15 P.M. the bodies were locked away. They had been brought to the chapel in the dark of the previous night. They were not taken out again until the new night was very dark again.
Vienna of the schone Leiche, of the corpse beautiful, where paupers scrimped and schemed to be buried like princes, now had a prince reduced to an impoverished and furtive funeral. None of the nobility had been invited to pay their final respects to the Heir Apparent or to accompany him on his last journey through the streets of the capital. But as the remains of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were rolled out of the chapel, a band of aristocrats pushed past the police. Led by the Archduke Karl and by Count Chotek, Sophie's brother, they made less lonely the scant procession behind the coffins moving to the West Terminal.
Near midnight a car coupled to a milk train took the dead sixty miles west along the Danube to the small town of Poch- larn. There only a delegation of local veterans saluted, in old uniforms wetted down by a sudden squall.
Two plain black hearses of the Vienna Municipal Undertaking Service transported the coffins onto a ferry. In midstream a thunderbolt frightened the horses into a panic that almost pitched the caskets into the Danube.
At 1 A.M. on July 4, the hearses gained the other shore. A few minutes later they stopped before the castle of Artstetten,[4] Franz Ferdinand's family manor. In its crypt the pair found the peace that now began to drain away from the world outside.
The next day all of Vienna was abuzz with that midnight in Artstetten. Some deplored its meanness. No one saw it as overture to vast, lethal chaos. On the contrary. The court considered that funeral a fitting end to dissonance. It recovered a harmony disturbed by the slain Crown Prince himself.
His very testament assaulted tradition. For centuries Habsburgs had been buried beneath the nave of Vienna's Capuchin Church. Franz Ferdinand, however, had anticipated that his Sophie would not be allowed to enter eternity among them. Since they would exclude her, he would exclude himself. His Last Will defied the custom of the house he had come so close to heading: He was to lie not with his kinsmen but with Sophie in the vault he had had built for them both in Artstetten.
As a result-in Palace eyes-their remains were inevitably subject to the consequences of his wilfulness. Since Franz Ferdinand and Sophie had died together, his final journey must share not only the destination but the limits of hers. Their funeral must not take on the grandeur his would have shown had he married suitably. The aberration he had visited on Habsburg while alive must not be ratified by their state funeral after his death. No: The ceremonies of his death must atone for the irregularity of his life. And the fact that a teenage zealot had killed him made not a scintilla of difference. The madness of a schoolboy must not change dynastic principle. That principle must override assassin and assassinated. In sum, the funeral was essential to Franz Joseph's "restoration of order."
Of course another source of disorder remained: Serbia. It was more dangerous than the man it had killed. Sarajevo proved that Serbia had been eating away far too long at the Empire's security, dignity, tranquillity. The First Lord Chamberlain's etiquette had disciplined the late Archduke. Next, Serbia must be punished. And for that purpose etiquette was not enough.
Within twenty-four hours of the murder, the Belgrade government wired condolences to Vienna, vowing that Serbia would". certainly, most loyally do everything to prove that it would not tolerate within its borders the fostering of any agitation… calculated to disturb our already delicate relations with Austria-Hungary." These sentiments came too late. They were not enough.
Belgrade's Prime Minister made a further gesture of appeasement that at the same time rebuked the ideology of Colonel Apis's Black Hand. The Prime Minister ordered all places of entertainment closed in Belgrade on the day of Franz Ferdinand's funeral. He also cancelled the rest of the weeklong celebrations of St. Vitus, the Saint's Day so sacred to the Serb national soul. It was not enough.
Throughout Bosnia, Habsburg-loyal Croats and Muslims smashed shops and inns and hotels owned by Serbs. In Bosnian schools, Serb students were beaten up. In Vienna, mobs kept attacking the Serb Embassy, barely stayed by police. It was not enough.
Not after Sarajevo. Not when Princip's initial interrogations established the fact that he had done the deed after a stay at Belgrade, probably with Belgrade's help. None of it was enough.
Order in Franz Joseph's sense could be restored only by a decisive act of the Habsburg government against Serbia. But an act of what kind? Of what force? Franz Joseph instructed his ministers to submit options.
At a cabinet meeting hastily called on June 29, four days before the funeral, Foreign Minister von Berchtold showed himself still guided by the pacifism of the late Crown Prince. He proposed relatively temperate demands: that Serbia dismiss its Minister of Police, jail all suspected terrorists, and dissolve extremist groups.
Prime Minister Tisza of Hungary sided with Berchtold for reasons of his own. Tisza could not be very furious with the Serbs for removing his worst enemy, the Crown Prince; nor did Tisza relish a war in which a victorious Austria would swallow Serbia, thereby increasing the Empire's Slav population and reducing the Magyars to an even smaller minority. Still, nei ther Berchtold (whose main resource in a debate was a small, fine flourish of his cigarette-holder) nor the Calvinist Tisza (who kept quoting I Kings 2:33 on the dangers of bloody vengeance) were a match for General Conrad. For now Conrad's anti-Serb wrath was triumphant. His one tamer, the Crown Prince, lay dead. And the Crown Prince's very death by a Serb documented that Conrad had been right all along. There was a deadly snake hissing at Austria's heels, he now said; it would not do to slap at this serpent. Its skull must be crushed.
Conrad's argument would have overridden all others, had it not been for the German envoy in Vienna, Count von Tschirsky. Von Tschirsky acted in the spirit of his monarch's prudence vis-a-vis the Serbs, the prudence so laboriously inspired in the Kaiser by the late Crown Prince. On June 30, two days after Sarajevo, the German ambassador called on the Austrian Foreign Minister to warn". with great emphasis and seriousness against hasty measures in settling accounts with Serbia."
Berchtold made the most of these cautions when he went to his Emperor. Austria, he argued, could not afford to define its stance against Serbia without Berlin's backing. After all, Russia was Serbia's protector; Austria needed the weight of the German army-the world's most powerful-as counterpoise to the Tsar's endless regiments. Only Germany's full support would keep St. Petersburg from meddling. But, as the German ambassador had just shown, only a temperate Austria would earn such support.
The Emperor agreed: Conrad was not to do any Serb skullcrushing, at least not yet. Any decision of the kind must be made shoulder to shoulder with Berlin. Franz Joseph himself would elicit Kaiser Wilhelm's sympathies in a handwritten letter.
4
Today the town of Artstetten, like thousands of others all over Europe, has a memorial to the local fallen of the Great War. But only the Artstetten does the list begin with a Crown Prince and his wife^ The Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg-Este and Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg.