As ordered, so done. Berchtold had successfully achieved the end of Act I.
Act II opened well, or so it seemed. Abruptly, out of the blue of yet another lovely day, the Austrian Ambassador Baron von Giesl placed a telephone call "of utmost urgency" to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgrade. It was 4:30 P.M. on July 23, and the Ambassador said that he must deliver "an extremely important communication" to the Prime Minister-who was also the Foreign Minister-that very afternoon at 6 P.M.
Prime Minister Panic was not even in town. He had no reason to stay close to his office. True, at the beginning of the month, Serbian diplomats abroad had reported rumors that something "strong" might be brewing in Vienna. Yet week followed week after Sarajevo, and nothing "strong" materialized. Serbia began to turn to internal matters. An electoral campaign engrossed the country in mid-July. Panic left the capital for a political tour, speaking against Apis's extremist party. It was at this point that the Austrian ambassador placed his peremptory call.
Since the Prime Minister was away on the hustings in the Southern provinces, the Finance Minister substituted for him. The Finance Minister received that astounding note from the ambassador at 6 P.M. of July 23. It did not reach Pasic until 8 P.M. that night, when he heard over the telephone details of the suddenness, the severity, the smooth murderousness of Vienna's demands. He had less than forty-eight hours to answer them.
Panic cancelled all further election speeches. He returned to Belgrade at five o'clock the next morning and immediately called a cabinet meeting. Sessions continued throughout the day, through most of the night that followed, and through most of the day after.
Shortly after 6 P.M. of Saturday July 25, a tall rotund man with a seignorial white beard and a black formal frock coat hurried on foot from the Foreign Ministry to the Austrian Embassy a few blocks off. It was Prime Minister Pasic, holding in his hand an envelope with his government's reply.
When he was admitted to the Ambassador's office it was 6:15 P.M., a quarter of an hour after the deadline set by Vienna. Therefore Ambassador von Giesl did not ask the Prime Minister to sit down. He himself read the note standing. It was a messy document, revised and re-typed many times, after frenzied debates and febrile consultations with the Russian and French embassies. The final version in Baron von Giesl's hands had an inked-out passage and a number of corrections made by pen. That did not interest the Austrian ambassador, nor did the reply's conciliatory and mournful prose, nor did its acceptance of all points of the demarche except those demanding the participation of Austrian police in pursuit of Serbian subjects on Serbian soil. Such requests, the note said, Belgrade "must reject, being a violation of the Serbian constitution and of the law of criminal procedure."
It was this rejection that mattered to the Ambassador. It was the necessary next event in Austria's scenario. The Ambassador had counted on it. He had anticipated it. That was why he stood before the Serbian Prime Minister in his trav eling clothes. That was why his code-book had already gone up the chimney, why his secret papers had been shredded, his luggage packed, and his motor-car readied at the front door. That was why he only needed to sign a statement prepared in advance: It said that "due to the unsatisfactory nature" of the Serbian response, the Austro-Hungarian Empire saw itself forced to break off relations with the Kingdom of Serbia.
At 6:20 P.M. a messenger took the statement from Baron von Giesl's desk for delivery to the Serbian Prime Minister's office. As the messenger left, Giesl repeated the statement orally to the Prime Minister who still stood before him. Then the Austrian ambassador bowed, wished the Prime Minister good day, walked to his car. At half past six he boarded a train that crossed the Austrian frontier ten minutes later.
33
THAT SAME EVENING OF JULY 25, THE AUSTRIAN FOREIGN MINISTER Count von Berchtold sat in the Ischl office of Emperor Franz Joseph's military aide-de-camp. They were waiting for a call from the War Ministry in Vienna, which in turn waited for a telephone call from the Embassy in Belgrade. When the clock struck 6:30 P.M., the Foreign Minister, white-faced, said he had to leave, he must get some fresh air. Two minutes after he had gone, the telephone rang with the staccato news. Serbia rejects essential demand. The aide ran to have himself announced at the Emperor's villa.
Franz Joseph received his message (as the aide would remember) "hollow-eyed" and "hoarse of voice." "Also dock…" he said. ("So, after all…"). Then, after a long silence, he added, "But the rupture of relations needn't necessarily mean war!.
What sudden change. Barely two days earlier, in the same idyllic Alpine setting, with the same beneficent weather, the same Emperor and the same Foreign Minister had looked forward to just this news: Serbia's rejection of the demarche, which now justified its military punishment. Why, then, was the Emperor shaken? Why the Foreign Minister's ashen cheeks?
Because the play had begun to fail.
In Belgrade Berchtold's libretto had proceeded on cue, but elsewhere the second act was suddenly unravelling. The trouble began with Austria's chief supporting actor, namely Germany.
On the surface nothing seemed wrong. Vienna had sent the text of the "jewel" demarche to Berlin on July 22. Within a day the Austrian ambassador cabled from the German capital that the Kaiser's Foreign Minister "thanks for the communication and assures me that the government here is entirely in agreement with the contents of the demarche."
Actually the Wilhelmstrasse was only imitating the attitude struck by its overlord, the absentee Kaiser (still away on his cruise) before he had boarded his yacht. Aping their master, German ministers stepped before the footlights to stiffen their upper lips at Europe: On July 27, Berlin officially and publicly advised its ally not to accept an offer of mediation from Britain.
But Berlin performed only the external mechanics of the Austrian script, as Vienna was soon to know. Internally things were rather different. A cable sent by the German Foreign Ministry to its principal diplomats abroad said". we have had no influence of any kind on the wording of Austria's note to Serbia, and no more opportunity than other powers to take sides in any way before its publication…" The tart implication here was made plain to the Austrian ambassador by the German Foreign Minister von Jagow shortly after he had read Vienna's demarche. "I at once gave my opinion to His Excellency [Jagow's memoirs would state] that the contents of the Austrian note to Serbia seemed pretty stiff and going beyond its purpose… I expressed my pained surprise… that the decisions of the Austrian government had been communicated to us so tardily that we were deprived of the possibility of giving our views on it. The Chancellor, too, to whom I at once submitted the text of the ultimatum, thought it was too harsh."
If Berlin thought so, in its heart of hearts, what about capitals less friendly?
On July 24, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey returned to London from trout fishing on the river Itchen, and the First Lord of the Admiralty Mr. Winston Churchill from his beach idyll near Norfolk. They met in Parliament, which was still in something of a dither over the Irish Home Rule Bill. But the debate suddenly gave way to Sir Edward's voice. He was reading from a paper just handed to him-the Austrian note to Serbia, ". an ultimatum [this is Churchill describing the scene] such as had never been penned in modern times before. The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone [i.e., the Irish issue] faded back into the mists… and a strange new light fell on the map of Europe."