Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War Read Online Free PDF

lamb, beef, crème aux ananas en surprise , cheese, ice cream and bon-bons. They drank Madeira, Tokay and Bosnian Žilavka. Next morning before leaving for Sarajevo, Franz Ferdinand sent a telegram to his elder son Max, congratulating the boy on his exam results at Schotten Academy. He and Sophie adored their children: he was never happier than when sharing their toys in the playroom at Konopiště. This was the couple’s fourteenth wedding anniversary, and also a date pregnant with painful significance for Serbs – the anniversary of their 1389 defeat by the Ottomans at Kosovo.
    The Archduke set forth in the dress uniform of a cavalry general – sky-blue tunic, gold collar with three silver stars, black trousers with a red stripe, surmounted by a helmet with green peacock feathers. Sophie, a buxom, stately figure, wore a white picture hat with a veil, a long white silk dress with red and white fabric roses tucked into a red sash, an ermine stole on her shoulders. Late on the morning of the 28th, in accordance with the published schedule, the archducal motorcade left Sarajevo station. Seven Young Bosnian killers had deployed themselves to cover each of three river bridges, one of which Franz Ferdinand was sure to cross.
    The royal automobiles passed through what the Catholic archbishop later described as ‘a regular avenue of assassins’. Shortly before reaching itsfirst scheduled stop, a bomb thrown by Nedeljko čabrinović, a printer, struck Franz Ferdinand’s car, but bounced off the folded hood before it exploded, wounding two of the archducal suite. čabrinović was seized and led away after making a half-hearted attempt to kill himself. He declared proudly, ‘I am a Serbian hero.’ Most of the other conspirators failed to use their weapons, later making assorted excuses for loss of nerve. The Archduke drove on to the town hall, where he displayed understandable exasperation when obliged to listen patiently to a pre-scripted speech of welcome. As the party re-entered their vehicles, he said he wished to visit the officers injured by čabrinović’s bomb. At the entry to Franz Joseph Street Gen. Potiorek, in the front seat of the archducal motor, expostulated: the driver was going the wrong way. The car stopped. It had no reverse gear, and thus had to be pushed backwards onto the Appel Quay, immediately alongside the spot where Princip stood.
    The young man drew and raised his pistol, then fired twice. Another conspirator, Mihajlo Pucará, kicked a detective who saw what was happening and sought to intervene. Sophie and Franz Ferdinand were both hit from a range of a few feet. She immediately slumped in death, while he muttered, ‘Sophie, Sophie, don’t die – stay alive for our children.’ Those were his last words: he expired soon after 11 a.m. Princip was seized by the crowd. Pucará, a strikingly handsome young man who had rejected an offered role at Belgrade’s National Theatre in favour of a career in terrorism, grappled with an officer who tried to attack Princip with his sabre. Another young man, Ferdinand Behr, also did his best to save the assassin from retribution.
    The plot to kill the Archduke was absurdly amateurish, and succeeded only because of the failure of the Austrian authorities to adopt elementary precautions in a hostile environment. This in turn raises the question: did the killing really represent the best effort of Apis, the arch-conspirator, or merely an almost casual, anarchic sideswipe at Hapsburg rule? No conclusive answer is possible, but the investigating judge at Sarajevo District Court, Leo Pfeffer, thought on his first glimpse of Princip that ‘it was difficult to imagine that so frail-looking an individual could have committed so serious a deed’. The young assassin was at pains to explain that he had not intended to kill the Duchess as well as the Archduke: ‘a bullet does not go precisely where one wishes’. Indeed, it is astonishing that even at close range