They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [182]
Balint spent his time wondering why she had sent for him and what it was she wanted to tell him. Her telegram had included the words ‘there are decisive matters we must discuss …’
His heart had constricted. What did she mean by the cold formal phrase ‘decisive matters’? What could there be that she was not able to write in a letter, that she had to tell him herself? What sort of danger could be threatening them now? In her last letter Adrienne had written that her daughter had suffered a lung hæmorrhage. It had been a short letter, and then there had been nothing for two weeks, though before that she had written nearly every day.
Then, five days ago before had come this telegram with every detail of their meeting carefully planned.
For what seemed an eternity Balint waited alone for Adrienne to arrive, alone with dismal thoughts and nagging distress and foreboding.
He must have walked up and down the terrace at least fifty times before he was able to pull himself together and force himself to think about other things. Otherwise I shall go crazy, he said to himself.
There were plenty of other matters to worry about.
At the end of June the Heir had been assassinated at Sarajevo, in a double tragedy which had taken the life not only of Franz-Ferdinand but also of his wife, the only being he had ever loved and probably the only person who had ever loved him. At the news of his death the Hungarian people had breathed more easily, for they all knew he was no lover of their country and no one, as yet, had imagined that his murder might lead to war. In this their feeling was reinforced by the general indifference with which the Heir’s death had been greeted in Vienna itself. He had even been buried with far less ceremony than his rank would normally have demanded and Balint had been one of the few politicians in Budapest who judged that this was a grave error, for if Austria-Hungary was to maintain her position as a great power it should at once have realized that the assassination had been the direct result of a Serbian conspiracy hatched in Belgrade and should have been treated as such. To those farsighted few the future seemed full of foreboding.
The prospects were indeed dark. Any military retaliation would inevitably explode into war, that war that had already twice seemed inevitable; once in 1908 after the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and then again, in the previous year, when the Balkan conflict had started.
There seemed to be only one hope. A royal prince had been brutally murdered and it was unlikely that any European monarch would wish to side with those who had killed the heir to a brother kingdom.
If the Ballplatz were to be sufficiently adroit to exploit this aspect of the crisis and demand satisfaction without raising the spectre of official Serbian complicity, if it were possible to do this without giving rise to the assumption that Austria was seeking an excuse to invade and annex Serbia, then perhaps war might be avoided.
This was not impossible. With skilful diplomacy it might just be achieved, but the crucial question still remained – was this what Berchtold really wanted and was he sufficiently able to bring it off? So far his handling of the Balkan problem did not give rise to hope. Maybe he could do it … maybe …?
It had never seemed that he wanted war, and indeed until now he had managed to avoid it, even if only by dint of shameful concessions. Would it be the same now?
But if he failed, what then? What would be the fate of Hungary, unprepared as she was, with an antiquated army and a leadership composed only of those who had always been bitterly opposed even to discussing anything that concerned the defence of the nation?
Balint tried to force himself to think only