To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [49]
In France, President Raymond Poincaré was at the races at Long-champ, where the Baron de Rothschild's horse Sardanapale won the Grand Prix, when he received news of the killings, and did not bother to leave. The French had something far more intriguing to distract them: the sensational murder case against Henriette Caillaux, wife of a former prime minister. She had shot and killed a newspaper editor who threatened to publish love letters she and her husband had exchanged when both were still married to others. At her trial the next month, the murder would be judged a crime of passion for which a woman, by definition not in control of her emotions, could not be held accountable. She was acquitted.
Even today it seems extraordinary how swiftly Princip's two bullets, fired in a city most people had never heard of, set in motion events that would so profoundly reshape our world. Few periods have been as intensively studied as the six weeks that followed the moment Princip squeezed off his shots, unsuccessfully swallowed his poison capsule, and was wrestled away from an angry crowd by sword-wearing policemen. (He would die of tuberculosis in prison four years later.)
If the Archduke and his wife had not been assassinated, might the war have been avoided? Possibly, but given Austria-Hungary's impatience to crush Serbia and Germany's ambitions to dominate Europe, it is hard to imagine a conflict of some sort not taking place—not when we listen, for example, to the Kaiser, at a court ball in 1913, pointing out the general designated "to lead the march on Paris," or asking, fruitlessly, two successive Belgian kings for the right to begin that march through Belgium, or when we read General von Moltke, in 1915, writing to a friend about "this war which I prepared and initiated."
Princip's bullets may have provided the spark, but—German and Austro-Hungarian aggressiveness aside—three other factors steepened Europe's plunge toward the abyss. First was the pair of rival alliances that obligated some countries to come to the aid of others in case of war. Second was the pressure felt by all the major Continental powers to mobilize their large forces of trained reservists who could triple or quadruple the size of any peacetime army. Mobilizing an army in 1914 required several weeks: reservists had to be called up, get to their bases, and collect their rifles and equipment; then millions of men, their weapons, and tens of thousands of tons of food and supplies had to be laboriously deployed by train and horse-drawn wagon to wherever the fighting was expected to be. The very time necessary for mobilization, however, was something inherently destabilizing, for if the other side looked about to mobilize, and you didn't do so, you would be at a fatal disadvantage. A third dangerous factor was the tremendous advantage gained by any country that attacked first, for this guaranteed that the fighting would at least begin on another country's territory.
In Vienna, Emperor Franz Joseph seemed remarkably unperturbed by the death of the nephew he disliked. What he and his advisers saw in the assassination of the heir apparent was something they had long sought: an excuse to attack Serbia. Anti-Serbian riots soon broke out on Vienna's streets. In Germany, when a launch raced out from shore to bring news of the murders to his yacht off Kiel, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been a close friend of Franz Ferdinand and impatient for him to succeed his aging, side-whiskered uncle, was crushed. A few days later at his palace, he told Vienna's ambassador to Berlin that he would back any Austro-Hungarian move against Serbia—and he urged that the upstart Serbs be taught a lesson with no delay. In effect, the Kaiser, who had far more power than a constitutional monarch like Britain's, gave Austria a secret blank check to invade.
Was anyone in the Serbian cabinet aware of the plans of Princip and his tiny band? No proof of this has ever surfaced, but it hardly mattered now that Austria had the perfect pretext to wipe Serbia off the map.
July was the month when