Countdown to War. Day 4, 1 July: so there weren't just Serbs in Bosnia. Who would have guessed?

One hundred years ago today, Wednesday 1 July 1914, our young Mancunian railwayman and his friends, leafing through their Manchester Guardian, would have read that the bodies of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, brought to the coast from Sarajevo, had been picked up by a battleship of the Austrian navy.
“Austria has a navy?” Martin might have asked. “How does a country without a coastline get an Empire that stretches to the sea?”

Inland, the assassinations had sparked trouble:

Violent demonstrations have been made in many parts of Bosnia by Catholics and Moslems against the Orthodox Serbs. Many shops and houses have been looted and several persons injured. The disorders, in part no doubt genuine proofs of devotion to the Hapsburgs [the imperial family], would be more important than they are were they not largely due to an old political animosity.

Curious. So there were three communities in Bosnia, not just the Serbs. And they didn’t like each other very much. Nor were the problems limited to Bosnia: in the Diet (parliament) of the Austrian province of Croatia, “an angry quarrel between the Croatian Nationalists and the Croat-Servian coalition caused a suspension of the sitting.”

More internal dissension, then. 

That chap, Princip, the student who shot the Archduke and his wife, was a Serb nationalist, but in the province next door it seemed there were Croats who were just as nationalist in their own cause. Always a recipe for trouble, that kind of thing. Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia were none of his business, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling it would be a good idea to sort out those tensions before they became really nasty.

Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary
He had plenty on his plate.
Long before Martin or his mates knew it

In another piece, the Manchester Guardian turned its attention to Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary. Not in connection with Austria or Serbia, but with the other end of the Balkans altogether, where Turks and Greeks were being thoroughly vile to each other, and leaving a trail of bodies behind them. Challenged by his critics, Grey had one of his officials reply:

...as regards your proposal that his Majesty’s Government should suggest to the Greek and Turkish Governments their acceptance of an international commission to regulate the reciprocal emigration of their Christian and Moslem subjects, and the adjustment of losses thereby incurred, I am to state that Sir E. Grey considers that these objects should be attainable by the Turco-Greek Commission already designed for the purpose and, further, it is his experience that offers of mediation are seldom acceptable to Powers at variance unless they can be made at the desire of both of them.

Yes. If there was too much bad blood between them for the parties to agree among themselves, mediation was never going to work. The idea of swapping populations, on the other hand, was a good one. It made no sense to have Christians living in Muslim countries or Muslims in Christendom. The faiths weren’t designed to get on with each other.

How could there ever be peace between them?

Countdown to War. Day 2, 29 June: fatal incident in Sarajevo

One hundred years ago today, on Monday 29 June 1914, the Manchester Guardian carried news that shocked Europe.

The day before, a bloody event had shaken Sarajevo.

Sarajevo? Martin wasn’t even sure where it was. A better-informed colleague explained that it was the capital of Bosnia which, with neighbouring Herzegovina, had been reduced to a province of Austria-Hungary, following the Congress of Berlin 36 years earlier. That was the congress that carved up Africa among the European powers, but it also carved up bits of Europe, and Austria-Hungary had taken Bosnia-Herzegovina.

On Sunday, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie, had been visiting Sarajevo where he intended to take part in army manoeuvres.

Franz Ferdinand and his family, including Sophie, his wife, who was killed with him
She had been born a mere Countess, so the children were cut out of
the succession to the imperial throne: a countess's blood was far too lowly

Not everyone was pleased about Austria’s takeover of the provinces. Serbia, next door and independent, felt that the large Serbian population of Bosnia would rather like to be part of a Greater Serbia, and a lot of that population agreed. One of them was a student, Gavrilo Princip. He decided to take dramatic action, and targeted Francis Ferdinand and his wife.

“Assassination of the Austrian Royal Heir and his wife,” screamed the Guardian. “Shot by student in Bosnian capital. Two attempts during a procession.”

Two attempts? In the morning, a bomb had been thrown at the Archduke’s car, but no one was hurt. In the afternoon however:

The Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria, nephew of the aged Emperor and heir to the throne, was assassinated in the streets of Sarayevo, the Bosnian capital, yesterday afternoon. His wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, was killed by the same assassin.

The paper pointed out that “the assassin ... is a student named Gavrilo Prinzip. He is 19 years of age... He studied for some time in Belgrade.”

Belgrade. The capital of Serbia proper. Clearly a centre for grooming impressionable young men, turning them into extremists ready to take violent action for their cause.

On being interrogated, Prinzip declared that he had intended for a long time to kill some eminent personage from nationalist motives. He was waiting to-day for the Archduke to pass by, and made his attempt at a point where the motor-car had to slacken speed when turning into the Francis Joseph Strasse.

Martin was appalled. He might not think much of Emperor Franz Joseph, but he couldn't help feeling sorry for a man who had suffered so much misery in his life. His brother Maximilian, another article explained, had been made Emperor of Mexico, only to be shot when he was overthrown. Then, as the Manchester Guardian delicately put it, “in 1889 the Crown Prince Rudolf and a lady of the Court to whom he is known to have been attached, died by violence in a mountain shooting lodge. His death is still a mystery. Officially he is said to have committed suicide...”

Also in 1889, a cousin of the Emperor who married an actress set off with her to South America and was never heard of again. And in 1898, Franz-Joseph’s own wife, the Empress Elizabeth, was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist.

This catalogue of disasters deserved at least a wry shake of Martin’s head. Poor bastard. He’d had to put up with a lot. Nasty business.

It wasn’t, naturally, the only nasty business reported in the paper that day. Sir Edward Carson, the rather loudmouthed leader of the Ulster Protestants, had been making more noise in the Emerald Isle. But there was nothing new about that.

At least there was one heartwarming piece, The Art of the Umpire, about the difficulty of managing a cricket match. It was gratifying to know that a South African cricketer felt that “the umpires in England are a credit to English cricket.”

Something at least was right with the world.