The Chief of Staff, handsome blond mustache a-twitch, answered that he humbly and duly noted the Highest sentiments thus conveyed to him. Within twenty-four hours, at an All-Highest audience, he recommended calling more reserves to the colors.
***
Now Franz Ferdinand had no recourse but Franz Joseph's great ally, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was a desperate move, and the Crown Prince executed it cunningly. What made it a bit easier was his habit of clothing anti-war arguments in vehement rhetoric. It suited his temperament, but in addressing the fustian Wilhelm it was also part of a strategy well calculated in advance. His message to Berlin resounded with carefully crafted bluster. The Crown Prince intoned the mightiness of great realms like Germany, Austria, and Russia; he hurled contempt at scummy little bandits like Serbia who tried to foment trouble between the giants; he vowed to wipe away the poison sprayed by these pygmies by insisting on troop reductions along the Russian-Austrian borders, and to continue insisting regardless of political risks but hopeful of the backing of his powerful great cousin and friend, the German suzerain….
Seldom has pacifism bristled with such militancy. Europe's foremost swaggerer was quite beguiled. "Dear Franzi," Kaiser Wilhelm answered, "Bravo! It can't be easy, that sort of thing. It takes stubbornness and stamina. But success will earn you the enormous credit to have freed Europe from such pressures. Millions of grateful hearts will remember you in their prayers… Even the Tsar will be grateful when he can order some of his divisions back from the border…"
Franz Ferdinand called the Chief of Staff to Konopiste, thrust at him Wilhelm's words, dismissed him in triumph. At the same time a copy of the Kaiser's letter reached Franz Joseph. It happened that shortly before, the special emissary to the Tsar, sent by Franz Joseph at the Crown Prince's request, returned with a message of "most friendly and fraternal feelings" from Nicholas II. Shortly afterward, Franz Joseph came to a decision. He instructed his diplomats to moderate their anti-Serb stance. And he ordered General Conrad to demobilize some reserves. Recent reinforcements along the Russian border were withdrawn again.
The problem didn't end there-but February did: a cold and difficult month in which the Crown Prince had done some good work. As March began he was ready to relax for a while in gentler climes.
His First Lord Chamberlain summoned his private train. With his wife, his daughter, and two sons, he traveled southward to Merano, in the semitropical foothills of the Dolomites, making a detour around Vienna, of course.
"Schani, trag den Garten ausse!"
It was a command often heard after winter's end in Vienna. Headwaiters shouted it at busboys: "Johnny, carry the garden outside!" All over town Johnnys carried onto the sidewalk foliage made of green-lacquered cloth leaves, then added tables and chairs to complete "the garden terrace." Spring had come to Vienna's restaurants as it did to the rest of this most theatrical of all cities: It came in the form of a stage set.
By April most props were in place. Only the mood music seemed still a bit wrong. Perhaps the weather had something to do with it. Not that the temperatures remained wintry; usually the sun drove away the night's chill. But there had been no rain for weeks, and the drought had delayed budding. Only restaurant gardens displayed some leafy green. It was fake and dusty. Dust, sooty, grainy proletarian dust, drifted from the proletarian districts in the West where the sanitation department did not trouble to send many brooms. Uncouth dust mottled the breasts of goddesses whose marmoreal charms supported balconies of the Imperial Palace. But dust could not stop Vienna from play-acting like Vienna. The city kept furbishing the decor and the costumes of Maytime.
Tailors cut and stitched deep into the night. Now was the moment for the city's fashionables to start fittings for their summer wardrobe, which this year featured slimmer singlebreasted suits. Fiacre drivers used their lunch hour to wield the paint brush; time to refresh the gray-black design of their carriages. On the gothic elegance of the menu card of Demel's, the ultimate patisserie, a herald of the warmer season appeared-iced coffee with a tiara of whipped cream.
Still, the trees in the Vienna Woods were less than verdant; so, underneath the busyness, was the feeling in town. Even on the day of the Resurrection, a sense of Ash Wednesday weighed on the roofs. Over the Easter weekend, Sunday, March 23 and Monday, March 24, twenty-three people tried to kill themselves, a majority of them in that unswept slum to the West; seventeen of these drank concentrated lye. It was the cheapest poison and therefore the most cost-effective means of suicide. Over six thousand crammed nightly into the municipal Wdrmestuben. These were "warming rooms" where the capital's homeless could sleep sitting up on wooden benches.
The somberness of Lent, stubborn past its season, extended to the upper reaches. True, the rich could afford to ease their spirit at chic new entertainments like the cinema. A film of Dante's Inferno was the dernier cri in the genre. You could see it at the Graben Kino, a theater with seats of plush and walls of silk and an orchestra of two pianos and three violins to make musical the shadows on the screen. No wonder that the jeunesse doree elected the Graben Kino as a favorite courtship rendez-vous. Perhaps it was no wonder, too, that in the early spring of 1913 one went a-Maying to the Inferno.
Dust thickened as the rains held off. Fires increased. Cinders sprinkled the time of rejuvenation. A touch of hell at the edge of heaven: that seemed to be the motto of the weather, of politics, and of the social scene as exemplified by the dinner party of Herr Hermann von Passavant, Consul General of the German Reich in Vienna.
On Monday, March 31, his table saw a cross-section of the powerfuclass="underline" Baron Conrad, the Chief of Staff; Hermann von Reininghaus, the beer magnate of the Habsburg Empire, with his lush, dusky-eyed wife; Baron Leo von Chlumetzky, influential publisher of the Oesterreichische Rundschau; and Joseph Redlich, a key member of Parliament as well as a political scientist and assiduous journal keeper who often recorded in detail his experiences as intellectual-in-residence of the Vienna establishment.
Delicious was the Tafelspitz that evening; delicate, the juxtaposition of personalities. Everyone in the know (and everyone here was) knew of the capital's foremost triangle: Herr von Reininghaus, Frau von Reininghaus, and the Chief of Staff. The last two were seated next to each other.
Alas, the piquancy could not be fully savored. Just as the General looked deeply into his neighbor's eyes, history interrupted him with a knock at the door. It was his adjutant with a bulletin concerning the latest Serb aggression. During the last few weeks the Serbs and their Montenegrin henchmen had reopened hostilities with Turkey, driving the Sultan's troops south on Albanian territory until they reached a critical zone, the town of Scutari, near the coast. Vienna had stated publicly that extension of Serb control into Scutari would jeopardize Austria's security and undermine all hope of Balkan stability. The news which had just reached the General indicated that Scutari might fall at any moment.
The General's facial tic had accelerated. His irritation dominated what was left of dinner. He should get up right now, he said, and walk to the telephone and call the Military Chancellery at the Imperial Palace and request permission through the Duty Officer to bring the Adriatic fleet into action. Before dawn he could dispatch a battleship and two cruisers with marines ready to land. They would make short work of Belgrade's provocations in that area. It would be the logical thing to do. But there was no point calling the Palace. Lately he was not allowed to apply logic when it came to Serbia. Never! Not once. Each time he tried, the Palace said No, pressured by the Crown Prince. It was always the bugbear of Russian intervention. Why, just recently His Majesty had said that war with Russia would be the end of His monarchy. Actually it would be the end of the Tsar. Conrad himself, with his own hands, had placed on the Emperor's desk intelligence that proved the illogic of any Russia-panic. This intelligence came from a source so high he could name its identity only to the Emperor (it was Count Sergius Witte, former Prime Minister at St. Petersburg), and the information proved that thirty million non-Russians would revolt against the Tsar-including Finland and Poland. The time to strike Serbia was now, before Russia could get organized. But that was out of the questionjust because it would be the logical thing!