The Assassination of the Archduke by Greg King

The Assassination of the Archduke by Greg King

Author:Greg King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group


THIRTEEN

The Fatal Invitation

A collision of wills seemed inevitable between Franz Ferdinand and Conrad, especially after the summer of 1913. On August 17, the emperor promoted the archduke to inspector general of the empire’s armed forces. A delighted Franz Ferdinand decided to rush to Ischl, where the emperor was on holiday, and thank him personally. He tried to bring Sophie, thinking that the emperor would not object to her presence at a private dinner, but he had not counted on Franz Josef’s continued ambivalence. On learning of his nephew’s plan, the emperor craftily asked Bardolff to dine with him as well. As head of the archduke’s Military Chancery, Bardolff ’s invitation turned a private occasion into an official dinner, and one from which Sophie was thereby excluded.1

Three weeks later, in September of 1913, the archduke attended the autumn maneuvers in Bohemia as inspector general for the first time. Things went badly between him and General Conrad. The archduke berated the general, accusing him of inefficiency, and angrily confronted him over missing church services (Conrad was an atheist). It was, Conrad complained to a friend, “a scene without parallel”; never before had he been subjected to such brutality.2 By the time the maneuvers had ended, Franz Ferdinand was even more determined to replace Conrad. As for the chief of the general staff, he, too, left Bohemia depressed and disgruntled. On his return to Vienna he again submitted a letter of resignation, but the emperor again refused to accept it.3 “As highly as the Archduke formerly praised him to the skies,” said an observer, “so now he hates him.”4

This was the backdrop to the fateful invitation to attend army maneuvers the following June near the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Even after a century the circumstances surrounding the invitation are surprisingly muddy. Conrad gave two contradictory versions. He insisted that he first learned of the visit on September 16, when the archduke personally told him he planned to attend and to take Sophie with him.5 Yet Conrad later said he knew nothing of the proposal until September 29, when General Oskar Potiorek, governor-general of Bosnia, informed him of the archduke’s plan.6 “On whose initiative the decision to attend the maneuvers rested,” Conrad wrote, “I do not know.”7

Many historians have assumed that Franz Ferdinand’s recent elevation to inspector general of the armed forces demanded his attendance at the Bosnian maneuvers. This is what his son Max later suggested, saying that his father felt obligated to appear in his role at the head of the Imperial Army.8 In fact, though, Franz Ferdinand went to Bosnia only as an observer. He did not attend the maneuvers as inspector general and had no official role in the exercises.9

Max suggested that his father was excited about attending the impending maneuvers in Bosnia.10 Perhaps this was true, when the proposal merely involved watching the exercises and staying at a nearby resort, but any enthusiasm for the trip quickly waned when it swelled to encompass an unwelcome ceremonial visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.



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