In the spring of 1914 Germany and Austria-Hungary, who both had old scores to pay off in connection with Morocco and the Balkans respectively, reached the zenith of their military preparations. The German army was ready at all points, and the Austro-Hungarian army was as ready as it can ever be. The airships and aeroplanes were only waiting for the signal to leave their sheds; the heavy guns, an array of monsters, were already marshalled in the artillery parks. All that was wanted was a pretext. As Dr. Schiemann had pointed out in the _Kreuzzeitung_, however, Germany could have a war with France merely by letting Austria fly at Serbia’s throat. Prophetic words, which a political crime was to bear out, while at the same time it was to give William II. the pretext he required for appearing before Europe as an instrument of justice and vengeance!
The Archduke Francis Ferdinand will go down to posterity without having yielded up his secret. Great political designs have been ascribed to him, mainly on the strength of his friendship with William II. What do we really know about him? That he was strong-willed and obstinate, very Clerical, very Austrian, disliking the Hungarians to such an extent that he kept their statesmen at arm’s length, and having no love for Italy. He has been credited with sympathies towards the Slav elements of the Empire; it has been asserted that he dreamt of setting up, in place of the dual monarchy, a “triune” State, in which the third factor would have been made up for the most part of Slav provinces carved out of the Kingdom of St. Stephen. Immediately after he had been murdered, the _Vossische Zeitung_ refuted this theory with arguments which seemed to me thoroughly sound. The Archduke, said the Berlin newspaper, was too keen-witted not to see that he would thus be creating two rivals for Austria instead of one, and that the Serb populations would come within the orbit of Belgrade rather than of Vienna. Serbia would become the Piedmont of the Balkans; she would draw to herself the Slavs of the Danube valley by a process of crystallization similar to that which brought about Italian unity.
From year to year, the Archduke had acquired more and more weight in the governance of the Empire, in proportion as his uncle’s will grew weaker beneath the burden of advancing age. Thus he had succeeded in his efforts to provide Austria-Hungary with a new navy, the counterpart, on a more modest scale, of the German fleet, and to reorganize the effective army, here again taking Germany for his model. Among certain cliques, he was accused of not keeping enough in the background, of showing little tact or consideration in his manner of thrusting aside the phantom Emperor, who was gently gliding into the winter of his years at Schönbrunn, amid the veneration of his subjects of every race. Another charge was that he appointed too many of his creatures to important civil and military posts.