When Diplomacy Fails

The July Crisis Anniversary Project

A day-by-day account of the events that occurred 100 years ago.

Reactions. Today is the 29th of June 2014, and around this point in history 100 years ago,

occurred the following events.

Conrad von Hotsendorf, Austria's military chief of staff, opted a train at Sarajevo to Croatia,

at 10.30pm on the 27th of June 1914. It was the last time he would see Franz Ferdinand alive.

By noon the next day, Conrad was told the terrible news while passing through Zagreb,

and received an official telegram from Vienna

hours later, which confirmed the death of the Austrian heir and his wife. Conran was already

perceptive enough, or angry enough, to jump to conclusions regarding the assassination. As he believed

even at this early stage, when details were at their sketchiest, that Gavrilo Princep could not have

worked alone. Believing the act to be the result of a wider Serbian conspiracy, Conrad sent a

telegram to his emperor, Franz Josef, in Vienna, and asked if he should cancel his planned

maneuvers in Croatia, and instead returned to Vienna. Franz Josef agreed, and that evening, Conrad boarded the train

to Vienna, by that time the most sombre city in Europe. Ever since the first Bosnian crisis of

1908-209, in which Austria annexed the region of Bosnia-Herzegovina into its empire,

Conrad had been urging that Austria crushed the Serbs. In 1913 alone, it has been

recorded that he suggested war with Serbia 25 times. Extremely belligerent, Conrad was a wiry, perhaps

even sinewy man, with the energy to reform that would irk the old Austrian order, but with the same

outdated views on the nature of war

that would also please them. He had his appointment to Franz Ferdinand personally, who saw Conrad as

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