e and more upon police-agents
and such like, so that in the Balkan War, when the heroes could no
longer be counted, when more than five standard-bearers fell one after
another in carrying the same standard and when it was proposed to
decorate _en bloc_ the Ku[vc]i brigade, the soldiers refused to accept
what had been so profaned.

THE RIDDLE OF SARAJEVO

On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the
Austro-Hungarian throne, was murdered at Sarajevo.

In the course of July 1914 the Austro-Hungarian Government (wherein
far more influence was exerted by Count Tisza, the wealthy and
incorruptible, the vastly ambitious Magyar Prime Minister, than by the
Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, the courteous, somewhat frivolous
man of the world who was doomed to execute reluctantly the orders of
Berlin and be swept away by the resulting storm, while the brave and
brutal Tisza, fighting for the glory of the Habsburgs and the greater
glory of the Magyars, rode upon the storm for years)--the
Austro-Hungarian Government in July 1914 dispatched to Sarajevo a
commissioner for the purpose of investigating whether the Serbian
authorities had anything to do with the Archduke's assassination. This
official, Baron von Weisner, a very distinguished Professor of
Political Economy who was a German Bohemian[73] with staunch German
sympathies, reported in the same month that he was convinced that no
accusation whatever could be levelled against Belgrade. (As a matter
of fact the Serbian police, who had information that a plot was being
hatched in Bosnia, gave warning to the Austrian authorities; but no
notice was taken of this, not even when a similar warning was uttered
on June 21 by the Serbian Minister at Vienna, nor were any special
precautions laid down for the Archduke's safety. It was all rather
mysterious.) "Byzantium, the everlasting and unconquerable Byzantium,"
says an Austrian publicist,[74] "had won another victory.... The
Habsburg Empire," says he, "only wished to defend herself against
those invisible and irrepressible intrigues." And after denouncing the
Serbs for throwing a spark into the powder barrel on June 28, 1914, he
accounts for their conduct by writing that "it is the tradition of
nomad blood to tear down ancient, noble palaces, replacing them by
nomad huts." What we know is that General Potiorek, the Governor of
Bosnia, who had urged Francis Ferdinand and his wife to continue their
programme after th