World War I, Part II: The King and Apis
Those who say they foresaw the precise moment of collapse are most often acclaiming their own hindsight
In 1903, more than a decade before a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist student would spark the First World War, a coterie of Serbian Army officers entered the royal bedroom in the old Beaux-Arts palace in Belgrade that was the home of the Obrenović dynasty. Armed with revolvers, they hunted down the 26-year-old king, Alexander I, and his deeply unpopular queen Draginja, flushing them out of their hiding place in a wardrobe and filling them with bullets. The assassins then mutilated the bodies beyond recognition with their sabers, and, in an ecstasy of triumph, hurled the corpses from a second-floor window, onto piles of garden manure.
The army officers’ leader—known by his nom de guerre “Apis,” for the primordial Egyptian bull-god—was a prominent member of the same Black Hand society that would plot the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand a decade later. King Alexander had been something of a tin-pot tyrant, with Draginja rumored to be infertile; his successor ushered in by the May Coup, Peter I, introduced greater press freedoms and a constitution, even as Serbian nationalism continued to simmer, unabated. The most fervent of the Serbs resented the great Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires fencing in their own would-be pan-Slavic enterprise. King Peter’s son was another ill-fated Alexander—he would preside over the transformation of Serbia into Yugoslavia, but was assassinated by an irate Macedonian in the end. Apis, the bull-headed organizer of two regicides, was executed by firing squad three years into the war, in 1917.
The point here—besides telling you to read The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark, which is truly excellent and unafraid to talk about pork tariffs as well as regicide—is that you never know where in history you are. It may well be that the May Coup organizers—decorated military men full of fanatical zeal—could not have imagined a higher drama than the one they engaged in, throwing a disemboweled king and queen onto the dung-heap that fed the royal roses.
Yet it was the tremblingly nervous teenaged fanatic Gavrilo Princip who stepped onto the footboard of the stalled royal motorcar, and shot Franz Ferdinand and his hapless wife. Princip then tried to kill himself, and failed. Another of the conspirators, eighteen years old, threw a bomb that hit the royal motorcade but caused no injuries, ate a cyanide pill that only made him vomit, and finally jumped into a river. It being summertime, the water was less than a foot deep; he died in prison three years later of tuberculosis.
After the deaths of millions of his subjects—in addition to all those who succumbed to wartime starvation as a result of naval blockades, to the slaughtered Belgian villagers, to the victims of typhus and other collateral expirations—the empire Franz Ferdinand had been set to inherit was as gone as he was. You never know where along history’s timeline you find yourself, and those who say they foresaw the precise moment of collapse are most often acclaiming their own hindsight.
There are these pat narratives concerning the past, and World War I is particularly prone to being subject to them—despite, or perhaps because of, its staggering complexity. As author Hew Strachan points out in The First World War, the depiction of a stagnant, pointless conflict that devoured millions is a fundamentally Western European, primarily British lens on things. All those poems and novels and memoirs of disillusionment by upper-class gents in the lower echelons of command have left their mark.
But the war wasn’t pointless for the socialists of Russia, who overthrew their tsar. Or for the suddenly independent countries of the Balkans. The greedy re-distribution of the Ottoman Empire’s tatters made the war a tragedy for Arabs bent on self-determination. There were so many wars within wars: a four-year struggle between Italians and Austro-Hungarians in the snowy heights of the Dolomites that saw thousands die by avalanche; Australians and New Zealanders fighting Atatürk’s forces on the heights above the Dardanelles, and dying by the score. There was the British conquest of Jerusalem by the British, who toppled a four-hundred-year-old mayoralty. Darkest of all were the bitter struggles over Germany’s African colonies, in Kamerun and Togoland, where Nigerians and Ghanaians and Togolese died for the empires of thieves.
The motto of the Black Hand was “Unification or Death.” As the postwar world order fulfilled the grandest Serbian nationalist ambitions—and its leaders were shot against a wall—it could be argued that this is a rare occasion of a slogan delivering its full promise. You never know where in history you are and it looks different depending on where you’re standing.
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Consider this, if you like, a loose sequel to my last column on the First World War—this overweening obsession of mine has not yet attained catharsis through column inches, apparently—and a reflection of what constitutes collapse. Nowadays we are less concerned as a global polity with the killing of kings, preferring the slaughter of innocents. But imperialist arrogance continues to cut a bloody swathe through Europe and elsewhere. It is impossible to heedlessly inflict violence around the world and not have it come home to you. Rot starts at the core, and there’s an air of madness in America these days—too much fanaticism, too much zeal, bundled up in inchoate narratives that make a lot less sense than Serbian nationalist epics played on the guzla.
Our stories are bad and weird and riddled with lies. This country has more guns than people in it. A good portion of those people are being told over and over and day after day that their queer neighbors are harming their children, and so a man shot up a gay bar last week in Colorado. Someone else shot up the power stations in a whole North Carolina county, and no one’s saying why but forty thousand people are in the cold and dark as you read this. There was a drag show going on that day, subject to protest and counterprotest, but there hasn’t yet been a formal linkage, just a bunch of bullet-riddled power lines, and dialysis patients hoping the hospital backup generators are going to work.
You want to ask: are we going to be OK? An expert wrote feelingly in the New York Times about our need to psychologically prepare for World War III, so you tell me.
I have felt for so long this sense of impending cataclysm. You run out of ways to say it—the marvelous satirical BBC program Cunk on Earth declared, we’ve “teetered up to the edge of the brink of the precipice, and gazed straight into an abyss of no return.” In this long unraveling, most of the historical analogies floating around have been tied to the nineteen-thirties—the rise of fascism, the state’s curtailing of minority rights, and, by extension, the carefully edited, heroic all-Americans ready to save the day at the end of the story.
But in considering what this present moment feels like, I am more drawn to 1903, to 1910, to the summer of 1914. Everything’s overheated and complex and intertwined, the specter of imperialism is fully revived in a land war, too many people have the means and motives to inflict the fatal wound. But who knows what the catalyst will be—a dirty bomb in Warsaw, an invasion of Taiwan, a teenager standing on a bridge at the right time, looking at a motorcade over the barrel of his gun? There was jingoism then too, there were the wildest stories that made people act. You never know where in history you are, or who will be beside you. All you can do is stand at the brink of the precipice and holler at the bull-faced god if you see him pass. Tell him to leave well enough alone. Let the roses be fed by anything but blood.
Beautifully written, clear warning of a fearsome future amid an account of a brutal past.