Then the Archduke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary, whose assassination was
the ostensible cause of this devastating war--what kind of man was he?
Quite a different person from the Crown Prince, and yet, so far as I
could judge, just as little worthy of the appalling sacrifice of human
life which his death has occasioned. Not long before his tragic end I
spent a month under the same roof with him, and though the house was
only an hotel, it was situated in a remote place, and though I was not
in any sense of the Archduke’s party, I walked and talked frequently
with most of the members of it, and so, with the added help of daily
observation, came to certain conclusions about the character of the
principal personage.
A middle-aged man, stiff-set, heavy-jawed, with a strong step, and a
short manner; obviously proud, reserved, silent, slightly imperious,
self-centred, self-opinionated, well-educated in the kind of knowledge
all such men must possess, but narrow in intellect, retrograde in
sympathy, a stickler for social conventions, an almost unyielding
upholder of royal rights, prerogatives, customs, and usages (although
by his own marriage he had violated one of the first of the laws of his
class, and by his unfailing fidelity to his wife continued to resist
it), superstitious rather than religious, an immense admirer of the
Kaiser, and a decidedly hostile critic of our own country--such was
the general impression made on one British observer by the Archduke
Ferdinand.
The man is dead; he took no part in the war, except unwittingly by the
act of dying, and therefore one could wish to speak of him with respect
and restraint. Otherwise it might be possible to justify this estimate
of his character by the narration of little incidents, and one such,
though trivial in itself, may perhaps bear description. The younger
guests of the hotel in the mountains had got up a fancy dress ball,
and among persons clad in all conceivable costumes, including those of
monks, cardinals, and even popes, a lady of demure manners, who did
not dance, had come downstairs in the habit of a nun. This aroused the
superstitious indignation of the Archduke, who demanded that the lady
should retire from the room instantly, or he would order his carriage
and leave the hotel at once.
Of course, the inevitable happened--the Archduke’s will became law,
and the lady went upstairs in tears, while I and two or three others
(Catholics among us) thought and said, “Heaven help Europe when the time
comes for its destinies to depend largely on the judgment of a man whose
be-muddled intellect cannot distinguish between morality of the real
world and of an entirely fantastic and fictitious one.”