In Europe

Viennese life, with gossip, road accidents and the daily adverts:‘Feschoform. Poetry in motion! For her firm bust, the true Viennese beauty thanks only Feschoform bosom enhancer!’ The clothing stores are competing with large advertisements, Germania offers a life insurance policy ‘covering acts of war and trips around the world’, and, to guard against the unmentionable, one is urged to use ‘H. Ungers Frauenschutz’.
    The monarchy is not altogether ignored. The foreign pages report a serious Greco-Turkish conflict, there are major problems with Serbia, the crown prince is leaving to inspect manoeuvres in a tense Bosnia. The editorial pages are full of reports on troop movements, ultimata and warships popping up here and there.
    Then there is the extra edition, which hit the streets on Sunday evening, 28 June, with huge headlines and the facts of the assassinations. In the days that follow the paper reports endlessly on the culprit's origins, the correct text of the crown prince's final words – ‘
Soferl, bleibe leben für unsere Kinder
’ (Sophie, stay alive for our children's sake) – the state of siege in Sarajevo, the preparations for the state funeral. The prince's last telegram to his children: ‘
Grüsse und Küsse von Papi
’. The reportof student demonstrations in front of the Serbian embassy in Vienna. On the Vienna, London and Berlin stock exchanges, the killings are the talk of the day, but trading remains calm. ‘The political consequences of this act are being greatly exaggerated,’ the paper writes on Thursday, 2 July.
    After that comes the arrival of the royal corpses and the state funeral. When it is all over, much of Vienna goes on wrangling for days about whether protocol was correctly observed with regard to the nobility and the military. The city sinks into a holiday torpor. Lessner's department store fills pages with the summer sales of foulard silk.
    There is a little summertime news. Wilhelm will leave on 6 July for a holiday cruise on the
Hohenzollern
. He will be gone for three weeks, to the seclusion of the Norwegian fjords. His chief of staff and the state secretary of the navy will also be leaving Berlin. The Austrian cabinet does not convene until Tuesday, 7 July, ten days after the killings in Sarajevo.
    On Monday, 13 July, more than two weeks after the attack, the
Neue Freie Presse
opens for the first time with the growing tension between Austria and Serbia. Princip and his cohorts, it seems, were aided by the Serb secret police. Austria demands redress. It continues to be a glorious summer, and everyone is confident that international diplomacy will succeed in extinguishing the fires of conflict. Meanwhile, envoys are sent back and forth and old alliances reconfirmed: Austria does not dare to act without Germany, and receives the assurance that Germany will help out; Russia supports Serbia, but has no real desire to go to war. The paper reports that the Russian ambassador in Belgrade has died of a heart attack. Otherwise everything remains still, for almost three weeks. On 16 July, French president Raymond Poincaré pays a state visit to St Petersburg. The stock exchange is caught in the summer doldrums. Even the keen-witted British minister of foreign affairs, Edward Grey, will be leaving for a weekend of fishing on 25 July.
    It is only after 20 July that unrest truly arrives in the pages of the
Neue Freie Presse
. Russia is openly interfering in the affair, the paper hints at ‘steps’ and ‘ultimatums’, on Friday, 24 July we read that the German kaiser plans to come back early from his holidays, and two days later – along with the call to mobilisation – the word ‘war’ appears in the paper for the first time.
    Even the Serbian chief of staff is caught unawares. That weekend he happens to be in Budapest, visiting his daughter, and he is promptly arrested by Austrian plainclothesmen. The
Neue
: ‘Putnik jumped up, pushed one of the detectives away and pulled his pistol. The impression was that he planned to take his own life.’ Meanwhile, his daughter started weeping and wailing. The next day the general has already been released and put on a train with due ceremony, ‘on the grounds that the Austrian Army is possessed of too much chivalry to rob the enemy army of its highest commander’.
    In the evening edition of that same Sunday I come across, for the first time as well, an editorial warning that a war between Austria and Serbia could become