Page - 102 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

102 Bloody Sundays and even France was only classified as being of little importance ; necessary in terms of diplomatic activity but otherwise not really worth taking into consideration. And so, work began in Vienna on compiling a dossier that was to prove once and for all that Serbia was guilty of the murder in Sarajevo and of anti-Austrian agitation in general. After all, in 1909, Serbia had expressly extolled good relations. The dossier was to include all the accusations and evidence that had been gathered in Vienna over time, as well as all the results of the investigation into the background to the Sarajevo assassination. On 4 July, the first meeting took place of a commission that subsequently became known as the ‘war factory’. Essentially, there were six top officials from the Foreign Ministry who with the aid of a former state attorney, the legation councillor Baronet Friedrich von Wiesner, had the task of compiling everything that could be used as evidence to portray Serbia in a certain light. War was the only thing on every- one’s minds. On the day after the Joint Council of Ministers, Wiesner was ordered to formulate specific demands on Serbia. They should not, however, be too easy to fulfil. Minister Berchtold even went one step further : he demanded that harsh terms be set that should end in a brief ultimatum.219 Wiesner requested more material before trav- elling to Sarajevo himself on 10 July. Belgrade was all too aware of the precarious situation and demonstrated a clear will- ingness to cooperate. At the same time, however, those in authority in Serbia remained deliberately superficial and noncommittal, since they neither wanted to expose Dim- itrijević, the head of the secret service nor to admit that a network had been formed, literally in plain sight of the government, that was agitating with the clear goal of destroying Austria-Hungary. In light of the risk of war, it was probably of little im- portance that some of the attackers who had fled to Serbia had been arrested, together with Mehmedbašić, another of their number who had fled to Montenegro.220 King Petar I ordered a six-day period of respect at court. King Nikola of Montenegro even decreed two weeks of national mourning. Notes of condolence were delivered to Aus- tria-Hungary and the double murder was criticised in the severest possible terms, while celebratory demonstrations were expressly forbidden. However, this failed to have any effect on the mood in Serbia and Montenegro, which was one of profound joy in both countries. The double murder was regarded as a heroic act, something that was just as difficult to hide from the Austro-Hungarian diplomats as the fact that the Russian em- bassy was the only one in Belgrade that declined to fly its flag at half-mast.221 Already on 30 June, the chargé d’affaires of the Habsburg Monarchy in Belgrade, Baronet Wil- helm von Stork, wrote in a telegram that after what he had seen, it was time to pound on the table. This, he claimed, would be the only language the Serbian government would understand.222 Baronet von Wiesner compiled his investigation report in Sarajevo and summarised the results of his research in a two-part telegram sent to Vienna on 13 July. He con-