Weeks had gone by, spring came, and the Roman season was on the wane. The month of May—the Primavera—with all its blossoms and ceremonies had opened.
As far as the world knew not a cloud obscured the political horizon. In the chancelleries of Europe there were no sinister whispers, in the Embassies they danced and dined, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand had made a placid speech from the Throne, and Count Berchtold had declared the foreign policy of Austria-Hungary unchanged, and further, that the changes in the Near East had created new interests common to the Dual Monarchy and to Italy, and that their policy was leading them together along the path of co-operation, and also that their attitude towards each other tended to preserve the peace of Europe and to assure freedom and equilibrium in the Adriatic.
It is always so. The calm is followed by the storm. At Vienna they were secretly completing their plans for a sudden coup against their neighbours, yet the true facts were known only in our own Intelligence Department in Whitehall, and the information had in turn been sent in a cipher dispatch to the Embassy in Rome.
It was this dispatch which the Ambassador, receiving it one evening from the hand of the King’s messenger, who had brought it in hot haste direct from Downing Street, passed over to Hubert to decipher.
The information was highly alarming, to say the least.
The British secret agent—a responsible Austrian official in the Ministry of War—reported that the great army massed in the Tyrol for manoeuvres was being kept there. A secret order had been issued to the Eighth, Tenth, and Thirteenth Army Corps to concentrate from the Adriatic across to the Danube, and at the same time the Ministry of Marine had issued orders to the navy recalling the Adriatic fleet which had been manoeuvring between Cattaro and Ragusa up to Trieste.
The wireless stations at Sebenico and Pola had been taken over by the navy, and operators placed there sent expressly from the Ministry of Marine in Vienna.
All tended to a secret attack—to war—a war in Europe with dreadnoughts, high explosives, aeroplanes, seaplanes, submarines, and wireless conditions never before imagined either in the wildest dreams of novelists or the ever-active brains of place-seeking party politicians.
Preparations were slowly but surely being made in Vienna, and the blow would surely soon be struck.
For an hour Waldron remained in consultation with his Chief. Then, regardless of Downing Street regulations, and only hoping to prevent the conflagration, he went back to his rooms on the ground floor of the Embassy, scribbled a hasty copy of the secret information, and with it walked direct to the Quirinale.