Atdtda29: There'd be no guarantee, 834-835

[Paul Nightingale]

[834.40-835.2] "These are busy times for everyone," explained Batka. "If you
really needed help, you could try shouting 'Union or Death', but there'd be
no guarantee ..."


See:


The outbreak of hostilities between Serbia and Austria-Hungary in 1914 that
led to World War I originated with the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, 1914. The assassination was the
work of a secret Serbian terrorist group called Union or Death (also known
as the Black Hand). This group was formed in 1911 with the aim of uniting
Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina with Serbia to form a "Greater
Serbia."


From: Ernest Evans, Calling a Truce to Terror: The American Response to
International Terrorism, Greenwood Press, 1979, 46-47.


And then a near-contemporaneous and quite colourful (not to say
self-serving) British account:


... its members were avowedly conspirators who ignored scruples and did not
stick at crime. This tendency was increased by the melodramatic method of
admission to membership; the candidate had to appear in a darkened room
before a table draped in black, and take a high-sounding oath by the sun and
earth, by God, honour, and life, while the symbol of the conspirators was a
rude representation of a death's head, banner, dagger, bomb, and poison
glass, surmounted by the motto "Union or Death." The life and soul of this
society was Dragutin Dimitrijević, a man of good education and attractive
personality, brave, energetic, and a fiery patriot, and possessing real
powers of organisation, but entirely lacking in balance or common sense, and
ruthless in his ambition. Personal vanity and a love of adventure also seem
to have played their part, and he possessed sufficient magnetism and
plausibility to rally round him some of the more unruly and reckless of the
younger officers.


From:  R. W. Seton-Watson, Sarajevo: A Study in the Origins of the Great
War, Hutchinson, 1926, 139. 


Note the distrust of the charismatic leader.