Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (43 page)

One of the first to reach the quay was Charles Howes. Shortly afterwards, he was joined by Lieutenant Charles Drage of the HMS
Cardiff
. Their initial task was to create a heavily armed cordon on the landing area so that the crowd could not rush the boat.

‘Prentice and some men jumped out and tried to clear a place,’ wrote Drage, ‘[but] they were swept back into the boat and literally submerged in a pile of terrified people.’ Hundreds rushed forwards and threw themselves into the whaler; the British sailors had no option but to use force to hold them back. ‘I only got away by beating them on the head with a tiller.’

Ward Price had accompanied one of the boats to the quayside to see the evacuation with his own eyes. ‘The bow touches the quay and a fighting, shrieking, terrified torrent of humanity pours over it. “Women and children only!” roar the officers, fighting with fists and sticks to keep back the men. It is as unavailing as pushing at an avalanche. The only thing to do is to back out directly the picket boat is full, literally to overflowing.’

Lieutenant Drage managed to push back from the quayside and, as he began rowing towards the British fleet stationed farther out in the bay, he noticed that the water was thick with corpses, among them a baby floating upside down. Drage pulled it out and, seeing a flicker of life, slapped it hard. After a few minutes, it began breathing again.

Howes was meanwhile loading a second boat with refugees; he was sweating profusely from the heat of the flames. ‘Right along the sea front was a wall of unbroken fire with flames 100 feet high casting a lurid glow in the sky. The night was rendered at intervals by loud explosions and all the while the people in the rear were being massacred.’

The vision was apocalyptic in its horror: ‘The stench of human flesh burning was appalling,’ wrote Howes, ‘and the streets were stacked with dead. Men, women, children and dogs . . . the heavens were lit by the flames and myriads of sparks flew skywards, the crackling of the wood and the collapsing of the houses sounded like a salvo of guns. The whole of Smyrna, except the Turkish quarter, was now in the grip of the greedy fire . . . [and] as hard as our boats and sailors worked during the night in rescues we did not seem to make much impression in diminishing the crowd.’

Howes was momentarily distracted by Turkish soldiers throwing the corpses of adults and children into the flames, but soon there were even more terrible sights to claim his attention. ‘One of the saddest cases I met was that of a little girl of nine who, with her father and mother and baby in arms, were making their way to the boats when their parents were shot dead. This little girl picked the baby up off the ground and, dashing through the flames, reached the boat.’ Howes and his men rescued her and treated the burns on her legs.

‘I don’t think the majority of English reading people will believe this narrative and will say I exaggerate,’ wrote Howes. ‘Well, here is the truth. Think of the old time torture, add to them the modern appliances for the destruction of mankind, exaggerate it as much as you like and you will not realise half the horrors of the evacuation of Smyrna.’

And so the night progressed, until more than 2,000 Greeks and Armenians had been taken aboard the
Iron Duke
. Another 2,000 were on the American vessel
Winona
. The
Litchfield
was also full to overflowing. One by one, each of the great battleships in the bay of Smyrna was loaded with a cargo of terrified humanity. On board the Italian ship,
Sardegna
, Oran Raber watched the rescue mission continue into the early hours. ‘Women half clothed and pregnant were dragged up the ladder only to fall exhausted on the deck. Children, haggard and half dead, were crying for bread, while young mothers sat on the decks trying to squeeze out a few drops of milk from their own impoverished bodies.’ On board the
Bavarian
, the Reverend Charles Dobson was attempting to comfort a mother and daughter who had been gang-raped by fifteen Turkish soldiers.

The Chicago news reporter, John Clayton, suddenly realised that he could no longer bring himself to write the sort of reports expected of him by Admiral Mark Bristol. The scale of the disaster was such that he was at long last forced to admit the truth about what was taking place in Smyrna. ‘The loss of life is impossible to compute,’ he wrote. ‘The streets are littered with dead . . . Except for the squalid Turkish quarter, Smyrna has ceased to exist . . . the problem of the minorities is here solved for all time.’ In a sentence that was guaranteed to provoke Admiral Bristol’s wrath, he added: ‘no doubt remains as to the origin of the fire . . . the torch was applied by Turkish regular soldiers.’

Ward Price’s account for the
Daily Mail
– written in the early hours of the morning – was even more graphic:

On board the
Simpson
, George Horton took his last glimpse of the city as the battleship slowly steamed out of the bay.

Thursday, 14 September 1922

A
ll night long the fire raged and all night long the rescue mission continued. Yet the sailors and officers knew that there was a grim arithmetic to the situation in which they found themselves. There were some half a million people on the quayside but there was space on board the battleships for less than one tenth of that number.

Admiral Bristol’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Merrill, arrived in the bay of Smyrna a few hours before dawn aboard the
Edsall
, having spent a few days conferring with his boss in Constantinople. When he stepped out onto the bridge of the vessel, he was surprised to find that the night air had been so heated by the fire that all the mariners on deck were in short sleeves. He felt desperately sorry for the refugees. ‘Thousands of homeless were surging back and forth along the blistering quay, panic-stricken to the point of insanity . . .’ he wrote. ‘Fortunately, the quay wall never got actually hot enough to roast these unfortunate people alive but the heat must have been terrific there to have been felt on the ships two hundred yards away.’

By morning, the furnace was so intense that the captain of HMS
Serapis
– which was anchored closest to the shore – feared that the flammable liquids aboard his vessel would burst into flames. He ordered a shifting of moorings and told the crew to haul her chains aboard. This routine operation was a harrowing one for those involved. ‘People clinging to them were precipitated into the water,’ wrote one, ‘whilst scores of people were swimming round the ship imploring to be saved . . . one man hung to the anchor cable and he was eventually hauled inboard.’

One of the crew helping to weigh anchor found his eye drawn to the seawall, where a horse had caught fire and was chasing wildly across the quayside trampling down children, its hind quarters engulfed in flames. ‘[It] galloped madly into the crowd,’ he wrote, ‘its end was not seen.’

By about 5 a.m., the
Serapis
could house no more refugees. ‘We had on board about as many as we could hold – the forecastle, upper deck and all the mess decks were full and there were also people in the boiler and engine rooms.’ Yet a headcount revealed that just 1,000 souls had been saved – a tiny dent in the crowds camped out on the quayside.

Other vessels were also filling up. When Lieutenant Charles Drage was sent to the SS
Karnak
he found its lower decks so full that he had difficulty jostling his way through. He finally reached the boat deck, where a makeshift infirmary had been established, and where he noted: ‘One old lady dying of nervous exhaustion, one man shot in the stomach and dying of peritonitis, one man dying of a cut throat, one with an amputated leg dying of gangrene.’

As Drage made his inspection of the ship, he came across several members of the Whittall family, who told him how grateful they were to have been offered sanctuary aboard the vessel. ‘All night they have heard screams, usually ending in gurgles, while through glasses they have seen men and women cut down and shot and girls raped.’

Six miles away in Bournabat, Hortense Wood’s sleep was disturbed by a deep-orange tinge to the night sky. It did not take her long to realise what was happening. ‘The town [has been] set on fire,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘We can see the red glow illuminating the sky and glowing smoke ascending ever higher. Bombs are continually exploding and the sound reaches us very distinctly.’

Isolated from Smyrna – and unsure of the scale of the unfolding tragedy – her first thought was for her family. ‘I am anxious about my people,’ she wrote, ‘although I am sure they are safe on board. No communications whatever with the town. No trains. Only military autos.’ She had little option but to sit at home and wait for news.

Her only reliable source of information was her nephew, Fernand, who had spent Wednesday night in one of the de Cramers’ as yet unburned town houses. Fernand assumed that everyone else in the family had managed to find safety aboard one or other of the British battleships in the bay. However, when he ventured outside on that Thursday morning, he could scarcely believe his eyes. ‘I met Aunt Harriet!’ he wrote. ‘Alone! Having spent all night equally in that hideous crowd. She was half crazed with fright, hunger and fatigue.’

Fernand jostled his aunt through the refugees – avoiding several bands of drunken irregulars – and eventually reached the Point. After much effort and anxiety, he managed to secure her passage aboard a British destroyer.

For the Levantines and Europeans of Smyrna, the worst of their ordeal was almost at an end. But for the city’s 320,000 Greeks, and their homeless compatriots, the immediate future looked grim indeed. Georgios Tsoubariotis, an eleven-year-old Greek lad, had spent the night hiding in the church of Haghia Yiannis, along with his mother, father, sister and many refugees. Yet as the fire advanced relentlessly towards the building – and dawn broke the sky – so a new menace arose. ‘A dozen brigands appeared, carrying knives,’ recalled Georgios when interviewed many years later. ‘They began to threaten people, one by one . . . they shouted
tsikar paragini
,
tsikar saatini
(take out your money, take out your watch).’

His father handed over all his money, but the man next to them had nothing to give. ‘They slashed his shoulder with a knife. The poor man rolled around on the ground, groaning with pain and died, quivering, before our eyes.’

As soon as the brigands had gone, the Tsoubariotis family decided to flee the church. Georgios’s father had no desire to join the crowds on the quayside, especially as his eighteen-year-old daughter was extremely attractive. He led his family to one of the city’s Greek cemeteries and forced open a family tomb in which he hoped to hide. They were not alone in seeking sanctuary there. ‘It was full of people. Almost all the tombs had been opened by parents to hide their girls.’ The family were to remain in hiding for the rest of the day and night before making their next move.

The Alexiou family had also spent the night in hiding, seeking shelter in an abandoned building on the outskirts of the city, one that had so far escaped the fire. At one point in the early hours, young Alexis – a twelve-year-old – needed to relieve himself.

The family abandoned their hiding place at dawn and made their way down to the quayside, determined to fight their way onto one of the British or American lighters. Alexis’s desperation to get aboard so angered an American marine that he smashed the lad over the head with an iron pole. ‘My neck swelled up and hurt unbearably,’ he later wrote. Nonetheless, he got aboard the boat, as did his mother, although she tried to hurl herself into the sea when she learned that her husband had been left behind.