The Great Fire (11 page)

Alarmed but unsure how to interpret the presence of so many people—refugees, really, they were in flight and homeless—Jennings decided it was time to suggest to Jacob that he return, and he sent a message by way of the ferry to Phocaea. The YMCA building was next to the Grand Bretagne Restaurant, about two hundred yards from the American consulate on Galazio Street, and in a neighborhood of brasseries, dress shops, and the offices of tobacco brokers. The refugees were there too, shuffling along, looking for shelter. Amy was horrified by what she saw. “Women with nursing babies and nowhere to go,” she noted in a diary. “Streets packed with people of all ages sleeping on the pavements.” Leaving Amy at the YMCA, Jennings walked up Frank Street to the American consulate to find out what was happening. On the way, he stopped a man who looked to him like he spoke English and asked what was going on.

Don’t you know? They are running from the Turks, he said.

The American consulate was an established gathering place for Americans, one block back from the Quay and the fashionable Hunters Club. Americans were used to dropping by the consulate to chat with Horton, who was informal and gregarious and liked to tell a story. There were several good cafés, restaurants, and private clubs on the surrounding blocks, including the Boston Cafe, which American businessmen could retire to after getting the morning’s chatter and news at the consulate from Horton or other Americans doing business in the city.

Entering the consulate, Jennings found the receiving area full, and Horton and his two young vice consuls, Maynard Barnes and A. Wallace Treat, besieged with people, mostly naturalized Greek and Armenian Americans who were seeking the papers and means necessary to leave the city. There was barely room to squeeze in. The talk inside added to what Asa had heard on the street. The Greek army had suffered a serious setback, and the Christian population in the backcountry, fearing the
advance of the Turkish army, had abandoned their farms and villages for the safety of Smyrna. The talk was fraught with rumor and speculation. No one seemed to know for sure what was happening. The Greek losses had come quickly and unexpectedly—and it seemed improbable that there had been a complete collapse of the Greek line. People were attempting to understand the situation by exchanging information about what they had seen, rumors they had heard, and conflicting reports they read in the city’s newspapers. The reports included a forceful published assertion by the Greek commander that Greek troops would hold the city against a Turkish assault and a statement by the Italian consul that thousands of Italian troops were standing by at Rhodes to be transported to Smyrna if needed to bring order.

Two British battleships, the
Iron Duke
and
King George V,
had arrived the day before, on Sunday, and the city’s oldest and most respected Greek newspaper,
Amalthea,
quoted the senior British officer in Smyrna, Admiral Osmond de Brock, as saying that he was confident of the city’s safety, but the paper then suggested, inaccurately, that he was also promising Allied intervention on behalf of the Greeks if it became necessary for their protection. More than a few Greek and Armenian civilians had armed themselves in anticipation of a battle for the city, and the Asia Minor Defense League was secretly distributing guns and bandoliers of ammunition. Many had judged the appearance of the British ships, along with this day’s arrival of a French battleship,
Waldeck Rousseau,
as evidence of Allied intentions to land troops on their behalf. Eleven warships were anchored in Smyrna Harbor—British, French, Italian, and Greek. The warships were the spear points of Allied diplomacy, except that there wasn’t a unified Allied diplomacy. Each of the Allies—Britain, France, and Italy—was pursuing its own interests. All remained technically at war with Turkey, but the French and the Italians had found their own private accommodations with the Turkish nationalists, and the Italians had been arming them against the Greeks. The British stood alone as a serious potential belligerent. This was not apparent to the people onshore. Given the importance of Smyrna as a trading and banking center, residents took the Allied naval presence in the harbor as reassurance
against disorder and a Turkish occupation. Still, there was also a lot of loose talk about the Greek army burning the city if it was forced to abandon it. Greeks and Armenians intent on resisting a Turkish takeover had hidden stockpiles of ammunition throughout the city, and the prospect of arson was frightening. There was also the troubling awareness that the British had brought a hospital ship, HMHS
Maine,
into the harbor and had requisitioned three merchant ships,
Bavarian, Antioch,
and
Magira,
to evacuate British nationals.

Jennings heard speculation and rumor that was ominous, confused, anxious, and mostly uninformed. He grew alarmed. What about his family and neighbors in Paradise, he wondered; were they in danger? Should the foreigners in the city be doing something to protect themselves? He, like everyone else in the consulate, knew there was no American military in Smyrna, and Paradise was even more exposed than the city itself. Jennings could see that Horton already had begun arranging for the naturalized American citizens with Greek and Armenian backgrounds to leave the city, and the situation’s gravity was further evident from Horton’s anxious demeanor and the feverish pace at which he was working. The diplomatic capitulations on which the foreign consuls relied in Smyrna allowed the consuls to designate “protégés,” local people who worked for the consulate and received limited diplomatic protection as representatives of foreign governments. In an unorthodox attempt to save people, Horton was writing letters that associated the naturalized Americans (and some others) as American protégés in the hope that the letters would be accepted as visas for travel or a means of protection.

Working his way through the crowded office, Jennings talked with other Americans at the consulate about the need for Americans to understand the situation as a group. Together they asked Horton to call a meeting of the American community so it could understand what was happening and take precautions for its safety—if indeed precautions were necessary. Horton agreed and said he would call the meeting later in the day. He wrote a note announcing the meeting and sent a courier to American institutions and businesses around the city to spread the message and went back to work.

HORTON HAD SLEPT HARDLY
at all in the five days since his return from Sevdikuey. He had met the night before, on Sunday, September 3, with Governor Stergiades, who already had concluded that the Greek army would evacuate Smyrna. Stergiades worried that disaffected soldiers might set fire to the city. Horton had met that morning with the British consul, Sir Harry Lamb, and Admiral de Brock, and de Brock had informed him of British plans to evacuate its nationals. Horton and Lamb were friends as well as colleagues, and they would frequently collaborate over the next several days. They shared similar views about Smyrna, and both were married to foreign women whose fathers were diplomats, in Lamb’s case, an Italian woman. Only a few years younger than Horton, Lamb cut a familiar figure in Smyrna, his easily recognizable hat a racing trilby. He carried a walking stick and wore a Marlborough collar and tie.

Horton sent cables to Bristol and Washington about the British evacuation, and, still not having heard back from Washington by the end of the day Monday, September 4, he repeated his request for an American ship. In addition to the State Department cable appealing for supplies from the American Relief Administration, Horton appealed directly to the Near East Relief in Constantinople for aid.

At about 3:00
P
.
M
., leaders of the American community gathered at the American consulate in response to Horton’s message. They were either missionaries or businessmen, and although there was often tension between the two groups, they were now bound by common concern for their safety and the safety of the organizations they represented. The missionaries were mostly aligned with the Greeks and Armenians; the businessmen with the Turks, in part because Greek and Armenian merchants and traders were formidable competitors and not so easily handled as the Turks. Among the missionary group were Alexander MacLachlan, the president of International College; Dana K. Getchell, a fifty-two-year-old Missions Board missionary from Northfield, Minnesota, attached to the American Girls’ School in the city; Jean Christie, thirty-nine years old and a Wellesley graduate, director of the YWCA; and Asa Jennings for the YMCA. The businessmen included Stanley W. Smith, director of Standard Oil of New York in Smyrna; representatives from the four
American tobacco companies in the city, Gary, Standard, Glen, and American; and Chester Griswold, an agent for MacAndrews & Forbes, the licorice company in Camden, New Jersey. American tobacco companies used licorice to sweeten their cigarettes, and the herb grew profusely around Smyrna.

George Horton appeared strained and tired as he leaned on his cane and called the group to order. He reported much of what he knew, which was that the Greek army had suffered a serious defeat, and, in disarray, it was burning villages as it retreated toward the sea. It was less a Shermanesque strategy to deny the Turkish army provisions and more the result of a leaderless army, which, feeling betrayed by its government and hunted by Turkish civilians, had turned into a destructive rabble. There was discussion about rumors of the Greek army’s total collapse and the possibility of it being pulled back together for the city’s defense. It was hard for the Americans to believe that the Greek defeat had come so quickly and completely, but the Americans had seen, on the way to the meeting, Greek soldiers entering the city, and their ragged and disconsolate condition suggested the worst. Some of the soldiers were ditching their uniforms for civilian clothes and selling or giving away their guns. Getchell, who had just returned to Smyrna from a trip to towns east of Smyrna on the Casaba rail line, reported that he had seen Greek soldiers rounding up Greek civilians for transport to Smyrna on train cars ahead of the Turkish army. Turkish civilians, he said, had begun firing on Greek soldiers and departing Greek civilians, and a battle had broken out at the train station of the hinterland town where he had spent the night.

Horton told the group that he already had cabled a request for naval protection but had not yet received a response. Stunned at the suddenness of events, the Americans were unclear about their next steps. Horton was not advising them to leave the city, but neither would he give them assurances that all would be well as the Italian and French consuls were advising their nationals. He did not want to alarm the assembled Americans, but neither did he want to suggest that the situation was safe. Privately, he expected the worst, and his posture and demeanor more likely spoke more forcefully than his words. Horton asked the group to meet
again the next day at the YMCA, where there was more room; he would schedule daily meetings, he told them, so he could provide updates.

After the meeting, Jennings took Horton aside and offered another idea—again as a question. Would it be possible for the Americans, Jennings asked, to organize help for the refugees? At the moment, Horton said, his hands were full trying to find all the Americans in Smyrna and secure passage out of the city for those who seemed most immediately in danger. Horton suggested that Jennings talk with the other Americans who had been at the meeting and raise the idea for discussion the next day. Later in the day, Jennings took the idea to his neighbors at International College, and Caleb Lawrence, a professor at the school, agreed to make the proposal when the group met again, the next day, Tuesday.

HORTON HAD COME TO SMYRNA
in 1911 expecting to deepen his learning and savor the classical ruins of ancient Ionia. His actual experience had been far different. The year after he arrived, in 1912, the religious strife in the Balkans erupted into the First Balkan War, pitting Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria against their old oppressor, the Ottoman Turks. To the astonishment of Europe, the Ottomans lost the war, and the city of Salonika and the Aegean islands passed to Greece. It was a humiliation the Young Turks would not soon forget, and ethnic Greeks throughout the Ottoman Empire would pay a heavy price in property and blood for the victory of the Hellenic state in the Balkans.

In the region outside Smyrna, in the villages along the coast and inland toward the Meander Valley, Horton witnessed a Turkish campaign of terror against Christians every bit as brutal as it had been around Salonika—perhaps even worse. Its goal was to drive the ethnic Greeks, who were Ottoman subjects, out of the country.

The sultan and his Islamic government had always considered the ethnic Greeks—like all Christians in the empire, including the Armenians—second-class citizens. But they had been allowed to practice their religion, live in peace (mostly), and run their own affairs as long as they respected the sultan’s authority, paid their taxes, and acknowledged
their lower status. Christians could not bring testimony against a Moslem in court, and Turks harassed Christians on the street with impunity. “
Giavour!
” they shouted, laughing and tossing rocks, “Infidel dog!” In American terms, it was a kind of Jim Crow system in which religion rather than color was the dividing line. But it had been tolerable to the Christians, who had little choice but to accept it. They kept to themselves, inside their church-dominated communities, which were governed by a council of elders; and in cities such as Smyrna and Constantinople, many Greeks and Armenians had managed to become rich through skill and determination. Ultimately, they formed the commercial ligaments of the empire.

The age-old Moslem tolerance of Christians (a “people of the Book”) ended with the Balkan wars—a second war had quickly followed the first—along with the emergence of a rising Hellenic consciousness among Ottoman ethnic Greeks, similar to the rising national consciousness among the Armenians. A Hellenic consciousness, like an Armenian consciousness, presented a serious threat to the established order, which was grounded on second-class citizenship for Christians in a unified empire governed by Moslems and ruled by Sharia law.