The Great Fire (18 page)

A sixth member joined the group aboard the USS
Lawrence
—Mark O. Prentiss, who had attached himself to Near East Relief but whose real career had been as a publicist in New York. Prentiss was a peculiar character, a kind of gray-flannel flimflam man with a talent for inventing and inflating his résumé and insinuating himself into situations where he saw personal gain. He had been an early member of the Council on Foreign Relations but had been pushed out of the organization, apparently for questionable bills he had submitted. He had shown up in Constantinople in August and introduced himself to Bristol as an efficiency expert who had come to Turkey to observe the operations of Near East Relief. Prentiss, incredibly, would end up filing stories to The
New York Times
and other prominent publications that provided Americans with some of the most influential and ultimately distorted coverage of the Smyrna catastrophe. Before the year was out, he even would be implicated in a murder involving a jealous lover in Italy.

Bristol added one more person to the trip—his naval chief of staff, Captain Hepburn. It was an unusual step that did not bring any additional aid or expertise to the mission but was a public demonstration of Bristol’s concern for the refugees. It was empty symbolism but good PR. He emphasized the point time and again in the press coverage—he took the situation in Smyrna so seriously that he had sent his naval chief of staff. The ship slipped its mooring in the swift Bosporus current in the late afternoon of Friday, September 8, and steamed toward Smyrna “at an economical speed.”

T
he USS
Lawrence
entered the Gulf of Smyrna early Saturday morning, September 9, its upward sweeping bow slicing through the blue-green water. Hepburn noted the numerous small sailboats and shabby coastal steamers that were overburdened with passengers and headed toward the sea. Some of the steamers pulled lines of small barges piled high with ragged pyramids of people and luggage. There were also numerous caiques, the small boats without keels, pointed at both ends and rigged with lateen sails, that were common to ports of the eastern Mediterranean. They skimmed on the sea’s surface like dry leaves with upturned edges, and the big bow waves of the
Lawrence
set them rolling.

Ahead was the city and the dense dark mass of refugees lining the waterfront, and to the south, along the coastal road, Hepburn, squinting into the bright morning sun that was rising behind the city, discerned a long thin line of Greek cavalry moving like a scraggly centipede over the green-and-brown stubbled landscape. The men, mounted on horses and camels, were headed toward Chesme, where Greek merchant ships were picking up remnants of the Greek army. The Greek line was two and a half miles long, and the boom of Greek naval artillery reverberated over the water as a Greek battleship several miles distant covered the army’s retreat.

Hepburn was arriving with little current information—few of Merrill’s
cables had gotten through to Constantinople. He had only just learned from a cable received at sea that the Greek governor had departed the previous day, and he was unaware of the extent of the Greek army’s collapse and evacuation. As the
Lawrence
approached the inner harbor, passing Pelican Point, the four stacks of the
Litchfield
came into view. The
Litchfield
was anchored near the Quay not far from the terminus of Galazio Street. The
Simpson
was moored off the Standard Oil dock, to the left and about a half mile farther north.

Captain Hepburn’s eyes swept over the city’s waterfront as he evaluated the situation ashore and his approach for the
Lawrence
’s anchorage. There were numerous other men-of-war in the harbor, and Hepburn strained to make out their flags and names. Twenty-five years earlier, he had nearly washed out of the navy because of his poor eyesight. A routine vision test after graduation revealed astigmatisms in both eyes and low visual acuity. The navy doctor declared him unfit for duty. His discharge papers were prepared, but an appeal up the chain of command kept him in the service, and as a newly minted ensign, he was sent to the USS
Iowa,
which soon engaged the Spanish navy off Santiago in the Spanish-American War. As subsequent eye tests showed, his vision had only worsened since then.

Hepburn was from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the son of a prominent attorney and his second wife, a Frenchwoman, Marie Japy Hepburn. “Japy” became Hepburn’s middle name as well as his nickname. Pronounced with a long “a,” it followed him through Dickinson College, the Naval Academy, and into the navy. Five feet, nine inches tall with thin hair parted at the middle and round rimless glasses, the captain had the long, loose, and kindly face of an English vicar. It would have been easy to imagine him in vestments instead of a naval uniform. At the Academy he had been a good student, and his superiors knew they could rely on his judgment and attention to detail. He had passed the war mostly in administrative jobs, superintending the refitting of a captured German vessel into a troop ship and serving as a detachment commander at a naval base in Queenstown, Ireland. It was hardly heroic duty, but it was necessary and he had done the work well. In June, he had joined Bristol’s staff, and a less efficient officer would not have survived
the demanding and ambitious admiral. Hepburn was not without his own ambition, and while he lacked Bristol’s sharp elbows and commanding presence, he had demonstrated his own upward persistence through diligence and hard work. Ultimately, he would go further than Bristol—far further, to the highest rungs of the navy. Along with poor eyesight, Hepburn’s service had been dogged by poor health, with bouts of bronchitis, arthritis, appendicitis, fevers, foot pain, eczema, and an especially bad case of hemorrhoids that required surgery. Maybe it was these chronic minor ills and physical humiliations that softened his demeanor and gave him a sympathetic disposition.
^*

The
Lawrence
anchored to the left side of the
Litchfield
very near the Quay. Lieutenant Commander Rhodes came aboard and sketched the situation for Hepburn, and then together, they and Merrill, who had also come aboard the
Lawrence
after being summoned from his house that morning, climbed into the destroyer’s motor launch to go ashore. Davis of the Red Cross brought his portly frame into the launch, rocking it with his considerable weight.

Ashore, they worked their way through the crowd on the Quay and went first to the American Theater, where twenty-five naturalized Americans had sought shelter in the cavernous interior, and afterward they walked through the nearby neighborhood. Hepburn saw refugees on the streets and squatting in tiny public spaces among their bags, boxes, and small collections household goods—sewing machines, pots, blankets, and rugs. He also saw Greek soldiers in scattered groups of four or six or eight moving silently and sullenly southward along the waterfront, sometimes carrying wounded comrades on litters or even their shoulders. They were mostly unarmed and ragged, and they seemed to pay no attention to their
surroundings. A few were riding on donkeys, moving southward along the Quay. The men were exhausted but orderly and showed no panic. These were the last of the Greeks who had come in from the front, and they were among the last of the last to pass through the city. The troop transports had departed from the Smyrna railroad pier the previous day. The Greek rearguard cavalry, which had attempted, mostly with success, to provide time for the retreat, already had passed them by on the way to Chesme. These detritus soldiers were stranded in Smyrna. They would have to either rouse themselves for the fifty-mile walk to Chesme or lose their uniforms and blend into the Smyrna population. They did both.

Hepburn found the city tense but quiet and the stores and cafés open. With Rhodes, Merrill, and Davis, he went to the American consulate—only a block from the Quayside theater. He wanted to get right to work. Consul General Horton was absent so the captain asked Horton’s vice consul to summon the local American relief committee for a meeting within the hour.

Hepburn was troubled that American sailors had been put ashore as guards—Bristol had specifically ruled out any demonstration of naval force, and these men were armed, some with machine guns—but given the lack of local police or any civil authority, as well as his inability to know when the Turkish army would arrive in the city, he assented to keeping them ashore for now. He saw that their presence was a reassurance to the Americans in the consulate.

While he waited for the local relief committee to arrive, Hepburn looked over a big map of the city brought out by one of the vice consuls, and with Rhodes, Merrill, and now Knauss present, he changed the distribution of the guards to reduce their exposure by eliminating protection of the private homes of American businessmen. He also relieved Rhodes of command of the shore force and installed Knauss. Rhodes got the task of making regular rounds of the guarded locations several times a day and reporting back to Hepburn. The naval uniforms that had been distributed to civilians by Rhodes were recalled, and Hepburn ordered the display of American flags at locations where he had decided to keep navy guards. He put fifteen men with two machine guns at the Smyrna theater; four men at a nearby bakery that Jennings had arranged to bake
bread for the refugees; twelve men at the American Girls’ School, which was inside a walled-in square block with a courtyard about a mile from the consulate in the Armenian district; twelve men at the YWCA compound, which was in the middle of the city midway between the consulate and the girls’ school; two men at the YMCA; four at the consulate; and sixteen at International College in Paradise. The postings remained a wide and thin distribution of the men, but Hepburn made the judgment that they were unlikely to encounter serious trouble of the sort that required a more substantial defense. The sailors, mostly in their twenties, were dressed in their working whites, flared trousers tucked into white-canvas gaiters, long-sleeved blouses with blue neckerchiefs, and white sailor’s caps pushed back on their heads. They went about the work eagerly, laughing and smoking cigarettes, astonished at the scene in which they found themselves.

The men had enlisted from every corner of the country, and their names read like the roster of an All-American baseball team: Toney Bello (Newark, New Jersey); John Brown (Nashville, Tennessee); John Bugdonvich (Springfield, Massachusetts); John Ciepiewicz (Chicago, Illinois); Friola Domingo (Boston, Massachusetts); Birchall Hamilton (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); Harry Friedman (Kansas City, Missouri); Sam Honeycutt (Raleigh, North Carolina); John Kilinski (Milwaukee, Wisconsin); Sigrid Landgrun (Buffalo, New York); Freddie Stewart (St. Louis, Missouri).

As Captain Hepburn worked with his officers at the consulate, they could hear the concussion of Turkish artillery shells, which were falling on the plain between Smyrna and nearby Bournabat. In the harbor, men on the ships could see the Turkish cavalry on the bare slope behind the city entering Bournabat. Some of the Turkish cavalry, coming down from the high pass at Nif, split from the main column and moved south in the direction of nearby Koukloudja, a Greek farming village, and soon it was in flames.

Within an hour, by about 10
A
.
M
., members of the relief committee, including Professor Lawrence, President MacLachlan, Jacob, Jennings, and many of the city’s businessmen, gathered at the consulate, and Hepburn introduced the Constantinople delegation—Davis, Jaquith,
Prentiss, and the medical team. Hepburn explained Bristol’s orders—to gather information and protect American property—and asked for the formation of a single committee that would work under the direction of the Constantinople American Relief Committee. Charles Davis would take charge of it, he said. There were no objections. Hepburn said he wanted their help in gathering the facts that would allow Admiral Bristol to direct the resources that would be needed in Smyrna. He said he was keeping the YMCA as the relief committee’s headquarters, despite his concerns that the word
Christian
in its name might antagonize the Turkish army. He also designated the waterfront theater as the military headquarters onshore. He would work between theater and quarters on the
Litchfield
.

The local committee members hung on his words and accepted his directions. They were grateful for his presence, but they made it clear that they were worried about their safety once the Turkish army entered the city. Horton had returned to the consulate by then, and he too said he was concerned, especially for the ethnic Greeks and Armenians in the city who were naturalized American citizens. Most of them were indistinguishable from the refugees, and as Ottoman subjects who had left the country and taken a new citizenship or expressed sympathy with the departed Greek administration, it was likely the Turkish authorities would single them out for retribution. They needed protection, he said, and the only way to ensure it was their evacuation. Hepburn was skeptical. The problem, from what little he had already seen and heard, was not the Turks but the refugees themselves—there were enormous numbers of them, and they were panicky and gathering in large groups outside the consulate. The challenge, he surmised, would be controlling the crowd.

In response to the committee’s fears, Hepburn said he would maintain the guards, then he proceeded to do what he was trained do—bring order and planning to the task that he had been assigned, which was to protect Americans and American property and evaluate the situation for Bristol, who would decide on next steps. But after two hours ashore, the captain was already feeling the tension between his orders from Bristol—restraint and surveillance—and the local Americans’
strong sentiment for a forceful American presence ashore and evacuation of their community. Until he was directed otherwise, he planned to stick to his original orders—and given that the Greek administration had dismantled the city’s telegraph office before departing and radio transmission remained spotty, he realized there would be limited, or nonexistent, opportunities for consultation with Bristol unless he sent a ship back to Constantinople. He was on his own. The conflict between Bristol’s orders and the sentiment of the Americans (as well as what he would observe) would only grow more intense over the next three days. It would grow into a personal struggle that tested his judgment and conscience. As the situation in Smyrna worsened, Hepburn would become a fulcrum of American action, which tilted between indifference and engagement.

With his talk to the committee ended, Hepburn sent the relief volunteers back into the honeycomb of neighborhoods to identify places where they could collect and concentrate refugees, distribute food and supplies, and (most important) establish the scope of the problem. He wanted numbers and other information he could take back to Bristol. He set a second meeting for the afternoon. If there was trouble, he told them, they should retreat to the theater for protection. It was agreed that a signal flag would be raised over the theater if danger were imminent.

The medical team of Dr. Post and nurses Agnes Evon and Sara Corning, present at the meeting and mostly silent, needed no guidance from Hepburn. Deeply experienced in relief work, they had seen more death and suffering than Hepburn or any of his officers. Post, a forty-seven-year-old Princeton graduate with a thick mustache, heavy black eyebrows, and a horseshoe of hair around his otherwise bald head, had been in the Near East since 1911. He had started a hospital in Konya, in central Anatolia, which had served mostly Moslems in a region as big as the state of New York. The hospital’s location, situated along one of the trails used during the Armenian deportations, had exposed him to the Armenian suffering and death during the war. He had gone back to the United States on a speaking tour as an articulate advocate for Armenian relief, then returned to continue his medical work.