The Great Fire (22 page)

The army had advertised Kemal’s entrance, and his route was decorated with red Turkish flags hung from windows. Like the cavalry the day before, he came into the city from the northwest, turned onto the Quay and traveled along the harborfront, passing (among the clubs, cafés, and other mansions) Jennings’s safe houses. He stopped at the Hotel Splendid, which would serve temporarily as his headquarters, then continued to the Konak, where he met with Noureddin and discussed the military situation. Afterward, he returned to the hotel and still later descended to the hotel’s bar where the waiter did not recognize him and apologized for not having an open table. But there were patrons in the bar who knew the face and the uniform. They were astonished at the man now among them. Kemal joined them at their table. He ordered a drink and threw it down, the first since the great offensive had begun on August 26. There were Greeks in the bar, nervously watching him, and he turned to them and said, “Did King Constantine ever come here to drink a glass of raki?” They said no he had not. “Then,” Kemal responded, “why did he bother to take Smyrna?”

BY SUNDAY AFTERNOON
, the situation at International College had deteriorated despite MacLachlan’s hardheaded Scots optimism which had been on display the previous day. The long-distance potting by Turkish snipers of refugees inside the college’s walls was more frequent, and Turkish soldiers stepped up the looting of homes and stores in Paradise. Refugees continued to move along the road coming up from the south, and they were easy prey for soldiers and bandits. The Turks picked them off like blackbirds sitting on a telephone wire.

Both the Jennings and Jacob families had Greek and Armenian
household help, as did nearly all of the American and European families in Paradise, and they brought the servants and their servants’ families and others into their homes for safety. Ernest and Sarah Jacob had forty people in their home.

The American sailors patrolled inside the college’s walls, but many of the Americans’ homes (including Jennings’s and Jacob’s) were outside the gate. A guard was posted in the clock tower of MacLachlan Hall to keep watch and communicate with the
Litchfield,
three miles distant, by semaphore. From the tower, the sailor on guard saw homes and vineyards set afire throughout the Meles valley. The British consul came out to the college and removed a British subject who was married to a Greek-born woman and their children. Unlike Captain Hepburn, he had judged it too dangerous for the young family to remain out of the city. The Turkish command in Smyrna had also sent guards to the college, but they were a rough lot. On arriving, they demanded liquor from the women in the American homes and paid no attention to the looting that was going on in the abandoned homes of the Americans despite the presence of American flags.

Amy Jennings, at home with three children, watched from her window the burials of Greeks who had been shot outside the college yard and of a child who had died at its starving mother’s breast. Amy was at the end of her wits. At one point, bandits attempted to enter the Jennings’s home, coming over a wall at the back of the house, and the older son, Asa, fifteen years old, fired at them with a pistol his father had left with him. He killed two and wounded a third. Amy was coming unglued.

The violence at Paradise was even more severe in the other expatriate communities of Bournabat and Boudjah.

In Bournabat that day, Turkish cavalry had passed through the town, terrorizing the Levantine residents and looting their homes and busting up furniture and killing refugees in the streets. In one instance, Turkish soldiers fired on a group of Greek women and children, killing forty-eight. A British officer described a scene in which a boy of about three years old played around the body of his dead mother, still holding a baby, who was alive: “A Turkish soldier appeared in the street, came
up and saw the little boy, raised his rifle and fired point blank at the child. The little fellow fell dead. The noise evidently startled the baby, who commenced to cry. Shooting the smaller child as well, the Turk proceeded on his way.” Later, in another instance, the British officer reported, “One of the superior Turks collared a girl of nineteen-twenty, who was with a sister of twelve and her mother, and took her round the corner of the road. The mother and sister were forced to proceed, the mother crying, shrieking, and protesting for her other daughter, without avail . . . the girl was seen to be embraced by the Turk, who stripped her of all her clothing, and then raped her. Having finished, he pulled his revolver and shot her.”

British subjects were also victims. A retired colonel, a doctor, lived in Bournabat. Turkish soldiers broke into his home, then stripped and raped his Greek servant girls in front of him and his wife. The doctor fought them and was shot through the lung and he died the next day. Another resident of Bournabat reported the rape and killing of two large groups of women servants in the town.

In Paradise, a contingent of Greek troops that had become lost wandered into the Meles valley as they tried to find their way to Chesme. The Turkish army became aware of their presence and opened a barrage of artillery fire from the hilltop behind Smyrna. The American guards rapidly collected the families who were in houses outside the college gates and brought them into the college as the fighting intensified nearby. Artillery shells whizzed overhead, and several landed near the college. Amy Jennings watched the battle from an upper window of the college’s main building. After the artillery had decimated the ranks of the Greeks, the Turkish cavalry attacked. She saw the slaughter through a pair of binoculars.

At around dusk, Jennings and Jacob returned to Paradise to spend the night with their families, who by then had gone back to their homes outside the college gates. The Greek soldiers who had survived the battle had been marched into Smyrna and paraded along the waterfront. Through the night, families in Paradise heard occasional shooting and the screams of women on the road in the direction of Boudjah. The sounds carried far over the treeless hills.

IN THE CITY
, Hepburn once again returned to the
Litchfield
for the night, his second since arriving. Reports of bodies lying in the streets continued to reach him, and he was aware that the body count he was keeping based on the actual sightings of corpses by his officers was far below the number of shots being fired day and night. He was reluctant to concede that the bodies of murdered Armenians were being left inside their homes or that he was underestimating the extent of the killings. He stuck to his belief that the Turks would drag the bodies of their victims into the streets to increase terror and that his count was accurate. Why he believed this is a mystery—possibly he wanted to find ways to keep his estimate of the killing conservative for Bristol’s approval.

In his message to Bristol, the captain stopped short of calling the bloodbath in the Armenian Quarter a massacre and put the number of dead at two hundred. Hepburn compared the number of killings to that which “might have occurred in certain sections of a large American city, should all police protection have been withdrawn . . .”
^*
As seemed to be the case with Merrill, Hepburn was selecting and interpreting information to provide a picture of events that would most likely conform to Bristol’s expectations—or his wishes. (Serving up intelligence to confirm the views of higher-ups is not a new phenomenon.) Hepburn again fell asleep that night to the sound of scattered gunfire. There was no fighting—it was the
crack-crack-crack
of executions.

Ashore, and about a half mile away, in the backstreets of the city, nurses Agnes Evon and Sara Corning were taking turns watching over the women and children who had sought shelter at the YWCA. This is where they and Dr. Post had slept on their first night in the city after they had found a hospital in which to treat refugees, and they would sleep there again on this night.

After their arrival the previous day, the medical team had left the meeting at the consulate and taken a relief-committee car with a three-inch American flag stuck on the grille and gone in search of a suitable medical base. Almost immediately they had run into the column of
Turkish cavalry arriving near the Konak. Their car had gotten caught in the crowd of Turkish celebrants, and when they finally broke free, they encountered four Turkish soldiers with rifles raised to execute a bare-chested man in the street. Their driver hit the accelerator to save the man, but the car stalled, and they were immediately besieged by people climbing on to the car. They had managed to move ahead slowly in the car, and in the commotion, the man to be executed slipped away. The medical team had then gone on to the Greek hospital, which they rejected as their base because the swift evacuation of the wounded Greek soldiers had left the facility a mess. At the Armenian hospital, Turkish officers, who were moving patients out to make room for Turkish soldiers, sent them away. They had ended up at a small Dutch hospital near the YWCA and begun treating refugees for gunshot and stab wounds.

On this night, Sunday, when it was her turn to make the rounds of the YWCA building and the grounds, Miss Evon walked among the women and children in the courtyard and then went to the roof of the building for a view of the grounds. She looked out over the city, which was dark except for a few small lights that seemed to move stealthily through the streets. They were handheld lanterns. Occasionally two or three lights came together and stopped, and then there was a sound of smashing doors and human screams and shots. Then, after the shots, she saw the lights go from window to window, up through the house, and she heard other women shrieking and children screaming and more shots. The killing was enacted in silhouette as a gruesome show of sound and shadow behind lantern-lighted curtains. When the screaming stopped in one house, Miss Evon saw the lantern lights move to the next house and then again heard the crashing of the door, the shrieking. At the same time, hundreds of dogs were barking and yelping throughout the city, adding to the ghoulish scene. “When no one could see me,” she later wrote, “sometimes I clenched my hands over my ears and stood there hanging on to self-control. I said to myself, isn’t there enough decency in all humanity, is it possible that the decency of the world isn’t strong enough to keep such things from being done on this earth in this century?”

Back at the theater, where Knauss was posted for the night, the refugees were huddled with their carts, donkeys, and bundles. They seemed
to him pitiable “small heaps” hardly stirring except to occasionally ask the guard for some water. Nonetheless, Knauss directed the sailors to prepare a metal screen that could be pulled down over the theater’s front doors in the event that refugees were overcome by their anxiety and attempted to rush the theater. At 2
A
.
M
., he was glad he had taken the precaution. Several Turkish soldiers on horseback rode into the crowd and grabbed a man from the group—his name must have appeared on a list of traitors. They wanted specifically him. The American sailors barely had time to drop the screen as the crowd attempted to force its way into the theater to escape the Turkish soldiers.

Merrill, who had tagged along on the security loop to the American institutions, displayed a different response to the fear of the refugees. “No one could imagine without seeing them ‘under fire,’” he wrote in his diary, “what a chicken-liver lot these ‘Christian minorities’ are.”

B
y Saturday, September 9, the city’s Armenian neighborhood was in high excitement about the approaching Turkish army. Many of those who could not afford to leave Smyrna were choosing instead to leave the Armenian district and move closer to the Quay with friends or family outside of the neighborhood—at least until the storm passed. If there was going to be trouble, the Armenians—everyone in Smyrna for that matter—knew the Armenian neighborhood would bear the worst of it. Better not to be there; many locked their doors and left.

Dr. Hatcherian decided it would be prudent for him and his family also to leave the district, at least temporarily. One of his patients was a woman whose family lived in a big house on the Quay. She was pregnant, and Dr. Hatcherian had been engaged to deliver the baby. He asked her if, in lieu of a fee, he and his family could stay in a room in their house for a while. It would assure his availability for the birth of her child and provide him a measure of relief from worry. She happily assented.

The doctor returned to his home and retrieved his family. He put on a Turkish fez and pinned his Ottoman military decorations to his chest. He thought they would offer him protection. Then, he, Elisa, and the five children and Araksi, their maid, walked to the house on the Quay, where they spent the night.

The next day, Sunday, September 10, Dr. Hatcherian was consumed with worry about his house and family’s possessions in it. (This was the day after the arrival of the first contingent of Turkish troops into the city.) He decided to check on things. He left the Quay house with Araksi and two companions with property in the neighborhood. Once again, Dr. Hatcherian pinned his Ottoman military medals on his shirt as protection against harassment by Turkish soldiers. As he, Araksi, and his companions approached the Armenian district, they found the streets deserted except for Turkish soldiers milling about. The two companions decided the trip was too dangerous and turned back.

Dr. Hatcherian and Araksi continued toward his house, which was on the far side of the neighborhood, nearly a mile from the Quay. As they walked, he was twice stopped by Turkish soldiers who were lost and asked him for directions to the Turkish barracks. He pointed the way to them and continued toward his house. He saw that many houses on his street had been broken into, with windows and doors smashed, and some places along the street were splattered with dried blood, but his home, to his great relief, was not damaged, except that the lock on the front door had been forced, making it impossible for him to use his key. He pulled on the knob and rattled the door but couldn’t get inside. He told Araksi to stand by the house as he checked nearby houses of friends. He knocked on the door of the house of his neighbor, Levon Arakelian, and got no answer. He checked other houses and found them broken into and rummaged. He walked around the corner and out of sight of Araksi. His diary records what he saw:

He went back to get Araksi. He tried the door of his house again without success. There were more soldiers in the street. He kept his composure—giving no sign of his inner turmoil. On the return, he and Araksi walked by the YWCA and saw the American guards out front.

He returned to the Quay and reported to the others what he had seen. Upstairs, where his family was staying, he tried to calm his wife, and occasionally he walked out to the balcony where he saw Turkish soldiers marching groups of refugee men toward the military barracks beyond the Konak. In the days that followed, Dr. Hatcherian learned that Christian men were being rounded up and taken to the prison at the barracks—Armenian men were being singled out, he was told, because they were resisting the Turks.