The Great Fire (23 page)

T
he city’s new military commander, Noureddin Pasha, had a reputation even among the Turkish military for brutal methods.

Forty-nine years old and a veteran at suppressing indigenous revolts against the Ottoman state in Macedonia and Yemen before World War I, Noureddin too had been groomed by German military advisers hired by the Sultan Abdul Hamid II to modernize and train the Ottoman army. Like Mustapha Kemal, he had played his part in a British humiliation during WWI —the British defeat at Kut Al Amara.

In November 1914, soon after World War I had begun, Britain had landed a force at the head of the Persian Gulf to protect its oil supplies in Mesopotamia. The landing was successful, and the force moved to Basra, which it soon occupied, giving the British control over the region’s oil fields. The British troops were then ordered—more to demonstrate prestige to Moslem inhabitants of the British Empire than for military necessity—to march farther north and take Baghdad. On the way, following the Tigris River, the British came under attack by Ottoman troops led by Noureddin. The battle was inconclusive, and both sides retired after five days of fighting, but the British, under General Charles Townshend, began a retreat toward the city of Kut Al Amara, twenty-five miles south of Baghdad. Noureddin, seeing an opportunity, pursued the British and trapped them at Kut, where they were unable to escape or be resupplied
despite several attempts to break the siege. Three months later, suffering from disease and diminishing food, the British surrendered—13,100 men were taken prisoner. They were marched through the desert to Aleppo. More than half of the British troops died in captivity, and the cruel conditions led British officers including T. E. Lawrence to try to gain release of the soldiers with a payment of two million pounds. The Ottomans rejected the offer. The British eventually reorganized their forces in southern Iraq and took Baghdad in March 1917, by which time British forces under General Edmund Allenby were moving north from Egypt through Palestine to Aleppo, forcing an Ottoman surrender.

After the Ottoman collapse and defeat of the Central Powers, the Ottoman government in Constantinople named Noureddin military governor of the Smyrna district, but the British successfully demanded his removal. Noureddin then left the Ottoman army and passed over to the nationalist camp and was appointed to lead the nationalist Central Army in the Black Sea region. In 1921, he put down a Kurdish revolt against the nationalists with such fury and cruelty that the Nationalist Congress in Ankara, no hotbed of sympathy toward minorities, sought to put him on trial.

Throughout the period of his command, tens of thousands of Ottoman-Greek subjects were slaughtered and deported along the Black Sea coast.

Noureddin had kept his command of the Central Army only through the intervention of Mustapha Kemal. And while Noureddin’s ego and ambition posed a threat to Kemal’s leadership during the war with the Greeks, Kemal had retained Noureddin because of his savagery in battle. He had proved his worth in the drive from Kocatepe to Smyrna, commanding the First Army.

One of his first orders of business in Smyrna was to settle a score with the city’s Greek Metropolitan Chrysostomos, a religious and civic leader among the Ottoman Greeks but also a Hellenic nationalist who mixed Greek territorial ambitions with his spiritual duties. He was the bishop who had led the Greek troops on their landing in 1919. The fifty-five-year-old religious leader was no stranger to conflict—he had been removed by the Ottoman authorities as the city’s bishop in 1914 and was
only reinstated with the Greek occupation, and even then Governor Stergiades had chastised him for his incessant nationalism. During a church service, Stergiades had risen from his seat and forced the bishop to stop a sermon that was blatantly political. A British naval officer described him: “The Metropolitan, short, thick-set, with gnarled face, looking like a hard-headed business man who had arrived at prosperity only after a hard struggle, and having attained the top of the tree, was determined that those under him should have a taste of the hardships he had once endured.”

Chrysostomos and Noureddin were old antagonists: the bishop had successfully pressed the British for Noureddin’s removal in March 1919 ahead of the Greek landing, and Noureddin had not forgotten.

Late in the afternoon on Sunday, September 10, a French patrol called on Chrysostomos to offer him sanctuary at the French consulate. Chrysostomos declined, saying he wanted to remain with his flock, and as the French force was leaving the Greek church, a carriage with Turkish soldiers arrived and ordered him to climb in. He was told Noureddin wanted to see him, and he was taken to the general’s office at the Konak. In their meeting, Noureddin reminded the bishop of an argument that had occurred between them in 1919 when Noureddin was the military governor. “On the last occasion that I had the pleasure of seeing you,” Noureddin said, “you were good enough to say that I ought be shot. I have sent for you, Lordship, to tell you that you are going to be hanged.”

Guards took Chrysostomos into the street where about fifteen hundred excited Turkish residents had gathered. Noureddin came to the balcony overlooking the street and, realizing that an alternative to hanging Chrysostomos had presented itself, said to the crowd that he was giving the bishop to them to do as they pleased. “If he has done good to you, do good to him. If he has done harm to you, do harm to him.” The mob dragged Chrysostomos by his beard to a nearby barbershop where they wrapped him in a barber’s apron and beat and stabbed him. His eyes were gouged out and nose and ears cut off. The French patrol watched the scene, the men furious at what was happening but under orders not to intervene. Eventually, a bystander shot the bishop to end his misery.

ON MONDAY
,
SEPTEMBER 11
, Captain Hepburn sent Lieutenant Merrill to arrange a meeting with Noureddin.

While waiting to be called in, Merrill was “cooling his heels” in the office of Noureddin’s aide, Brigadier General Hassam Pasha, who, like Noureddin, projected the image of a German officer: he spoke fluent German, made a crisp and stern military presence, and delivered his orders and remarks to subordinates with a Teutonic finality. Merrill, in typical form, chatted him up in French and asked him about care of the refugees. The Turkish general said feeding his troops came first, then he led Merrill to a window where they watched Turkish guards lead six thousand Greek soldiers past the government building, forcing them to shout “Long live Kemal” as they passed by. After an hour or so, Noureddin saw Merrill and assented to a meeting with Hepburn. The time was set for 3
P
.
M
.

Hepburn arrived on time with his delegation but was forced to wait an hour before entering Noureddin’s office. In his white uniform and white shoes, Hepburn encountered the khaki-clad rugged and bearded man. He looked at Hepburn through small dark eyes, round and nicked like the bottoms of expended rifle casings. His ears were turned slightly forward at their tops. Noureddin was forty-nine years old, seven years older than Hepburn. He wore a stiff tunic, still dusty from the field, and a Sam Browne belt that girdled his waist and crossed his right shoulder.

Hepburn planned to introduce the relief committee and explain its goals, but his real intent was to gain insight into the general’s attitude toward the refugees and Americans in the city. The captain introduced Barnes, Davis, Jaquith, and Dr. Post, who served again as the interpreter. The conversation would be in Turkish. Hepburn congratulated Noureddin on his military success and explained the work of the committee, which he said had been organized by Admiral Bristol in Constantinople and operated under his auspices. The American navy’s mission, he said, was the ordinary one of looking after American lives and property. Based on the guidance he had gotten from Bristol, Hepburn told Noureddin that he hoped the refugees would soon be able to return to their homes in the interior. Noureddin interrupted. No, he said, the refugees could not return to their homes. The devastation by the Greek army made that
impossible. The refugees would be killed if they went back, Noureddin said. “Bring ships and take them out of the country,” Noureddin added. “It is the only solution.”

The response caught Hepburn by surprise. Once again, the script failed to follow what Bristol had laid out for him. (Jennings and the relief committee, of course, had already reached that conclusion based on the momentum toward a general massacre.)

Forced to improvise, Hepburn continued to engage the general and made the point that a removal of hundreds of thousands of people would take time, and that in the meantime food and medical care must be made available. This required bringing the refugees into safe areas, under the protection of Turkish guards; in addition, the relief workers would need a Turkish liaison officer with whom they could coordinate the complicated work. Hepburn handed him a note listing refugee collection points suggested by the relief committee. These included the warehouse at the Point, the football stadium, and the barracks at Balchova. It made no mention of Jennings’s string of safe houses, which Hepburn appears not yet to have noticed. Noureddin said he didn’t have time to read it and the details should be taken up with his commandant but there would be no liaison officer assigned to the relief committee. Dr. Post was translating Noureddin’s words for Hepburn, and soon the general and Dr. Post engaged in a rapid back-and-forth that sounded hostile to Hepburn, who sat and listened in exasperation, guessing at what was passing between them in Turkish. He was reluctant to interrupt more than occasionally for fear of showing discord within his delegation. In one of the pauses, Post told Hepburn that Noureddin was going over an incident from last year that Noureddin said had proved missionaries in Marsovan had supported an Ottoman-Greek rebellion against the Turks.

The Marsovan incident was well known in the missionary community and had turned into a serious point of conflict between the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and Admiral Bristol. Marsovan, a town in the Black Sea region, was home to Anatolia College, a missionary school, as well as a big missionary hospital and orphanage. During the First World War, thousands of Armenians had been deported from the city, and the Turks had demanded that the college’s president,
Dr. George White, a Congregationalist minister, turn over Armenian faculty and students. White refused, and the Turks threatened to execute the American missionary staff. White relented, and the Armenians were taken away; the men were executed and the women deported. The school was closed. After the war, White had returned and reopened the school. In 1921, nationalist authorities who controlled the territory around Marsovan suspected the school was sheltering Greek students who were plotting against Turkey. They raided the school and discovered documents and letters that they said proved that the students—and by extension the school—were involved in subversive activities. Among the evidence were a map labeling the area “Pontus,” a Greek word that had been applied to the region for two thousand years, student essays about Pontic autonomy, and a letter written by White, in which he expressed his hope to convert Turks to Christianity. Three teachers, an alumnus and two students—all Ottoman ethnic Greeks—were arrested and executed. The executions spread, and soon five hundred more ethnic Greeks were put to death. The school was closed again. Dr. White protested the actions to Bristol, who, in his diary, suggested the problem was with the school for allowing a student “debating” society.

As Hepburn listened in bafflement to the back-and-forth between Noureddin and Dr. Post, Noureddin had specifically referred to Dr. White’s letter about Moslem conversion. Noureddin, his temper rising, told Post that he had the letter that proved missionary collusion with Greek subversives. (It was a detail that stuck with Merrill. A letter of that sort would be valuable to Bristol in his campaign to discredit the missionaries.) Noureddin asked Dr. Post if the Americans had brought priests—“the Americans are always bringing priests.” (Post was both conversing rapidly with Noureddin and giving Hepburn snatches of the translated conversation.) Post would later say that Noureddin had told him, “You have a saying in your country, ‘America for the Americans.’ We say ‘Turkey for the Turks.’ You have another saying, ‘The good Indian is a dead Indian.’ Well, we believe that the good Armenian is a dead Armenian.”

Hepburn was getting a good insight into Noureddin’s antipathies, but he did not get an answer to his specific question about Noureddin’s disposition
toward the refugees: Would they be protected until their evacuation was arranged?

He tried again, being less oblique. The refugees, he told Noureddin, had flocked to American institutions but it was not the American intent to protect them; the intent was to remove them to a place where they would be safe. He put the question again to Noureddin, and this time the general shot back that he resented the question: “Of course they will be protected.” At that moment, the sound of cheers from the street entered the room through an open window, and Noureddin walked to the balcony overlooking the square, the one from which he had spoken to the crowd about Chrysostomos. He gestured to the Americans to watch with him as Turkish soldiers passed by. “Look at them,” he said with pride. “They have come five hundred kilometers in twelve days. Praise Allah.”

Noureddin concluded the meeting by giving Hepburn a copy of a proclamation he had just prepared. It ordered civilians to turn in their guns, prohibited looting, and declared that anyone who harbored a Greek soldier or “functionary” would be executed. The proclamation was posted throughout the city the next day.

BACK AT THE CONSULATE
, Hepburn found the relief committee further discouraged. The looting and shooting remained flagrant, and it was obvious by now that the Turkish command had no intention of stopping it. The Americans—principally Davis and Jaquith—feared that the disorder was sliding toward a slaughter of all Christians in the city. The refugees were packing into any building that put them out of sight of the Turkish army and roaming civilian bands with clubs and guns. They were hiding even in mausoleums and in stone-covered graves. (One survivor would remember the smell of the ptomaine gases coming up from a putrefying corpse in the tomb where they stayed for two days.) Jennings’s safe houses were overflowing. So far, Turkish soldiers had left the safe houses untouched.