The Great Fire (25 page)

Stubborn and unwilling to heed the advice of Crocker about the danger of confronting the looters, MacLachlan was determined to chase the unruly soldiers from the school’s property. Crocker decided to go with him and brought several sailors along in case help was needed. They stopped their car about one hundred yards from the settlement house, and MacLachlan and Crocker approached it as the sailors, arrayed in a line and armed with a machine gun, stayed near the car. At the settlement house, MacLachlan shouted in Turkish “What are you doing here? This is an American house, American property!”

Six Turkish soldiers came out of the house with their guns pointed at MacLachlan. One of them whistled, and another six soldiers appeared from another house that was being looted. The second group of soldiers took a position between MacLachlan and Crocker and the sailors. The American sailors were about to fire when Crocker, realizing that his men were outnumbered and likely to lose in a firefight, threw his pistol to the ground.

“Don’t fire,” he shouted to his men. “Retire!”

The sailors backed away, and after covering about thirty yards, Crocker shouted to them again, “Run.” They did, with the Turks firing
at them, and reached the college unharmed. The action left MacLachlan and Crocker alone with the Turks but within sight of the college. (An American sailor in the college’s clock tower was watching all this.) One of the Turks went up to MacLachlan and demanded his watch, then his wallet and coat. Two other soldiers beat MacLachlan with the butts of their guns, and he fell to the ground, temporarily losing consciousness. He got back up and one of the Turkish soldiers told him to start running. MacLachlan stood in place, taking the beatings, fearful that the order to run would provide the soldiers with an excuse to shoot him. Speaking Turkish, MacLachlan explained that he was trying to protect American property. Some of the soldiers listened, but others were goading him with their rifle barrels to run. The first soldier demanded his shoes. At this moment, a Turkish boy from the school appeared and appealed to the soldiers to stop the beating, explaining that MacLachlan was his teacher. He had no effect on the soldiers and ran off to find help.

The soldiers asked MacLachlan what was in the car, and he said nothing, but they found a stick inside and beat him with it. They took the wedding ring from his finger. Crocker was getting the same treatment, beatings with gun butts and the stick, and the soldiers forced both men to strip and stand naked. The beatings continued. The boy who had run off had found a Turkish cavalry officer nearby, and when the officer appeared, he asked MacLachlan who he was, and what was going on. MacLachlan explained he was the president of the nearby college, and the officer dispersed the soldiers. Both men were injured, MacLachlan seriously, but Crocker was able to help the president back to the campus.

It was a humiliating incident—and a serious sign that order was breaking down even further and that the situation was dangerous not just for naturalized Americans. Even American sailors might be attacked. It seems inexplicable that Captain Hepburn would not have been informed of the incident immediately, but Hepburn’s own report says he learned of it a day afterward at the meeting with the Turkish military governor. (Rhodes was the officer detailed to making the rounds of guarded American properties and keeping Hepburn informed.)

Even for the cautious Hepburn, it was clear that the city was approaching
a crisis. There were other troubling signs: Noureddin had issued another proclamation, which, by requiring passports and Turkish permission, made it difficult to remove refugees and naturalized Americans; none of the Turkish guards that had been promised for the refugee encampments were provided; and news of the beatings and killings of Europeans and their servants in Boudjah and Bournabat was finally reaching him.

Knauss also brought him reports of worsening violence. “On my round at 5 a.m., I found looting in full progress throughout the Armenian quarter with desultory firing everywhere and many new dead in streets especially about the Collegiate Institute (Girls’ College).” In the afternoon, he spotted Turkish soldiers on rooftops in the Armenian Quarter sniping at refugees inside the Girls’ School. He went aboard the
Lawrence
to report it to Hepburn who was meeting with a Turkish officer. The Turkish officer gave Knauss a note to take to the city’s district police commander, who, the officer said, would intervene to stop the sniping. Knauss departed with Jaquith, who spoke Turkish, and after a runaround at the police station, a Turkish army officer said he would go with them to the school to investigate. At the school, the offficer gathered some nearby Turkish soldiers from the street and told Knauss he wanted to enter the school to investigate. Concerned about the Turk’s intentions, Knauss stalled and told one of his sailors guarding the school to hide the refugees inside the building.

“I could see that he (Turkish officer) desired to enter the building and kept him on the stairs until I felt all refugees would be out of sight and when he remarked that it was cooler within than without we entered and while there 1050 refugees in the building not a head was in sight.” Knauss introduced the officer to his men, said he would feed the Turkish soldiers a meal, and quickly escorted him out. The Turkish officer said he would post guards at the school to prevent the sniping, and Knauss returned to the Quay.

On his way back, Knauss saw a French officer and two French sailors backed against the wall by Turkish soldier, and the French officer was talking furiously to save their lives. Knauss slowed down, and a Turkish soldier in front of the car pointed his gun at him. Knauss pressed the ac
celerator and the soldier jumped out of the way. Knauss pulled out his revolver but was able to get away while the Turk was still off balance and unable to shoot. Later in the day, the Turks held a parade on the Quay to celebrate their victory, and Americans along the parade route were forced to remove their hats as it passed by. To make matters worse, small unexplained fires were breaking out in the Armenian Quarter, where the stench of rotting bodies had become overwhelming.

“On Tuesday, a visit to the Armenian quarters was, literally, like entering a ‘city of the dead,’” wrote a British officer. He went on:

George Horton reported that nine cartloads of bodies were removed from the Konak and three cartloads near the Aydin Railroad station.

“In the early hours of the twelfth,” wrote Knauss, “squads of Turkish soldiers were sent out to collect the dead bodies exposed to view in the streets, and by ten o’clock no bodies were to be seen on the more important streets of the Armenian quarter. However, at three o’clock in the afternoon, fifty bodies were seen on one street in this quarter by an American.”

The frustration and alarm among the relief committee was growing more intense, the pressure on Hepburn to act more severe. Charles Davis sounded the alarm in a cable to the Red Cross: “Only way to picture this refugee situation imagine refugees some single, families, groups few to five thousand hidden in institutions or huddled here, there moving panic stricken when irregulars begin shooting them.”

Hepburn was getting smiles and pleasant receptions from the Turkish command even as the Christian refugees were being terrorized and shot, and he came to see that the Turks were working him. Late Tuesday night, Hepburn talked the situation over with the relief committee’s leaders, who strongly favored immediate evacuation. Jaquith pledged Near East Relief money to charter a merchant ship if it was necessary to remove the naturalized Americans. Hepburn, keeping his own counsel as they spoke, made up his mind to evacuate the vulnerable Americans, and he decided too that George Horton would be among those he would send away. He said nothing to the relief committee; he would make his decision known in the morning.

I
n summer, a north wind blows in a ceaseless rhythm over the eastern Mediterranean, gusting to a gale in the afternoon but nearly always slowing to a whisper in the evening. Stirred in the vast spaces of the faraway Russian steppe, the wind—the Meltemi, as it is known—sweeps down the Balkan peninsula, ruffles the blue surface of the Aegean, and bends the wild grasses of the Anatolian littoral into undulating waves of green and brown. As timeless as the ancient landscape it scours, the wind once filled the sails of Greeks on their way to Troy and Persians on their way to Athens.

In the first weeks of September 1922, the north wind brought a small measure of relief to the hundreds of thousands of people crammed into the hot and fetid streets of Smyrna.

On Wednesday morning, September 13, something strange happened. The north wind died, and almost immediately a new and unfamiliar wind lifted out of the south. The shift was at first imperceptible. For a brief moment, the air in the city’s streets was motionless. Curtains that had been lofting in open windows went slack and the trembling leaves of the hillside olive trees went still, but soon the south wind—“Samyeli,” in Turkish, the Damascus wind—was gusting with force, bringing with it the heat of the desert. The city already was hot, but the new wind was hotter. It was a strange wind for Smyrna in summertime, and it came as an alarming portent. A few men lost their hats. People felt something unfamiliar without
knowing what the unfamiliar thing was that played at the edges of their senses. The surface of the harbor turned to white chop, the flags of the Allied warships in the harbor snapped to the north, and donkeys and horses standing among the crowds in the hot morning sun lifted their heads and flexed dry nostrils to sniff the danger in it. The danger was fire.

Hepburn came ashore early, on this, his fifth day in Smyrna, went to the American Theater, and met with officers who had made the morning’s rounds of the guarded checkpoints. They told him they had seen less looting and fewer corpses, but, in Hepburn’s judgment, the change had come because nearly all the shops and homes already had been cleaned out and residents killed or driven off. He motored through the city to have a look. He traveled along the Quay, then into the Greek and Armenian Quarters. Smashed-up furniture and broken doors and windows filled the streets; the arms and legs of corpses were bent and turned in lifeless and unnatural gestures on the pavement. It was a scene to make a man sick, and the captain could no longer avoid concluding the obvious. The Turkish command had encouraged the sacking of the city. He made a note for his diary: “Few patrols were in evidence, and these paid no attention to the wandering chetahs and rowdies that were obvious looters and probable murderers.”

Hepburn seems not to have traveled north on the Quay, toward the Point and Jennings’s safe houses. It was an area untouched by looting, and there so far had been little violence on the upper area of the Quay in sight of the foreign consulates. Hepburn turned onto Galazio Street and arrived at the American consulate at 8:30
A
.
M
. He found George Horton meeting with British consul Harry Lamb. The two had been close colleagues, brought closer by recent events, and they would continue their friendly relations after both had departed Smyrna. Horton momentarily excused himself from the conversation with Lamb and told Hepburn privately that he now had confirmation that Britain was about to go to war with the nationalists.
^*

As Hepburn absorbed the important news, Horton explained to him that the British action would require closure of the British consulate, and Lamb was requesting that Horton handle British interests in the city as he had done during the early years of World War I. He felt it was his duty as a State Department employee to inform Washington of the request. Once again, Hepburn and Horton found themselves in conflict. Hepburn objected to the British request on principle, but he also told Horton (falsely) that he should decline the British request because the American consulate too could be closed at any moment. Hepburn, in fact, had received no instructions about closure of the consulate, nor had he previously considered it. There was no reason to expect the Turks to demand it.

The situation now was tightening around Hepburn. The prospect of war between Britain and the nationalists—along with the accumulation of Turkish provocations and other indications he was receiving that morning—confirmed for Hepburn that an evacuation was the prudent decision. He was persuaded that he needed to bring it off this day, or very soon. Without having resolved Lamb’s request, Hepburn ordered Horton to prepare for departure from Smyrna by packing his personal possessions for transport to a destroyer. Hence forward, as he had been doing for the last several days in his meetings with Turkish authorities, Hepburn would work with the young vice consul, Barnes, the barely experienced twenty-five-year-old Grinnell College graduate from Minnesota. The request took Horton by surprise, and he replied that he was reluctant to exit Smyrna if it would leave the impression he was abandoning his post. Hepburn, soft-pedaling his reasons, told Horton it was his duty as consul general to ensure the safe landing of Americans in Athens. Hepburn said he would personally explain the necessity of Horton’s departure to the State Department. Horton had no choice but to assent. No mention was made of Hepburn’s anger over Horton’s leak to the press.

Hepburn initiated the practical details of an evacuation. He gave orders for the
Simpson
to move from the Standard Oil dock to the Quay, and for both the
Simpson
and
Litchfield
to prepare to lower their whaleboats at his command, perhaps later in afternoon. Then, with Vice Consul
Barnes, he called on the city’s latest vali, Abdul Halik Bey, with two requests, the first a mere formality—permission to keep the American consulate in Smyrna open on an informal basis until the United States could establish diplomatic relations with the nationalists; and (more urgently) permission to evacuate Americans, which both he and the vali knew included naturalized Americans who formerly had been Ottoman subjects. Hepburn tried to finesse the issue by pointing out that the naturalized Americans were in the same condition as the refugees in the streets, and he had already had been told by Noureddin that all refugees should go. To demonstrate good faith, he also said that he had waited until the Turkish command had established civil order in the city before deciding to evacuate Americans so as not to provoke fear among other foreign nationals. He wanted to leave the vali with the favorable impression that the United States had concluded civil order had indeed been established. The vali said he would consult with Ankara.

Just as Hepburn returned to the theater to check on evacuation preparations, one of his officers came back back from Paradise and reported that, en route, he had seen fires burning in houses in the city’s Armenian neighborhood. He’d seen no effort by the fire department or the Turkish army to extinguish them. The freely burning buildings posed a danger to the rest of the city, the officer said, noting that a hot south wind was blowing, and it was bound to push a fire in the direction of the main part of the city. The houses in the backstreets were mostly of one or two stories, with frail walls of thin, sun-dried bricks, sustained with wooden posts and beams, which easily caught fire. A second officer then appeared and reported that fires had been set near the American Girls’ School. He said he thought the fires had been set to smoke out the refugees who had taken shelter in the school. By the time Hepburn received these two reports, at about noon, the fires had grown sufficiently large for smoke to blanket the back section of the city near Basmahane station.

In the meantime, French admiral Henri Dumesnil had summoned Charles Davis aboard his flagship to discuss the refugees. Davis found it a gruesome ride through the harbor. The shootings may have diminished, but the number of victims floating in the harbor was appalling, and the
launch that carried him to the French vessel had to steer around them. “The whole harbor was strewn with the most ghastly looking corpses floating out to sea,” a crewmember of the
Iron Duke
wrote to his parents on the thirteenth. Hepburn’s reluctance to coordinate with the Allies required Davis to serve as a go-between. The Italian admiral Guglielmo Pepe was present at the meeting and said the Italians were guarding seven buildings with six thousand refugees and sanitation was very bad. Dumesnil reported two thousand refugees were sheltered in the Catholic cathedral, also with intolerable sanitation. Neither the French nor the Italians had formed a relief committee; they were concerned solely with their own nationals and protégés. As Davis talked with the French and Italian admirals, two columns of smoke rose from the back of the city, from the area near Basmahane, where the officers had reported the fires to Hepburn. When Davis returned to the consulate, Hepburn informed him that he had made the decision to evacuate Americans and ordered him to stay at the consulate. Davis would remain there until the very last minute.

Clayton of the
Chicago Tribune,
meanwhile, had scored a scoop: an interview with Mustapha Kemal. He immediately sent his story via a merchant ship departing for Alexandria, Egypt, where it could then be relayed by telegraph to his editors. “You can say order has been completely restored from today,” Kemal told Clayton. “We do not wish any acts of revenge. We are not here to regulate past accounts. For us past acts are finished.”

JENNINGS HAD SPENT THE NIGHT
in Paradise with his family and returned to the city on the train in the morning. He got off at a stop before the Aydin station, and as he walked toward the YMCA office through the Armenian Quarter he encountered an armed Turkish mob moving up the street. The poorest and roughest elements of the Turkish population, from the edges of the city, and even from outside the city, were roaming the Greek and Armenian Quarters in search of loot and victims. Jennings took an American flag from his pocket and pinned it to his jacket, hoping it would offer some protection. As the mob passed
him, he was absorbed into it and it carried him along like a cork in a stream. He made his way out, flattened himself against a wall, and escaped without harm. At that hour, the fires were still small and widely dispersed, and the fire department was making a modest effort to extinguish them. Soon, however, more had been lit, and they had spread along several blocks. Jennings by then had limped his way back to the YMCA building, which the sailors continued to guard.

By early afternoon, the city generally was becoming aware of the fires. The smoke was visible, and the acrid smell and the fine dust from the tchatma—the local building material, a mix of plaster and wood—filled the air.

People ascended to high places where they could get a look—Colonel Reginald Maxwell of the Royal Marines looked from the roof of the Oriental Carpet Company on the Quay; George Helzel, the Czech manager of the Hotel Splendid, watched from the hotel’s roof, also on the Quay but several blocks north; Dimitrios Marghetti took his view from atop a carpet factory in the Mortakia neighborhood, in the industrial north end; Haralambos Spanoudakis, an accountant for the Aydin Railroad, looked from his second-floor office near the Point; Rene Guichet, a French engineer for the Casaba Railroad, watched in the north center of the city from the roof of the French hospital where his wife was a patient; Lieutenant Heaton Lumley of the Royal Marines gazed from a warehouse, nearer the Quay, which was being used as a semaphore station next to the British consulate. Each observer had a different line of view, but it was clear to all of them that the fires were spreading, and Smyrna was in danger.

By midafternoon, the smaller fires had joined together—fires spreading through adjacent houses, crawling over the cotton fabric commonly stretched between roofs and over narrow lanes to provide shade, then jumping streets and lighting still other houses—to create three distinct bigger fires. They were distributed in a quarter-mile arc across the outer boundary of the Armenian neighborhood.

Under the force of the south wind—shifting sometimes slightly east or west—the bigger fires, after sweeping through the Armenian district, would soon merge and roar as a single mass of flame into the southeastern
flank of the Greek Quarter, begin to consume the European district, and press along a broad front toward the Quay.

By late afternoon, the crowds along the Quay grew denser and more chaotic as Italian, French, and British nationals assembled for loading on naval launches. The French and Italian efforts were poorly planned and confused. Guards from the two countries were having difficulty moving their nationals through the crowds, which were packed along the waterfront and made even more alarmed by the sudden decision of the French and Italians to evacuate. These were the two nations that had been counseling calm and the good intentions of the Turkish authorities. The refugees wanted desperately to be taken aboard the ships, asking for mercy and claiming false French and Italian national connections, but they were denied passage and pushed back.

The British showed better preparation, and their officers had even rehearsed a smaller evacuation earlier in the week. Turkish soldiers mustered British nationals in batches at the British consulate, marched them down Galazio Street past the American consulate to the Quay and then along the waterfront to the Passport Office. The Turks checked their identification a second time before allowing them to embark on the British ships.

For the present, Hepburn decided against bringing American boats to the Quay. He was waiting for permission from the vali and for the other navies to clear some of the Quayside congestion.

THE SPEED OF THE FIRE
forced Hepburn to pick up the pace of the American evacuation. Jennings and Lawrence had driven out to Paradise at noon and spread word that all American women and children should be ready by 3
P
.
M
. to travel to the city so sailors could take them aboard a destroyer. Hepburn had decided only Americans would be evacuated, not servants or staff at the school, and only hand baggage could be brought along.