The Great Fire (26 page)

Many of the families at Paradise counted housekeepers and cooks as members of their families—these were often long and close relationships—and they protested against having to leave them behind, fearing for their
safety. Knauss had arrived at Paradise to supervise the transportation of the Americans into the city, and the American women pleaded with him to bring along their household staffs. Knauss weakened. He said he could not give permission to the non-Americans to join the evacuation, but he would not object if the American women happened to bring them along without asking his consent. (This loosening of his orders would infuriate Hepburn.) The American women ended up bringing their servants, members of the servants’ families, and Greeks and Armenians attached to the college. There were about 125 Americans, and they brought along at least 60 others.

Jennings drove his family back to the city in the Chevrolet, which he had draped for protection with the American flag. He steered around refugee corpses in the road and refused to stop when a group of Turkish irregulars—bandits, really—stepped in front of the car. He swerved to avoid them and continued toward Caravan Bridge and then the movie theater. The route took him past the fire, and near the Quay, the car had to pass slowly among the crowds. He dropped off Amy and the children and returned to Paradise for others. The sailor driving the car with the Jacob family and their servants told his passengers to look at the car’s floor or close their eyes to avoid seeing the bodies, some of which had been stripped naked. The sailor swerved sharply several times to avoid bodies, but occasionally the passengers felt a bump when the tires rolled over one. The stench of decomposing bodies was sickening.

The Paradise Americans (and their entourage of servants, friends, and families of friends and younger students from the college) waited nervously inside the theater for Hepburn to decide when they should depart for the whaleboats that would carry them to the ship. After Jennings, Jacob, and Kingsley Birge (a teacher at the college) had finished ferrying the people from Paradise, they stayed at the theater to reassure their families and help with the evacuation. Jennings, who had been moving between his safe houses, Paradise, and the YMCA, then decided to make one quick check of the YMCA before his family departed. He hurried back to his office there. The fire had not yet reached the building, but he found an Armenian employee inside, frightened
and unsure how to save himself. He was reluctant to leave the building. He appealed to Jennings for help, and Jennings decided to take him to the theater with the others that were being evacuated. Together, they made their way through the crowds to the theater. Jennings told the guard at the theater door that the young Armenian was a servant he had employed in Paradise, and the guard allowed him to join the people being evacuated. “As long as I live I shall never forget the gratitude, almost devotion, that lit up his face,” Jennings later remembered.

The American sailors sorted the people into groups of ten, which were the limit for each whaleboat, and each group was set apart and assigned to a boat.

By midafternoon, Hepburn had directed the
Litchfield
to tie up, stern-to, at the Quay. Its anchor, at the bow, was dropped, and the stern was swung around so that it was only thirty yards off the seawall. The ship was made fast to the Quay with two lines as big around as a man’s arm, both tied with knots that could be slipped in a hurry. The
Simpson
was brought to within fifty yards of the seawall and anchored, and it swung naturally with its bow pointing south, into the wind. The plan was to bring the Americans to the
Simpson
. He planned to have two motor sailers (each destroyer was equipped with one) tow the whaleboats, two at a time, from the Quay to the
Simpson
. Given the numbers of people the Paradise families had brought along, Hepburn, who thought he was evacuating 125 Americans, estimated it was going to take maybe nine trips to get all the people, Americans and non-Americans, aboard the destroyer. He was not pleased, and he demanded an explanation from Knauss for his failure to follow his order to bring back only Americans. Knauss said the Paradise Americans must have misunderstood his directions, and some of the Americans, seeing that Knauss’s concession to them had landed him in trouble, told Hepburn that Knauss had conveyed an Americans-only order but they had chosen to violate it. Anna Birge had brought along four boys who were students at International College and when challenged about them said they were her sons. There was nothing Hepburn could do at this point. The fire was approaching, and the Americans were supporting
Knauss, and everyone was already in the theater. He agreed to load them all.
^*

Both ships were in position by 4
P
.
M
.

THE SITUATION AT THE AMERICAN
Girls’ School had grown even more desperate. The building, which wrapped around a gated courtyard, was in the neighborhood where most of the looting and killing had taken place. The school had twelve American sailors as guards and was directly across the street from the Basmahane station, though its front door opened onto a side street, Tchinarli Street. The teachers had witnessed shootings and stabbings since Saturday when the Turkish cavalry had first arrived, and the streets outside the buildings had become impassable, piled high with rummaged goods, broken carts, and bodies.

Minnie Mills was the school’s director. She had deep experience in Turkey. Born in Magnolia, Iowa, and a graduate of Olivet College, a small religious school in Michigan, she had been a missionary teacher in Smyrna since 1897—this was her twenty-fifth year since arriving at the Girls’ School. She was fifty years old.

That morning, she had seen Turkish soldiers break into nearby homes, light fires, and spread them with petroleum they poured from tins. The fires flared under the accelerant and drew close to the school, but Miss Mills had decided to remain with the students and her colleague Annie Gordon, a fifty-five-year-old missionary teacher from Canada.

On that Wednesday, the two missionary teachers had responsibility for the school’s students and staff as well as twelve hundred refugees, mostly from the neighborhood, who had taken refuge in the gated courtyard. Some were also inside the school. Miss Mills had given them sanctuary when they began arriving the day of the Turkish cavalry’s entrance into the city. The people were all women and children. (Hepburn had ordered the men removed earlier in the week.) The school’s staff had
counted eight new babies among the refugees—one woman had given birth while at the school—and several women were expected to deliver on this day. Many of the refugees were camped in the courtyard; the locked iron gate separated them from the soldiers in the street. The school had been feeding them as best it could with soup and bread. Turkish soldiers had tried several times to enter the courtyard but were frustrated by the gate and the American sailors.

At about 3
P
.
M
., Dana Getchell arrived at the school. Getchell, as a member of the relief committee, had been moving between the American consulate, the Armenian orphanage, and the Girls’ School. He arrived as the fire was moving along Tchinarli Street toward the school, and new fires were breaking out in nearby streets. He saw the city’s fire department attempting to put out some but without success. Getchell and some of the sailors brought water buckets and wet carpets to the roof, hoping they could prevent blowing sparks from setting the building on fire, but a Turkish soldier on the street pointed his rifle at them and ordered them to desist. When the building next door was set afire by a group of Turkish irregulars, Getchell decided his effort was futile and the situation too dangerous to carry on. He descended to the courtyard below and told the refugees that he and the teachers would stay with them awhile longer, but there was nothing more that the school could do for them. The Americans would soon have to abandon the building. For the refugees, this meant either staying inside the courtyard as the building caught fire—or attempting to leave and enter the streets where they were likely to be killed by the soldiers.

At about 4
P
.
M
., navy ensign Thomas A. Gaylord (a red-haired recent Annapolis graduate from Pittsfield, Massachusetts) and four additional sailors arrived to evacuate the teachers. The navy men told Miss Mills that they had come to take only Americans, but she refused to depart without the school’s children, principally Greek and Armenian. Ensign Gaylord told her she would come along on her own or a sailor would carry her back, but in any event, he said, she would be evacuated. These were his orders. Miss Mills was determined to stay with the children. The standoff continued and the fire touched the building. Miss Mills planted herself; she wasn’t moving without the children. Gaylord had four of the
sailors carry Miss Mills to the truck they had parked outside the door and promised her that he would leave a contingent of sailors to lead the children and school staff to the Quay. The truck with Miss Mills and other teachers departed.

The remaining seven sailors, including Petty Officer J. W. Webster of Omaha, brought the children and staff together and led them out the door. “When we left,” Webster wrote in a letter to his sister, “we could hardly get out of the door, and some of the Turks fired into the crowd and killed a few people.”

The group started toward Rue Rechidieh, the main avenue leading through the Armenian Quarter toward the Quay, but the fire stopped them. They turned back toward the school to find a different route, and as they passed the school the sailors saw that the Turkish soldiers had begun shooting the refugees in the courtyard. The group followed Tchinarli Street in the opposite direction for a short distance, then turned left toward the Quay, wending its way through the cross-hatched neighborhoods without any clear sense of where it was. The streets, which sometimes jogged right or left, were not arranged in neat squares or rectangles: they crossed each other at acute angles as well as right angles, and sometimes the streets dead-ended at masonry walls.

At about the same time, Dr. Post and nurses Agnes Evon and Sara Corning decided they had to leave the Dutch hospital, where they had been treating refugees, to retrieve children at an American-assisted Armenian orphanage, near the Girls’ School. They walked about a half mile in the direction of the fire to reach it. Coming through the smoke and litter of the streets, they arrived at the orphanage to find the children—one hundred and fifty little girls in black-and-white aprons—waiting quietly under the protection of Jean Christie, director of the Smyrna YWCA, and Bertha Morley, a teacher at the Girls’ School, who, in the mayhem, had taken responsibility for the children. The orphanage also had a courtyard, and hundreds of refugees had gathered there, behind its gate.

Miss Christie, born into a missionary family in Turkey, was a Wellesley College graduate and thirty-nine years old. Miss Morley, from Oberlin, another school with a reputation for turning out missionary teachers, was five years older. Preparing to depart, Miss Morley
and Miss Christie lined up the orphan girls two by two to form a column to march to the Quay. Miss Christie and Miss Morley were at the front. Sara Corning took position in the middle, and Agnes Evon and Dr. Post at the rear. Miss Morley carried an American flag on a pole. Because it was officially an Armenian and not an American institution, the orphanage had no American guard.

The women and children stepped from the school’s door into the street. At this point, they became visible to refugees in the courtyard, and it was obvious to the people that the orphanage was evacuating the children. Turkish soldiers were standing outside the courtyard gates, and soon the fire would force the refugees into the street. Knowing their probable fates, the refugees came crashing out of the courtyard to join the evacuation party and overwhelmed the column of girls. About one hundred of the orphan girls had passed into the street by the time of the rush, and in the chaos, many of the children were pushed aside, some trampled underfoot. The women and Dr. Post tried to separate the refugees from the children, and Turkish soldiers joined the fray. One of soldiers was about to drive his bayonet into a male refugee when Miss Corning struck him in the face with a fat Bible she was carrying. He went down in a heap.

The women pushed through the crowd and rounded up the girls, who had remained quiet through the ordeal, reassembling the column of black-and-white aprons. Then, the children followed Miss Morley with her flag, as the women led the orphans through the burning streets toward the Quay. The group founds its way to the YWCA, which lay in the direction of the consulate and the Quay. Another young American missionary teacher, Myrtle Nolan, was there preparing to evacuate the women and children with the help of American sailors who had been placed there as guards. Miss Morley had planned to stay at the YWCA, but as the fire approached, she departed and took the children, on her own, toward the Quay. Some would be lost along the way.

The medical team went back to the Dutch hospital, which was about four blocks from the YWCA, and found that many of the patients had been removed. Others were too badly injured or sick to be moved, and the Greek medical staff said they would stay with them. The hospital was made of stone and occupied the inside of a courtyard, which offered
protection from the fire. Dr. Post directed Agnes Evon and Sara Corning to return to the American consulate with the sailors; he said he would go to the YMCA.

It was close to 6:30
P
.
M
. by then, and the southeastern part of the city and much of Smyrna’s midsection were engulfed in flames.

ALL THROUGH THE AFTERNOON
, the fire had forced people from homes, churches, and schools, all the places they had been hiding. They filled the streets, moving toward the Quay and away from the burgeoning mass of the fire. From above, they must have seemed like animals trying to outrun a rapidly moving forest fire. It was becoming clear to all Christians in the city—residents and refugees, Greeks and Armenians—that the Allies and Americans had no intention of evacuating or even protecting them. They were being left behind with the fire, the Turkish army, and the lower class of Turkish residents that had turned into a mob.