The Great Fire (27 page)

At 5
P
.
M
., the American sailors at the American Theater carried the evacuees’ luggage to the whaleboats and ferried it to the
Simpson
. Then at about 6:30
P
.
M
., Hepburn prepared to give the order to begin moving people. The transfer needed to happen quickly. The sailors moved the assembled groups into the theater’s lobby, and then, with a double line of sailors forming a passageway, the whaleboats were made ready at the seawall. Hepburn gave the order, and when a sailor at the seawall saw that the whaleboats were in position, he signaled the sailors in the theater to send the people to the street. The evacuation began. The Americans moved through the line of sailors and to the whaleboats ten at a time. The refugees pushed and pulled and attempted to pry themselves between the sailors; women shrieked and begged to be taken along. The sailors were sickened at the duty, and they were forced to beat them back.

Among the last to pass through the line of sailors was Asa Jennings, his wife, Amy, and their three children. Jennings was near total exhaustion. He had not slept in two days and barely had taken anything to eat. He took Amy and the children to the lip of the Quay, passed them to the waiting sailors, and said good-bye. He had decided to stay in Smyrna to maintain the safe houses. He stepped back from the Quay’s
edge and watched his wife, who had suffered an emotional breakdown in the chaos, ride through the harbor’s chop with the other Americans toward the destroyer. From the deck of the ship, Amy saw Asa melt into the crowd of refugees on the Quay. It would be nearly a year before she would see him again.

Some time after 7
P
.
M
., the theater was empty of Americans.

Hepburn now wanted to get his sailors aboard the ships. He sent Roger Griswold to retrieve the guards that remained at the bakeries and then to the consulate to help load files for transport to the ship. Davis and the consulate staff, including Horton, were still at the consulate. Hepburn wanted them to depart as well. It was time for everyone to leave. There were still sailors guarding the Standard Oil property and International College but since they were safe from the fire, Hepburn decided not to recall them. They would remain at their posts for the night. (He had left guards at International College because some of the American families had decided to remain.) He sent other sailors to move several of the relief committee’s cars to an area near the Konak, which appeared to be outside of the fire zone. Eventually, the fire would be over, and he wanted to preserve the vehicles for his and the relief committee’s use. At a minimum, he would need the cars to retrieve the Standard Oil and International College guards.

Next, Hepburn had sailors clear a small section of the Quay, just astern of the
Litchfield,
as a collecting place for the Americans who had not yet come in from the Girls’ School and the YWCA. It was after 7
P
.
M
. and they had not yet arrived.

THE SITUATION IN WHICH HEPBURN
found himself was chaotic. It was impossible for him to know precisely what was happening around him, except as he could see it. He was not communicating with the Allied navies or the Turkish authorities, and his men had ceased making their rounds of inspection. The fire made movement through the city impossible. The heat, the flames, the smoke, the cacophony and panic of refugees—all of it conspired to create an atmosphere of confusion. A kind of fog of war prevailed. The captain was sensible only to the world that contained
the theater, a small section of the Quay, and the destroyers.

It would later be established that Turks, both soldiers and civilians, had begun starting fires late Tuesday night and very early Wednesday morning. A lookout at the city’s fire station (a few blocks east of the American consulate) had spotted the first fire at 1
A
.
M
. in a house on Rue Rechidieh, the thoroughfare through the Armenian district (and quite probably the route Hepburn and others traveled when they drove out to Paradise). Ten minutes later, another fire was reported nearby, next to the Basmahane station, in a house next to the Armenian Club. At 1.45
A
.
M
., another had sprung up in the same general area at Rue Suyane, in a tight grid of small streets southwest of Basmahane station. As the fire brigade extinguished the Rue Suyane fire, they spotted smoke nearby at yet another fire. And so it went through the early hours of the morning—the fire brigade would douse one fire only to have others set behind them. There were at least five fires by sunrise.

The fire that had threatened (and ultimately consumed) the American Girls’ School was reported at 11
A
.
M
.—at about the time that Hepburn’s officer was returning from Paradise. It was one of the fires that would not be extinguished and would spread toward the main part of the city. (Hepburn’s officer was correct in his prediction about the danger posed by the south wind.) The fire brigade responded to the numerous early-morning blazes, each involving one, two, or three houses, and hooked its fire hoses to hydrants that drew water from a storage tank above the city. Around noon, the fire brigade was forced back to the central station because of faulty equipment—their hoses had sprung leaks. The brigade was sent back with new hoses to meet the spreading fires but forced to withdraw again as the blaze threatened to surround them. By late afternoon, the fire was past fighting in the Armenian Quarter.

THE FACTS ABOUT THE FIRE
were established at a London trial in 1924 in which the American Tobacco Co. had sought to collect on its losses from the Guardian Assurance Co. The trial lasted fourteen days, and forty-two witnesses were called to testify under oath, and many more people, including George Horton, were deposed. Lawyers cross-examined
nearly all the witnesses; the judge also put additional questions to them.

Everyone with knowledge of the fires concurred that they had begun in the Armenian Quarter. Firemen said they had seen Turkish soldiers and civilians lighting fires with kerosene-soaked rags and furniture cushions. One said that Turkish soldiers had forced Armenian families to remain in their homes as they caught fire, burning them alive. The court stenographer summarized one fireman’s testimony this way: “Witness went on to describe he found dead bodies in all the houses he entered in the district and spoke to having seen in a cupboard the mutilated body of a woman. He also saw [the] body of a woman hanging from a lemon tree.”

The lawyer for the insurance company called as a witness an Armenian woman, Arouskiak Sislian, who was in Smyrna to visit her parents. She was a nurse, and her parents lived around the corner from the Basmahane station. The insurance company sought to establish that Smyrna had been beset by civil disorder, which exempted it from liability. This excerpt describes her experience in the days and hours leading up to the evacuation of the Girls’ School, which was only three blocks away.