The Great Fire (30 page)

By midafternoon Thursday, the fire had consumed the Hotel Splendid and reached the southern end of the Quay and the Oriental Carpet Co., the British onshore headquarters. British sailors were sent to the roof to try to save the five-story building, which was at the head of a half-mile stretch of carpet warehouses. Despite the British efforts, it caught fire later in the day when the wind lifted. Soon the entire carpet-warehouse district was ablaze, burning, as a British officer put it, a million pounds’ worth of carpets “with a fierceness unbelievable.” The warehouses were “one roaring seething mass of writhing flames rising to an enormous height,” and the smoke and smell of burning wool enveloped the city.

At about 9
P
.
M
., Barnes and Jacob, on the stern of the
Litchfield,
watched a man light fires around the big storage building on the Passport
Pier. Turkish soldiers were stationed around it and did not interfere with the arsonist. After several attempts, the building caught fire and an enormous blaze broke out. The building, which had been a holding place for Armenian men, was packed with barrels of kerosene and ammunition. A witness said the series of resulting explosions created waves of oily flames four times as high as the building. “The explosion must have been repeated fifteen times, of which the first seven or eight went straight up through the building and yet left the walls standing. The eighth or ninth explosion took the centre of the building clean away, and only the end walls afterward remained standing.”

Yet fires were not the worst of it. Captain Hepburn and the relief volunteers noted what seemed to be a thinning of the refugees’ numbers. He sent a message to Bristol about the ominous development—previously feared and still not fully confirmed. “Number of refugees in sight much less than yesterday. Believe being herded into interior and all such definitely beyond hope relief or evacuation. Within week under present conditions relief workers generally agree there will be no relief problem.”

Had deportations begun? It was a terrible echo of the past.

D
r. Hatcherian had awoken on the morning of Wednesday, September 13, in a good mood. He decided again to check on his house—it was always on his mind. He walked through the Greek Quarter and asked an old Greek man if he had any news of the Armenian district. The man said that some sections of it had been ransacked; other sections not. He advised Dr. Hatcherian against going there. He went anyway, and on reaching the neighborhood he saw that it was under siege. He continued far enough to see the balcony and door of his home, which appeared closed. The house seemed untouched, but the neighborhood far too dangerous to enter. He returned to the house on the Quay.

Then, in the afternoon, he saw smoke billowing over the Armenian district, and he and his family watched from a window in the attic. He wondered if the fire had come near his home—he seemed not able to put his home out of his mind. He decided again to check on it, and again he put on his Ottoman medals. Dr. Hatcherian walked toward the house and found people were pouring out of the Armenian neighborhood. It was as if he was walking into the current of a swift river. He was running into and around people who were intent on one thing: moving away from the fire. He fought his way upstream. Women were fleeing with infants in their arms, pulling young children along; men followed
with bags and bundles of household goods. As he got closer, he saw two fires, one spreading on either side of St. Stephanos, the Armenian cathedral. He was still at least ten blocks from his house. A Turk who took him for a compatriot said to him, “We did what was due. You turn back.” Not wanting to create suspicion about his identity, Dr. Hatcherian answered, “Very well.” He waited for the Turk to move twenty or so steps away, then followed him step for step out of the neighborhood, keeping the same distance between them. At the Greek hospital, the Turk went right, Dr. Hatcherian left. He took a deep breath.

Back at the Quay house, he watched the course of the fire from the upper floors into the night. “Gradually,” he wrote, “the flames approach our house. The crackle of burning materials and the transformation of explosives into flaming clouds produces an infernal sight the likes of which I have never seen before. In Istanbul and other cities, I have seen huge fires. During the battles in the Dardanelles and in Romania, I have witnessed the burning of so many cities and villages, but none of those fires has made such a strong impression on me. This fire in Smyrna is indescribable and unimaginable.”

The blaze reached the Quay, but not the house in which the Hatcherians were staying. It was unclear whether the fire would take the house or not. It seemed a dangerous proposition to leave the house and join the masses of people moving back and forth on the Quay. He and his family stayed in their upstairs room. In the morning, fearing the fire, the owners of the house said they were departing, and Dr. Hatcherian felt obliged to leave with them. He carried his chest of medical instruments, his wife held their infant daughter, and each of the older children carried a sack; they walked along the waterfront among the frightened people, terror-stricken themselves but without any place to go. They moved toward the Point but heard gunfire and turned back. (He passed Jennings’s safe house at No. 490. It was full.) The children began to cry, and his wife lamented his decision to keep them in Smyrna. The children joined in blaming him. “Alas, I have nothing to answer. I join their lamentation and confess that I am the only one to be blamed and, with tearful eyes, I ask for forgiveness.”

Dr. Hatcherian saw the foreign navies loading people into boats along
the Quay and begged for his family to be taken aboard, but his requests were repeatedly denied. Only people with foreign passports were taken. He was still carrying his doctor’s chest, and the weight of it strained his arms. His wife suggested that he throw it into the harbor, but he insisted on keeping it, seeing it as their only hope for a future. Tired, hungry, and without hope, the family walked back and forth along the Quay under the hot sun, jostling among the people and looking for some escape. They found none—they were among tens of thousands of others doing the same thing. People were wailing, pushing, and jumping into the sea, attempting to swim out to the big ships in the harbor.

In the afternoon, the wind shifted and came off the sea, pushing the fire back from waterfront toward the inner sections of the city. Somehow, Dr. Hatcherian found the owners of the Quay house and together they returned to it. From the balcony, Dr. Hatcherian saw a group of American sailors leading a group of Armenian children toward the Passport Pier, and he decided to try to join them. (These would have been the orphans who were brought aboard the
Winona
.) He summoned his family and grabbed his box of instruments and ran to the pier, but the American sailors refused to take them. The whaleboats were full, and even some of the orphans had to be left behind.

“On the open sea, we see an American transport ship and look for a way to get on board a boat to get to the ship; it turns out to be impossible. The waves are high and we are wet again up to our knees. On the Quay, along with household items, one can see valuable objects and human corpses strewn everywhere and we walk through them almost stepping on them.”

Unable to get to the
Winona,
the Hatcherians returned to the Quay house and found that the owners had admitted more people, and now there were many people inside the mansion. Everyone waited and carefully marked the progress and direction of the fire, which skirted perilously close to the big house, but somehow, miraculously had not yet touched it.

The next day, Friday, September 15, one of the people in the house on the Quay where Dr. Hatcherian and his family had taken shelter told him that he had heard that not all the Armenian neighborhood had
burned—some houses were still standing. Tortured with indecision and perpetually desperate to determine if his family’s home and possession remained, Dr. Hatcherian foolishly went back to check on it a third time. He again put on a Turkish fez and pinned his Ottoman medals to his chest; he was joined by his friend Aram Arakelian, an Armenian who had obtained false papers identifying him as a Turk with a different name. Aram also had a home in the Armenian section.

The two set off to check on their properties, and as they entered the Armenian neighborhood a Turkish soldier called out to them to turn back, then, suspicious of them, summoned the two to come to him. The soldier asked their identities to which Aram said, “Thank God we are Moslems.” Suspicious, the soldier turned to a group of Turkish boys standing nearby amid the rubble and asked if they knew the two. The boys identified Dr. Hatcherian as an Armenian. Not sure who to believe, the boys or the men, the soldier took Dr. Hatcherian and Aram to the Basmahane station, which had been turned into a military quarters. Dr. Hatcherian showed his Ottoman military papers and service medal, and Aram took out the fake papers that identified him as a Moslem. Aram’s papers created more suspicion, and a soldier ordered the two men arrested.

T
he destruction of Smyrna has several backstories. Oil is among the most important. It was the pursuit of oil that led to the decisions that led to Smyrna.

The serious pursuit of oil in the Near East had begun twenty years earlier in a remote region of sand and cream-colored rock in southwestern Persia (now Iran) about 350 miles north of the apex of the Persian Gulf. In the late nineteenth century, European geologists explored the region, and one Frenchman in particular, Jacques de Morgan, published papers and maps that extolled its oil potential. Until the turn of the century, there had been no serious attempts at oil drilling in the Persian Gulf, but the history of the Near Eastern oil industry soon would begin with the encounter of two remarkable characters.

In 1900, a British socialite was introduced through an intermediary to the shah of Persia. The socialite was leading an extravagant life that was drawing down his considerable wealth. The Persian shah was a dandy who had a taste for luxury. The socialite was William Knox D’Arcy, and he was seeking an investment that would float the life that he and his second wife, an actress, were leading in London and at their two country
estates. One of those estates was near D’Arcy’s favorite haunt, the Epsom racetrack. The Persian shah was seeking an investor who could turn what he suspected was his country’s reservoirs of oil into a steady stream of royal expenditure. The shah especially liked to travel to Paris, where he enjoyed the movies. D’Arcy and the shah were oddly compatible in their need to find money to support their lavish tastes. One wanted to make an investment; one had an investment to offer. Out of that compatibility, the Near Eastern oil industry came to be born. The two never met in person—their communication was through the shah’s Armenian business agent—but they soon would strike a deal and ultimately trigger a rush for Near Eastern oil.

D’Arcy sent a team to investigate oil prospects in Persia, and when it reported back favorably, D’Arcy and the shah, Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, signed a deal. For twenty thousand pounds cash, another twenty thousand pounds in company stock, and the promise of 16 percent of the profits, D’Arcy got a concession to all the oil in Persia, except for a few northern provinces near the Russian border. It wasn’t exactly the purchase of Manhattan for trinkets, but the comparison is irresistible. Following the sale, the shah immediately went on a Paris vacation and caught the latest movies.

After financing the costs of two wells over the next two years, which produced no oil, D’Arcy grew discouraged. He decided in 1904 to unload his concession. A bettor by nature, he decided he had put his money on the wrong horse. But a coincidental meeting with British Admiral John Fisher, a second sea lord and a forceful advocate of new naval methods and technologies, proved to be the encouragement that D’Arcy needed to continue drilling. With Britain considering conversion of its naval fleet to oil, Lord Fisher (and many others in British naval circles) did not want D’Arcy’s Persian oil concession to slip out of British control. Britain needed a reliable source of oil since it had none of its own. Fisher would help D’Arcy hold on to his concession, which ultimately would prove extremely, fabulously, and unbelievably profitable. Its success would ignite an oil fever at the very time Europe was organizing itself for a very big war.

THERE WAS THE UNEASY FEELING
among many in Britain that war with Germany was inevitable, and there was very little time left to prepare for it. Lord Fisher was one of those who saw the conflict ahead. The help he gave D’Arcy came in the form of a well-financed syndicate with D’Arcy as a director, but no longer the controlling interest. The syndicate, with capital provided by the Burmah Oil Co., chose to drill farther south, and closer to the Persian Gulf, and after two more dry wells, it too lost hope. An order was mailed to end the work, but D’Arcy’s stubborn geologist, convinced that there was oil below the sand, drilled a third well, at Masjid Sulaiman. Fortunately, the mail arrived late.

At 4
A
.
M
. on May 26, 1908, the drill struck oil, and it gushed fifty feet over the rig. A young British lieutenant who was present, along with twenty riflemen to protect the operation against bandits, sent the news back to the British government in code: See Psalm 104 Verse 15 Third Sentence. The passage read: “And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face shine . . .”

Gusher followed gusher, and the Near Eastern oil industry was born. In 1909, the British syndicate was reformulated as the Anglo-Persian Oil Co., later to be named BP, British Petroleum.

ALL THIS, BY WAY OF A WINDING ROAD
, led to World War I, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Smyrna, and Bristol’s inexcusable response to a humanitarian disaster.

D’Arcy was not the only person who had sniffed oil. In 1908, a retired American admiral, Chester Colby, had gone to Constantinople to negotiate an oil and railroad concession on behalf of a New Jersey corporation. He was granted preliminary approval, but the concession was never ratified by the Ottoman Parliament and withered, though it would revive and die again over the next fifteen years.

In 1909, at about the same time that the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. had been formed, a group of well-placed British bankers established the Turkish National Bank in Constantinople. The bank was a front for an initiative to gain an oil concession in Mesopotamia, the place
now called Iraq, to the west of D’Arcy’s concession. The British bankers worked through a mysterious and brilliant young Armenian businessman named Calouste Gulbenkian. There were no Turks involved in the Turkish National Bank—just the British and Gulbenkian, an Ottoman subject but not a Turk.

Gulbenkian, with good contacts in the Ottoman government, was adept in the negotiating skills of the Near Eastern carpet trade and he understood the oil business. Mesopotamia had drawn the British, Germans, and Americans, and they had each negotiated competing claims to oil rights and concessions from the Ottoman government. It was a tangle that needed a patient deal maker. Astonishingly, after long negotiations, Gulbenkian was able to bring together his British business partners, assigning their interest to the Anglo-Persian Oil Co., with representatives of Deutsche Bank and the powerful Royal Dutch Shell Co. into a single entity. It was called the Turkish Petroleum Co. (again, no Turks involved). On June 28, 1914, the Ottoman government granted the hugely valuable Mesopotamia concession to the Turkish Petroleum Co. The Anglo-Persian Co. got 50 percent; Deutsche Bank, 22.5 percent; Royal Dutch-Shell, 22.5 percent; Gulbenkian, 5 percent. His personal piece of the deal would make Gulbenkian the richest man in the world.

On the day the concession was granted, the Austrian-Hungarian archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo. The big forces of colonial, military, and industrial competition that had been building for decades among the powers of Europe, and especially between Britain and Germany, were about to burst. Suddenly all bets were off on oil in the Near East.

ON THAT DAY
of the assassination, June 28, 1914, Captain Mark Bristol was in Washington as head of the new Office of Naval Aeronautics; George Horton was in Smyrna as consul general, documenting the terror campaign against Ottoman Greeks in western Anatolia; Dr. Garabed Hatcherian was in Bardizag, his Armenian hometown on the Sea of Marmara, practicing medicine as a private physician and teaching hygiene in the local Armenian school; Theodora was four years old and
living with her family in Gritzalia; the Reverend Asa Jennings, recently recovered from his illness, was preaching at the Richfield Springs Methodist Church.

BY THE FALL OF 1918
, sixteen million people were dead as a consequence of the war, and the continent of Europe was a shambles. World War I lasted four years and two months and ended in a series of rolling armistices toward the end of 1918: the Bulgarians first, on September 29; the Ottomans next on October 30; then, Austria-Hungary on November 4; finally, Imperial Germany on November 11. “The Allies had floated to victory,” Lord Curzon said after the war, “on a sea of oil.” He might have added, “American oil.” The war had made it clear that Britain needed its own source of petroleum if it wanted to remain a world power.

Oil had twice the thermal content of coal, and an oil-powered battleship required one-third the engine weight and one-fourth the fuel weight of a coal-powered battleship to achieve the same horsepower. Its range was four times farther. Speed was essential to winning naval battles, and oil gave a battleship an extra four knots—decisive when big ships with big guns slugged it out at sea. There were other advantages—it took five hundred men five days to fuel a coal-powered battleship while just twelve men in twelve hours could refuel an oil-fired battleship.

So obvious was the military advantage to a nation with ready access to oil that the United States, beginning in 1910, established oil reserves for its navy, places of naturally abundant supply in the American West that could be tapped in times of war. One of these was at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, a rock formation that soon would become synonymous with graft in the Harding administration. The secretary of the interior took a bribe to let the Sinclair Oil Co. pump oil from the reserve. The first dirty money passed hands in November 1921.

When Britain had met with its allies at Sevres to divvy up the Ottoman Empire in 1920, its eyes were on Iraq—the oil prize of the war. The Sevres Treaty assigned the Iraq mandate to Britain—with 25 percent of Iraq’s oil production pledged to France. American oil companies immediately objected. The loudest objection came from Walter Teagle,
president of the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, the biggest single piece of John D. Rockefeller’s old empire, which the Supreme Court had broken up in 1911. (It was later named Exxon.) Teagle—all three hundred determined pounds of him—charged that the British were monopolizing oil in the Near East. The State Department also conveyed its objection to Britain and held fast to the American policy of an “Open Door” on all commerce, including oil exploration.

Britain claimed the mandate did not lock up Iraq’s oil for Britain alone and pointed out that Britain accounted for only 4.5 percent of the world’s oil production while the United States accounted for 80 percent. The American opposition to the Iraq mandate was so noisy that Britain produced a densely reported and reasoned document, “Memorandum on the Petroleum Situation,” that dissected and disputed the American concerns of a British monopoly. Mark Bristol had a copy of it on his desk. He considered it British bunk, and it only further inflamed his antagonism toward Britain—and, by some extension of geopolitical overthink, the Greeks, who Bristol considered a British client. Secretary Hughes suggested that the seven big American oil companies form a consortium to negotiate their piece of the Iraq oil reserves—and the State Department would back it up with tough-minded diplomacy. (Hughes was no apologist for the oil companies: he had voted to break up Standard Oil as a member of the Supreme Court back in 1911. But he knew America needed oil.) Hughes was true to his word. America would remain engaged, through diplomacy and hard bargaining, on the issue of oil, and eventually a compromise would be found in which the American oil companies and the British divided Iraqi oil.

AS FOR THE NON-OIL ELEMENTS
of the Sevres Treaty, including the provisions intended to protect the Christian minorities, the European allies had lost interest, and Americans were staying out of the matter entirely. Harding stood firm on the issue of American military engagement in Turkey. There wouldn’t be any. Harding was no enemy of the Ottoman Greeks or Armenians; on the contrary, it was in his nature to sympathize with people. But he had not the slightest inclination to protect them from
Turkish cruelty—either as a moral imperative or as an obligation under a treaty to which the United States was not a signatory.

It was in this political atmosphere of business first, international humanitarian ideals last, that Bristol operated in his own inimitable way as high commissioner. The admiral flattered himself with the notion that he was influencing American oil policy. He was not; others at a higher level managed that important matter for the nation. As for American-Turkish relations, they would travel on a track laid down by forces of political economy and geopolitics far more profound than the admiral’s personal conception of a “square deal” and his preference for Turks over Greeks. In all likelihood, Washington saw Bristol as running an expensive but useful taxi service for oil and tobacco executives in the Near East.

But Bristol was not without influence, and the Smyrna catastrophe offered him his one opportunity for a genuine legacy. He could have responded with speed and compassion; he might even have saved the city with mediation. But Bristol was no Henry Morgenthau; of course, there was no room in the Harding administration for a Morgenthau.

Idealism was out; the missionary impulse and rural Protestantism was fading. Consumerism, oil, and public relations were in. Power was shifting. The America that was emerging in 1922 was not the America of 1914.