The Great Fire (33 page)

On the way to Salonika, the
Edsall
radioed Bristol with a message from Prentiss, the first transmission in what would eventually form a controversial record of the Smyrna fire and its aftermath. It began, “Prentiss requests following telegram be sent N.Y. Times corrected as you deem best.”
The substance of the cable was a proposal to write a story about the burning of Smyrna. Bristol approved the message and had it relayed from the radio room of the American embassy in Constantinople to New York, and the
Times
agreed to take an article written by Prentiss.

Prentiss’s first story appeared on the front page of America’s most important newspaper two days later:
EYEWITNESS STORY OF SMYRNA
’
S HORROR
. In it, he described the city’s suffering during the fire, but he played down the brutality leading up to it. “I personally saw Turkish officers escorting a wounded old lady to a hospital. I saw Turkish soldiers giving food and water to dying Armenians and Greeks. I saw officials arrest junior officers for brutality to prisoners.” Throughout the
Times
story, Prentiss stands at the center of the action as a principal character in the relief effort. There was no mention of Jennings, his shelter, or the women brutalized by Turkish soldiers. Over the following months, Prentiss would make himself into the hero at Smyrna. Once again, he was inventing a résumé.

The
Edsall
reached Salonika at 11 p.m.

Powell put the refugees ashore. The Greek civil officials and military officers at the port warmly received him, and he responded with his own hospitality, inviting them and the U.S. consul at Salonika, Leland B. Morris, aboard the ship. Morris was a thirty-six-year-old Foreign Service officer from Texas.
^*
Powell, Morris, and the Greek officials descended to the
Edsall
’s tight wardroom, under the forward deck, and a Greek officer in halting English rose from his seat to thank America for its kindness in helping his stricken countrymen. The Greek officer, in his heavily accented English, said he was not surprised that America had come to the aid of Greeks since America was a friend of Greece—perhaps now America was its only friend. His words brought similar speeches of gratitude around the table from the officer of the port and the Greek naval officers. Powell was moved by the display of appreciation.

The two hours he had spent alongside the
Litchfield
on Smyrna’s
waterfront earlier in the day had been enough to convince Powell of the urgency of an evacuation. As the
Glencart Castle
episode had demonstrated, he had an instinct for rescue. In the
Edsall’s
wardroom, he raised the question of how to organize an evacuation of Smyrna’s refugees. There was a lot of talk among the men, and the outline of a plan began to emerge. Powell suggested using Greek merchant ships. One of the Greek officers said the Greek military would make Greek merchant ships available at Chios but the Turks would not allow the ships into Smyrna’s harbor. Powell considered the man’s comments and responded in his soft Kentucky drawl that he thought it would be impractical for the Greeks to bring in their own ships. He suggested an alternative—to have the American chargé d’affaires in Athens request Turkish permission for the Americans to take over Greek merchant ships and conduct the evacuation. Someone at the table suggested that Bristol might be able to work it out; everyone knew Bristol had good relations with the Turks.

On its face, the idea was far-fetched. It would require American intervention, and the U.S. government had been disinclined to get involved, even as an interlocutor between the Greeks and Turks for the handover of the city to prevent its destruction. Authorizing American naval officers to take indirect command of Greek shipping and work between the Turks and Greeks to direct a large-scale evacuation seemed even less likely. Besides, Bristol was downright opposed to an American-led evacuation. He was hewing to his line of neutrality and the sole mission of protecting Americans and American property. As the conversation continued around the table in the cramped quarters, lit by an electric light powered by the ship’s generator, Powell offered an alternative to relying on Bristol. Why not have the senior Allied and American naval officers in Smyrna work out an agreement with Mustapha Kemal directly? It eliminated layers of decision making and potential opposition. The obstacle to this approach was that it violated Bristol’s order against working in concert with the Allies. Still, it seemed to Powell, as workable if handled in the right way. The men talked past midnight.

At 1:30
A
.
M
., Powell broke up the gathering. The
Edsall
’s boilers were fired for the ship’s return to Smyrna, but a gasket in a steam pipe blew
out, and the ship was forced to remain at the pier until morning. The engine crew made temporary repairs, and the
Edsall
departed Salonika at 9:30
A
.
M
. firing a single boiler, which meant the trip to Smyrna would take nearly twenty-four hours. It arrived the next day, early Saturday, September 16.

As the ship came to the Quay, the fire in the city was still burning, though not with the intensity of the first three nights. On the previous two days, it had spread north and south along the waterfront, leaving wreckage from the mansions at the southern end of Bella Vista all the way to the Custom House Pier—well over a mile and a half of jagged black walls, smoldering piles of masonry and wood, and barely discernible streets. Refugees remained on the Quay, sitting on the remains of their bundles, many partially burned. Turkish soldiers on horseback patrolled up and down the waterfront, and refugees attempting to swim the ships were shot. Jennings’s safe house at 490 flew an American flag, and children continued to occupy the space outside the front door, but there was no American guard posted there.

HEPBURN HAD BEEN BUSY
in Smyrna on Thursday and Friday, September 14 and 15, while Powell had made his way to Salonika and back.

The day before Powell’s return, on Friday, September 15, Hepburn had joined a meeting aboard the
Galileo,
the flagship of Italian admiral Pepe. British admiral Reginald Tyrwhitt, Harry Lamb, the French and Italian consuls, and Dumesnil’s chief of staff were present. The group agreed that a meeting with Kemal was needed to get answers about the Turkish attitude toward the relief and evacuation of the refugees. Pepe suggested that the consuls call on Kemal, but Lamb favored the naval officers as emissaries, and Lamb’s view appeared to prevail when the French officer who had been silent through the meeting finally spoke up. He surprised everyone with the news that French admiral Dumesnil was at that moment meeting Kemal. Clearly the French were working their own channels and agenda, and the group realized there was nothing to do but await the outcome of the conversation between Kemal and Dumesnil. The shipboard meeting broke up, and as Hepburn
departed, Admiral Pepe said to him, “There shall be no refugees problem to worry about by the time we get through conferring.”

Over the previous several days, a storm of diplomacy had been blowing among the Allied governments in London, Paris, and Rome. None of it was a secret to the men aboard the ship except possibly Hepburn—the U.S. State Department itself was staying abreast of the shifting Allied positions through leaks in the embassies at London and Rome. The French had announced that they supported the firm British position that a nationalist incursion into the neutral Dardanelles Strait would trigger war, but the French commitment to force was thin. It would soon disappear, and French foreign minister Raymond Poincaré would fly into a rage at his British counterpart Lord Curzon over an ultimatum to the Turks issued by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Even more conniving, Italy openly opposed the British position and had proposed a conference between Turkey and the Allies. The Italians had been trying to broker a Greek-Turkish armistice for a month and had sent a series of questions to the nationalists including one marked confidential: “What oil concessions would Italy get in Turkey in a peace settlement?” The French were slipping toward the Italian position. It was the same old story: the Allies could not agree among themselves on how to deal with Turkey.

Having heard nothing about Kemal’s response, the next morning, Saturday, September 16, Captain Hepburn decided to call directly on Dumesnil. Hepburn wanted to return to Constantinople to consult with Bristol and he needed to know Kemal’s position on the fate of the refugees. On board the
Jean Bart,
Dumesnil had no answers for Hepburn—either he had not asked Kemal, Kemal had not answered, or Dumesnil was not saying, choosing to withhold his response. The refugee situation was now less serious, the French admiral said, though on what basis he made the judgment was not clear. Nonetheless, in response to Hepburn’s suggestion, Dumesnil said a meeting between Kemal and the naval officers would be useful, but Dumesnil could not attend because he was returning to Constantinople to consult with his government. Dumesnil warned Hepburn against making demands of the Turkish supreme commander. There should be no ultimatums, he insisted. Dumesnil was
making clear his deference to Kemal. Hepburn left the French ship frustrated.

Then later in the day, a proclamation went up around the city, in Turkish, that settled Hepburn’s question. It announced that all Christians must be evacuated by October 1—two weeks away—or they would be deported to the interior. Women, children, and old men could leave, but all Greek and Armenian men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five would be held as prisoners of war. The Turkish authorities also declared that the names of refugees who wanted to depart must be furnished in advance. Given that at least 250,000 refugees were in the city, the overwhelming number without documents, the requirement was a logistical impossibility. The Turks seemed to be setting up a situation that had no logical outcome except the erasure of the refugees through death or deportation.

To Hepburn, the situation was moving backward toward some sort ultimate catastrophe.

Hepburn decided to call on Kiazim Pasha, the city’s military governor, to work out a compromise to the demand for refugee lists and documents. By now, Powell was back in Smyrna, and Hepburn brought him along, but the Turkish governor was absent. Hepburn returned to the
Litchfield,
and Powell, who was ashore in Smyrna for the first time, went to have a look at the refugee concentration sites. The largest group was at the Greek cemetery at the north end of the city, where about twelve thousand people milled about, sat on their blankets, and huddled with their children. As Powell walked among the crowd, the refugee men, mostly elderly with thick broad mustaches and dressed in farm clothes, removed their hats as Powell passed by, stood at attention and gave him military salutes, offering to escort him through the makeshift camp. “There is no doubt that they knew and appreciated what our visit was for,” he wrote in his ship’s diary. The suffering and the obvious appeal for help touched and made an impression on him.

THE BURNED CITY THROUGH
which Powell walked was a ghastly scene—a vast plain of rubble and destruction, leveled almost entirely by the fire except
for the shafts of naked chimneys, brick arches where once there had been grand entrances, and blasted churches without roofs. The twisted metal and cinder-filled streets were discernible only by the broken lines of standing walls of masonry, the remnants of capacious buildings. The blackened warehouses and hotels that still stood at the perimeter of the fire zone showed floorless vacant interiors—the rectangles that once were tall upper windows afforded a view to more ruins beyond, or the sky. The scene resembled those places in France that had been devastated by artillery fire in the Great War, except this was worse because it was a not a Picardy village or a town that been shattered by exploding shells but an entire city that had been broken, burned, and flattened. Jagged and partially standing walls resembled headstones. The spread of it was appalling—nearly a mile deep and more than a mile wide. The blasted cityscape smoldered still, smoke rising from the piles of mortar and stone at various places, and it gave off the smell of wet ashes, tobacco, and death. The corpses of the people who had been trapped by the inferno or shot in its aftermath lay in distorted positions, blackened, on the pavement. Dogs roamed, pulling at the putrid flesh. It was surely a piece of hell reconstructed on earth. Here and there, Turks picked through the ruins for unburnt booty, or a pod of refugees took shelter in the shade under an overhang of scorched masonry. Occasionally, under the wind, in a pile of rubble or a tumbled building, flames would flare back up. The only part of the city undamaged was the Turkish section at the base of Mount Pagus, the small adjoining Jewish section, and the terminus of the Point. Turkish residents had taken to fishing along the Quay with hooks and strands of salvaged telegraph wire for submerged bodies from which they could remove valuables: rings, coins, or gold teeth. The water was remarkably clear, and the corpses could be seen waving like seaweed below the surface. For years afterward, a big fish would be caught and opened and a bag of jewels would come out of the stomach.

Throughout the day, Merrill had been busy, pursuing his own agenda for Bristol. Bringing along Brown from the
Chicago Daily News,
Merrill also had called on Kiazim Pasha, who told him the police had arrested twenty-two Armenians for starting the fire. He said they had confessed and belonged to an organization of six hundred Armenians that had plotted
the city’s destruction. Merrill asked to interview the fire starters. Kiazim agreed but was unable to produce them. Merrill continued to press for them, but they were never produced. He also visited Noureddin at the Konak, seeking a copy of the letter written by Dr. White that proved American missionaries had conspired with ethnic Greeks in Marsovan against the Turkish government. This was the letter that Noureddin had described in the conversation five days earlier in the meeting with Hepburn and Dr. Post. Merrill told Noureddin he wanted to take it to Admiral Bristol. (It would make an excellent talking point for the admiral in his press campaign against the missionaries.) Noureddin said he didn’t have the letter in Smyrna but he would send for it and have it delivered to one of the destroyers for transmission to Bristol. (If the letter was ever delivered, it appears not to have made its way into Navy or State Department archives, and even if it had been, it hardly could justify the killing that took place in Marsovan.)