The Great Fire (35 page)

There was something both reassuring and endearing about the little man with the hunched back. Maybe part of his appeal
was
the hunched back—which suggested a kind of magical figure to the poor Greek women, who were overwhelmingly agricultural peasants. A favorite character in Greek folklore had been a likable little hunchback—Karagiozis (Kar-a-gee-O-zees). A poor man of the people who survived on his wits during the Ottoman rule of Greece, Karagiozis had imparted wisdom and laughter—usually without realizing it—to audiences throughout Greece and Asia Minor, including Smyrna. Represented in shadow-puppet theaters with a long right arm and raggedy clothes, he was a beloved figure who had given the Greeks a way to laugh at themselves—and their Islamic masters. A rich Turkish pasha was a regular character in the corpus of Karagiozis stories, known to the refugees by heart.

Jennings was no fool nor was he barefoot, black eyed, and big nosed, as was Karagiozis, but he would become beloved. Powell was among those who saw the good work he was doing—sheltering people who had been frightened beyond endurance and gently treating their wounds and sicknesses and saying his prayers among them.

On this Sunday-morning walk of the Quay, Powell saw that an American flag was hung on the house at No. 490, and he decided it had to come down. It was likely to attract Turkish attention and provoke trouble. Powell asked Jennings to have someone haul it down, and he went inside for an inspection. The house was full on all its floors; people were spread everywhere, and many of the women were pregnant or holding newborn babies. It smelled of sick and unwashed people. They were dirty and frightened, but they were safe—or safer than on the street. The mansions along the Quay were the products of great wealth—their entrances typically opened on to a large foyer and grand staircase, the ceilings were high, the rooms capacious, the floors made of marble tiles or polished
wood. There were four big rooms on a floor, and there would be two main floors, top and bottom, with a tighter floor squeezed between the first and second floors for servants and household chores. The mansions were filled with red Ushak carpets, tall mirrors, bronze statuary, high beds, and mahogany wardrobes the size of arks. Each had a big balcony protruding from the third floor that overlooked the harbor. Powell walked through Jennings’s small hospital, though the scarcity of medical supplies hardly justified the name, and checked the other safe houses, and he saw the same scenes spread among the luxury of former residents—women who had been raped and stabbed, others who appeared emaciated and were speechless—but he also saw that there were men present, some of them sick and wounded, others healthy relatives of the women who were being sheltered. Powell did not know what the Turkish attitude toward these safe house was—so far there had been no trouble—but he wanted to see them continue operating until he could arrange an evacuation, and he worried that the presence of the men would bring down a Turkish order to empty them. He directed Jennings to remove the men. Powell also learned from Jennings that he had been sleeping in the safe houses since the night of the fire. Powell’s orders were to protect Americans—he ordered Jennings to sleep aboard the
Edsall
or in the American consulate (the Spartali mansion) at night for his own safety.

In the ship’s diary that night, Powell recorded the names of the American Relief Committee members as they had been given to him, and it showed that the committee continued to assign Jennings little importance, listing him as an assistant after young Robert Trueblood, a recent graduate of Whittier College who had only just arrived in Smyrna to teach at International College.

THE RELIEF EFFORT WAS SPUTTERING
. The fire had destroyed nearly all the bakeries, and there was no gas or water service to the few that remained on the city’s outer edges. The fire had melted the underground pipes that brought water through the city. The committee was producing only eight hundred loaves a day. The only vehicles were those few that Hepburn had saved on the night of the fire, and the relief workers couldn’t travel safely on foot without guards to protect them—the risk of being robbed or shot by Turkish soldiers was too high. Some of the soldiers had come from deep inside Anatolia, and they had no idea who or what an American was and why they should care. Jennings was now staying close to his houses and not wandering the city.

Feeding was restricted to stations along the waterfront. People thronged the volunteers when they arrived with food, rushing the feeding stations like pigeons to a crust thrown on the street. Refugees were given flour with which they tried to make their own bread by finding water and improvising ways of cooking it. Some made flour patties and placed them on the blades of shovels, which they held over hot spots in the ruins to make something that resembled bread. The American destroyers had brought Near East Relief foodstuffs from Constantinople, and the relief committee was distributing them, but it was having difficulty because the refugees were scattered not just on the Quay, but throughout the burned city, on the roads out of they city, and in the nearby suburbs. The refugees had taken to wandering like frightened animals in search of food and shelter. Many families would walk miles in one direction, only to turn around and walk miles in another—the wandering might turn up some food or a way to escape. The continuous movement seemed instinctual.

John Clayton, back in the city, filed a story on Sunday, the seventeenth: “The horrors of plague have been added to the terrors of Smyrna. The disease broke out yesterday, and, owing to the impossibility of taking
sanitary precautions among the thousands of refugees, scores of victims are being added to the toll of starvation and massacres. . . . The city is almost entirely without food today, practically the only visible supply being a little formerly in possession of the various relief organizations but now being held for the Turkish population.”

The only efficient way to get what little food there was to the refugees was to concentrate them at several locations that could be reached by a vehicle, but the relief committee and Powell found the Turkish officials were unwilling to follow through on promises of establishing concentration points. The Turkish army either allowed bandits to roam through refugee camps or dispersed the refugees without notice to the committee. Powell made several attempts to intervene, and while he did not meet overt opposition, his efforts went nowhere—he was either told that the decision he sought must be made at a higher level or he was given a promise of assistance that never materialized. He could not get past the smiles, insincere promises, and delays. Often, the people in charge changed, requiring a new set of negotiations and explanations.

The Turkish authorities made two points clear to Powell: the Turkish army would be fed first from available supplies, and the Turkish military was determined that all Christian men of military age would be arrested. Powell could see that the Christian men were being hunted down. Nadja Bey, the military governor, made his own trip to the biggest refugee camp, outside the city at Balchova,
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to determine whether any men of military age were present. He walked among the refugees carefully checking men and boys, examining their faces and pulling them out of the crowd if they were even close to the dangerous age bracket. They were arrested and taken away by soldiers.

Powell also visited the Balchova camp and found the conditions appalling: no water for most of the people and hardly any food. Ernest Jacob came along with him. “The worst sight I have seen thus far are the 8,250 old men, women and children in the military barracks at Baldjoba,” wrote
Jacob. “There is almost no water, and they had no food for five days. We gave them over thirty sacks of flour, promised bread for tomorrow, and arranged to repair the pumps.”

To make matters worse, the nights were turning cold, and the rains would soon begin. The refugees huddled and slept on the ground at the city’s football field and the big Greek cemetery, both near the Point, or anywhere else where they could find safety, either by blending into a large group or hiding amid the ruins. Frightened and defenseless, they responded like vulnerable animals on an African plain, seeking safety from predators in sheer numbers. “On account of the continued moving of the refugees,” Powell observed, “it is difficult to keep track of them and relieve them. Only one camp has been permanent for three days, that at Belchova, where the conditions are very bad.” Powell did find the committee’s American businessmen skilled at bribing Turkish officials; they provided helpful to him as he tried to get answers and the authorities’ cooperation.

Powell was also aware of friction inside the relief committee and the general unhappiness (including his own) with one member in particular, who, as he put it in his ship’s diary, was seeking the limelight. No doubt it was Prentiss, who had returned to Smyrna after filing his second story to New York. His articles ignored the work of others, and he continued to magnify his role and cast himself as an expert and the leader of the relief effort. He also had the annoying habit of blowing a whistle in the concentration areas to bring the refugees to order or get their attention—this, while wearing a helmet, making himself look ridiculous as well. He also arranged to have his photo taken as he threw bread to the scrambling refugees, and another committee member reported that Prentiss had come into a large amount of unexplained cash while in the city.

Powell had other worries. It had become dangerous for Americans to wander from the Quay, out of the sight of the ships. Jacob and Trueblood had been roughed up and robbed at gunpoint near the remains of the YMCA building just three blocks back from the Quay. They complained to a Turkish officer, who took what money the first bandits did not. Powell also had received the report of the murder of a Greek American in his home in a farming village south of Smyrna near Aydin. Powell intended
to take every incident seriously—it was essential for the maintenance of American prestige and the protection of American lives. He let nothing slide. He ordered Vice Consul Barnes to write an official letter protesting mistreatment of Greek and Armenian naturalized Americans. Powell said he wanted the Turks to investigate each incident and provide him a report of the details, including the statements of witnesses.

For the Greek American killed near Aydin, he also wanted the city’s military governor to provide a caisson for the return of the man’s body and a Turkish officer as an escort to ensure its safe return. Both were supplied. Powell also sought the release of a naturalized Greek American, fifty-three-year-old George Carathina, who he knew to have been arrested and shuffled among the city’s jails until his whereabouts were unknown. Mr. Carathina had returned to Turkey from California, where he had immigrated, to retrieve his family in Smyrna. Powell was not making distinctions as Hepburn had between native-born Americans and naturalized Americans. Americans were Americans, and he was there to protect them all. Powell’s inquiries into Carathina’s whereabouts were met with the predictable reassurances and—the same lack of results. Carathina, by now, Powell concluded, was probably being marched into the interior.

In line with the decision to protect all Americans, Powell decided to reverse Captain Hepburn’s decision to allow Americans, if they chose to accept the risk, to remain at International College in Paradise, which no longer had American guards. It was an untenable situation in his view, since he could not stand by if they were molested. Cass Reed, a professor at the college, was among those who had remained. Powell ordered them into the city and aboard the destroyers, where he housed and fed them. He also set his mind to evacuating the orphans and American missionary director of the orphanage in Boudjah that was sheltering four hundred children under the auspices of the relief committee. He intended to put them on the
Simpson
when it returned from Constantinople and send them to Salonika. A young American missionary, Raymond Moreman, a graduate of Pomona College and teacher at International College, was supervising the orphanage. Moreman had hoisted an American flag over the orphanage and told the Turkish soldiers, “I shall die with them if they are killed.”

Powell preferred to avoid the young American’s martyrdom. The
Simpson
had just returned to Smyrna, but Bristol almost immediately ordered it back to Constantinople, scuttling Powell’s plan to remove the orphans. Powell was unwilling to give up on the orphans’ evacuation, though, and let Bristol know, via the ship’s telegraph, that he was seeking to position one of his ships so that it could watch over the consulate and the Standard Oil docks at the same time, freeing a second ship to remove the children. Either his message was not received, or Bristol elected to not respond.

On Sunday, September 17, Powell also got word back from Admiral Pepe through a subordinate officer that Kemal was unwilling to allow evacuation of the refugees on Greek ships. It was obvious that Kemal had the authority to do as he pleased in Smyrna—he was the uncontested leader of both the army and the nationalist government—but he chose to tell the Italian admiral that the decision must be evaluated by a committee and submitted for consideration in Ankara. Admiral Tyrwhitt got the same news and sent it back to London. Lord Curzon immediately cabled British ambassador Auckland Geddes in Washington. Kemal’s decision, the cable said, was “tantamount to condemnation of quarter of million people to death by starvation.” The note directed Geddes to ask the United States to join Britain in issuing a protest and pressing again for permission to evacuate the refugees. The State Department did not respond.