The Great Fire (38 page)

Kemal continued to drink raki and talk expansively, and, finally, overcome by his feelings—in the traditional manner of the rough men of the Anatolian hills and Aegean Islands—he got up to dance the zeybeck, in which a lone dancer wanders the floor with his arms spread until he feels the nine-beat rhythm of the music and the inner force of his wild soul and begins to dance—making himself into an eagle, proud and fierce, the predator that drops out of the sky.

I
t is difficult to know precisely what happened to Asa Jennings on the morning of September 20.

It was a Wednesday, his birthday, and he was turning forty-five years old, though the day would pass uncelebrated. It was one more hopeless and breathless day in a long string of hot, hopeless, and breathless days on the Smyrna waterfront. The sun came up behind the city and baked the red roofs and gray cobbles of the street. Hollow-eyed women and skinny children crouched where they could find shade—in the lee of a standing shattered wall or under a blanket hung between two upright sticks. Dogs limped through the rubble, heads down, and tongues out, jackal-like. Occasionally, a breeze worried the surface of the harbor.

Jennings stood in front of his safe house at No. 490 and looked down the length of the Quay. He saw refugees, mostly motionless except to pick lice off their children. There were mounted Turkish soldiers whose horses occasionally shook their heads against the flies. Lieutenant Commander Powell and a few American sailors were outside the nearby consulate, and the
Edsall
was anchored in its usual place, just off the Quay. The British ships
Curacoa
and
Serapis
and several merchant vessels also were in the harbor, all at anchor. The atmosphere was static, desultory, tired, and hot, and whatever movement occurred seemed to be formed without intent or consequence.

The deeper motivation behind the action Jennings was about to take, setting far-reaching events in motion, had been present throughout his life, but Jennings himself did not seem to know its immediate cause. Maybe it was the consequence of his powerful empathy encountering unimaginable despair. Possibly the fever that he lived with every day had spiked in the hot morning sun and caused some dislocation of his thinking and, as a result, loosened his normal restraint. Did he have a vision of his imagined Jerusalem, the place as well as the meaning of it? Maybe he’d had a moment of clarity brought on by his awareness of advancing age and declining health. Time was running out on his chance to achieve the importance he told Amy he had wanted his life to embrace. Asa had been inclined toward a religious life since boyhood, and his deep faith coupled with a strong sense of personal duty. Maybe this was the moment for which he had been allowed to live twenty years earlier when the abscess had broken in the Adirondack cabin. He stood alone on the Quay, but he felt (he would later say) God’s hand placed on his shoulder.

He described the sensation that surged through him as an “uncontrollable desire” to save the lives of the people who had come under his protection. There were about two thousand of them now, women and children, spread among a number of safe houses at the north end of the Quay. In the two weeks since the relief committee had relegated him to messenger-boy status, Jennings had pulled women from the streets where some had begun to give birth and others from the water where they had tried to drown themselves. He watched refugees being beaten and shot and carried off to be raped.

Jennings had been fully occupied with the care of the people in “his houses,” as he called them, not getting much sleep and suffering with his own broken body. Lack of sleep can also be a powerful drug, so it might be said that on Wednesday morning, September 20, 1922, Jennings was drugged into action.

He was nothing if not respectful of authority and he had accepted the directions he had been given—and not given. The relief committee had assigned someone else to find ships to remove the refugees to a safer place. So, being a man who understood obedience, he had left that job to another, though every day he had prayed privately for ships.

As he scanned the harbor, Jennings saw a passenger ship that had arrived the previous day. It flew the French flag from its stern, and it was taking on passengers. Jennings was unaware of it, but the ship had been a Russian navy vessel until it was sold to a French steamship company for passenger service in the Levant. It was named
Pierre Loti
after the French naval officer of the same name, a passionate Orientalist and novelist.

Jennings went to Powell, pointed to the ship, and said he would like a sailor to take him out to it. He wanted to see if he could get the ship to take away some of the people in his care. There were other ships in the harbor, but Jennings had fastened his attention on the
Pierre Loti,
and he asked Powell for a launch and a sailor to ferry him to it. Powell gave him a long look, then consented and sent him off in a motor sailer. Powell and Jennings were friends by now, and Powell had come around to helping Jennings in his mission by assigning sailors to bring women to his shelter.

Do your darndest, Powell said to Jennings as Jennings limped to the seawall.

Jennings got into the launch with the sailor and motored toward the
Pierre Loti
. He went on board and met the captain, who told him that the vessel was full. The captain would not—could not—take more passengers. Unable to shake the “uncontrollable urge” that had seized him on the Quay, Jennings again surveyed the harbor. He saw a second steamer, the
Constantinopoli,
which was flying the red, white, and green flag of Italy. A tramp steamer, it was a twenty-four-year-old 330-foot-long single-screw vessel with a long fantail that hung over an exposed rudder. It had a cabin amidships, one stack, and two masts, one fore and aft. It looked like a cross between a Chinese junk, a city bus, and a scrap yard. It was primarily a cargo ship, but it held a few well-appointed cabins for passengers. In its first life, as the
Citta Di Torino,
it had carried thousands of poor Italian immigrants to New York and Buenos Aires from Genoa, Palermo, and Naples, but since America had tightened its immigration laws,
Citta Di Torino
had made a new life, principally as a cargo ship, plying the Levant. Today, it was scheduled to sail from Smyrna to the city for which it was named.

Jennings directed the sailor to take him to the
Constantinopoli
. He went aboard, and the Italian captain told him the ship was scheduled to
sail in a few hours and without refugees. It was carrying cargo and a few paying passengers. Jennings put his request to the captain: Would he accept two thousand refugees for passage to Lesbos, which was on the way to Constantinople? No, the captain said, it was impossible; there were too many obstacles to taking aboard refugees. His orders would have to be changed by his employer, the steamship company Servizi Marittimi. It was impossible to reach them from Smyrna. Anyway, even if the company allowed him to take the refugees aboard, what assurance did he have that the harbormaster at Mytilene, the port at Lesbos, would permit them to be unloaded? And what about the Turkish authorities?, the Italian captain wanted to know. Would they countenance the transfer of two thousand people from the Quay to his ship? And, even if these obstacles could be surmounted, who would pay for their passage? Jennings had to know that his ship was not a philanthropic organization.

The captain’s last question suggested that he was keeping an open mind—based possibly on the quiet exchange of some cash. What would Jennings be willing to pay him if the obstacles could be overcome? Jennings understood that he was being felt out on a bribe—
baksheesh
, the universal language of the Levant. Let me work on this, Jennings told him. If things could be worked out, the captain said, the refugees would need to be on board for a 10
A
.
M
. departure the next morning. The deadline was firm; he would delay only one day.

Elated, Jennings went ashore and told Powell and Davis of his meeting with the Italian captain. Davis approved the expenditure. The captain wanted $5,000. Money for the passage would be collected from the refugees who had it, and the rest (including the bribe) would come from Near East Relief. As it turned out, many of the refugees had sewn money into their clothes or had been able to hide it from the bandits and soldiers on the street, and most ended up paying their own passage. Davis gave Jennings papers that identified him as a member of the American Relief Committee at Smyrna and told him to determine whether additional refugees could be landed at Mytilene, whether there would be housing for them, and what supplies would be needed if others were sent. Overnight, Jennings, Davis, and Powell prepared the refugees for departure. The Turkish authorities had granted permission for the evacuation, but
only women, children, and old men would be allowed to depart. The women pleaded for their husbands and brothers to no avail. In the morning, Thursday, September 21, Turkish soldiers appeared at the house at 490 and formed a row from the front door to the Quay to be sure no men joined the evacuees. “It was heartbreaking to see the grief,” Jennings later recalled.

Powell provided the whaleboats to ferry the refugees to the ship. It was a lot of people. Hepburn had transported about two hundred on the first night of the fire, but Powell needed to move two thousand with fewer boats and men. To make matters worse, a wind had come up—the “donkey wind,” which often came up in the afternoons when the heat of the land pulled in air from the cooler sea and created an updraft. The harbor had turned rough and sloppy. Powell put his men to work in the whaleboats and motor cruiser moving back and forth between the safe houses on the Quay and the
Constantinopoli
. The job was not complete until the late afternoon, well beyond the Italian captain’s announced sailing time of the day before at 10
A
.
M
., but with the money in hand, the captain held the ship.

Powell told Jennings he would have the
Litchfield
pick him up at Mytilene, the main port at Lesbos, the next day. Powell had finally been able to send the
Litchfield
to Salonika, earlier that morning, with the orphans he had wanted so much to evacuate; it was returning to Smyrna the following day. Like Davis, Powell instructed Jennings to investigate the feasibility of Mytilene as a trans-shipping station for refugees.

Jennings and the
Constantinopoli
departed Smyrna at 5
P
.
M
., September 21.

THE
CONSTANTINOPOLI
WAS PACKED
with women, children and old men—from stem to stern, above and below deck. No space was left unoccupied, and Jennings had been barely able to pass from the gangway to his cabin. “I could scarcely get through the mass of people that crowded around me,” he later said. “They fell at my feet in gratitude. They kissed me. Old men got on their knees kissing my hands and feet, tears streaming down their faces. They did everything they could to show their thanks.”

As the people mobbed him, they wept for family members left behind and begged Jennings to find a way to bring them away too. Jennings was overcome with emotion and embarrassment and disappeared into his cabin. “When I finally reached the cabin assigned to me,” he recalled later, “I dropped on the berth and burst out crying.” He said his prayers and thanked God for the ship. “There in that cabin,” he told a reporter a year later, “I thanked Him for His guidance, and asked Him to continue it.” After he collected himself, Jennings left his cabin and by happenstance met a passenger who had booked one of the cabins for the trip to Constantinople. He was Ernesto Aliotti, a twenty-five-year-old Italian Smyrniot with fine features and dark hair parted at the middle. The Aliottis were among Smyrna’s most successful families and had piled up a fortune from, among other things, carpets. Ernesto’s grandfather had been a founder of the Oriental Carpet Co. It was a fortuitous meeting. Aliotti spoke English, and he and Jennings talked as the ship steamed and rolled ever so slowly toward Mytilene.

The trip from Smyrna to Mytilene was only about one hundred miles. Lesbos, a big island shaped like a triangle with rounded edges, had been an Ottoman possession until ten years earlier when it had passed to Greece after the First Balkan War. Mytilene, a small but prosperous city of twenty-five thousand people, was its principal harbor, on the southeast point of the blunt triangle. In the daylight, Turkey was visible from the port city as a line of low brown hills only six miles distant. Now, at night from the deck of the
Constantinopoli,
the Turkish headland was dark except for the flicker of a few lights at Aivali. No moon was visible in the sky; it had waned since the first week of the month, and on this night it finally disappeared. The night was black.

On the trip, Jennings described to Aliotti his mission to deliver the refugees and determine whether others could be brought from Smyrna. Aliotti was helpful, and it didn’t take much effort to persuade him to join Jennings. Aliotti spoke Greek as well as English and Italian, so his presence would make Jennings’s task much easier. He was also a man of important reputation and wide acquaintance; he had contacts on the island who could assist a relief committee. His name assured instant credibility. The
Constantinopoli
arrived at Mytilene at midnight, Thursday, September
21. Jennings and Aliotti continued to formulate a plan of tasks and committees, which would be made up of the people on Allioti’s list. At five
A
.
M
. the two men went ashore. It was still dark.

A rock breakwater with a narrow entrance that admitted only smaller vessels protected Mytilene’s harbor. The
Constantinopoli
was too big and its draft too deep to tie up at the inner harbor’s dock so it waited at anchor offshore. Soon, the sun was rising over the Turkish headlands and threw its bright rays on the white façades of Mytilene’s harborfront and the dome of St. Therapon Cathedral. It was a picturesque port, gathered in a curve around the small harbor, with many pink and white villas among palm trees along the shorefront, but the pretty picture on that morning contained thousands of refugees and soldiers who had been evacuated from Smyrna and other Aegean ports in the days before the Turkish capture of Smyrna. Mytilene and Chios had been the two main holding areas as the army awaited its return to Greece. The streets, churchyards, and empty lots of the city were full of refugees, and soldiers camped in the open areas at the edge of the port.