The Great Fire (42 page)

This was more of Jennings’s creative bluster: he had no authority from the relief committee to threaten to withdraw its relief efforts in Smyrna. Jennings and Theophanides received a quick message that confirmed receipt of the ultimatum and promised an answer.

As they waited, Jennings sent a message to Powell in Smyrna: “12 ships and sufficient coal Mytilene with total carrying capacity of 18,000 persons each trip await favorable reply Athens to your generous offer before being released Stop Other ships also available Stop Expecting reply
every moment Stop If favorable will send some of ships today and others tonight Stop Call me.”

Powell confirmed receipt of the message.

Before the 6
P
.
M
. deadline was reached, the
Kilkis
’s telegraph came alive. It clicked out an answer: the Greek government was ordering Frangos to turn over the ships at Mytilene to Jennings, and Greek ships from Piraeus were on their way, also to be placed under Jennings’s command.

The bold gamble had worked. Incredibly, Jennings would soon find himself in command of a flotilla.

The
Kilkis
replied: “Mr. Jennings on behalf of American Relief Committee gratefully appreciates the Hellenic Government’s prompt cooperation in connection with the transport of the Smyrna Refugees.”
^*

Jennings then received a radio message from Frangos: “After communication with the General Staff I acknowledge you all the ships now in Piraeus harbor have been seized by the Government and have been ordered to Mytilene for the transport of the refugees from the Asia Minor coast. Stop. I acknowledge you also that the Commander of the Navy has ordered to be in communication with the American Admiral with reference regulation of the transportation.—Frangos, Brigadier General.”

Since Bristol was unaware of what was happening and his name was being invoked as the enabler of the evacuation, there soon would be hell to pay.

Jennings then radioed Powell: “Capt Panos Argyropulos is hereby appointed to be in charge of transportation and direction of ships assigned to the American Relief Committee Mytilene during the emergency connected with the evacuation of Smyrna and elsewhere due to the advance of Kemal army.” Arygyropoulos was the cashiered Greek naval officer Jennings had met on coming ashore at Mytilene with Aliotti two days
earlier and was among the group on the
Kilkis
. He and Theophanides were probably well acquainted with each other. Jennings needed Arygyropoulos since Jennings barely new a ship’s stem from its stern.

Theophanides immediately summoned the merchant captains at Mytilene to the
Kilkis
. He told them to be ready to depart at midnight for an evacuation of Smyrna. There was grumbling, and a number of the merchant captains explained why they could not join the evacuation flotilla, but Theophanides was firm. He threatened military action against uncooperative captains. Ten ships were made ready for the first trip to Smyrna. One of the merchant captains spoke a little English, so Jennings picked the captain’s ship,
Ismini,
as the one on which he would travel. In the morning, it led the flotilla from Mytilene.

Powell soon received a radio message from Jennings, asking for an escort when the ships had entered the Gulf of Smyrna. Communication was roundabout: the
Edsall
radioed the
Kilkis,
which had already departed Mytilene or was about to depart, because of the rebellion, and the
Kilkis
in return relayed the messages to Jennings on the lead merchant ship.

Jennings to Powell: “15 ships are scheduled to arrive Pelican Spit 6:00 a.m. Stop. Meet with U.S. Destroyer. Stop. Confirm.”

Powell designated the
Lawrence
as the escort, and the
Lawrence
radioed the
Kilkis:
“Reference your message to Edsall for Mr. Jennings. Am approaching Long Island (in Gulf of Smyrna)/have vessels ready to follow me/will escort them anchorage south and east of railway pier.”

Powell, lacking barges to carry the refugees to the ships, had arranged (through Roger Griswold, expert at bribes) to bring the ships alongside the railroad pier. By early Sunday morning, thirty thousand refugees already had gathered outside its enclosure. The
Lawrence
met the Greek merchant ships with Jennings aboard the lead ship, the
Ismini,
at 2
P
.
M
. Sunday, September 24. The ships proceeded in a line into the harbor. The
Lawrence
led the way, flying the American flag, and the Greek ships followed. “From quite a way out,” Jennings later remembered, “I could see from my station on the bridge the smoking ruins of what had once been the business part of the town. It was the most desolate fearsome sight I ever saw. And at the water’s edge stretching for miles, was what
looked like a lifeless black border.” As Jennings’s ship drew closer, he saw that the black border was actually the crowd of black-clad women along the Quay, “suffering, waiting, hoping, praying as they had be[en] doing every moment for days—waiting, hoping praying for ships, ships, ships.”

The ships moved closer. “As we approached, and the shore spread out before us, it seemed as if every face on that Quay was turned toward us, and every arm out-stretched to bring us in. I thought the whole shore was moving out to grasp us.”

The refugees on the Quay, seeing the line of ships, knew immediately that help had arrived and that they might now survive. A great cheer went up from the crowd, and the many tens of thousands of people along the Quay reached toward the ships, tearful and exultant. Jennings would remember it as a cry of “transcendent joy.” Among those watching were Theodora and her two sisters and the Hatcherian family. Their prayers had been answered.

The rescue was about to commence, but their suffering was not over.

T
he Greek merchant ships tied up at the railroad pier four at a time. The seven that had arrived on the first trip were the
Ismini, Matheos, Atromitos, Thraki, Byzantion, Zakinthos,
and
Peneos
. The railroad pier was a big industrial space with cranes, train tracks, and storage sheds just past and around the bend of the Point at the very terminus of the harbor. In the morning, Turkish soldiers had herded 30,000 of the 250,000 refugees that still remained in the city toward the Point to board the ships. They filled the streets around the Point, to the north and south, and nearly all were women and children. They carried their sacks, straw baskets, carpets, blankets, and, sometimes, odd possessions—a wooden saddle, a piece of a loom, a roll of chicken wire. Many of the very young and very old were close to death. They had been without food for days.

The pier was made of rough wood planks and projected several hundred yards into the harbor, then broke at an angle to the right, forming a crooked digit that pointed toward the lower end of Cordelio. The ships docked at the crooked digit, two on either side. A seven-foot-tall iron-picket fence enclosed the rail yard behind the pier. There were three widely spaced gates in the iron fence, and refugees passed through each gate, inspected by Turkish soldiers. The three additional makeshift fences had been set up inside the main iron fence, and these interior fences channeled the refugees through the rail yard and toward the base of the pier,
which led to the pier’s crooked digit and the ships. The passages between the makeshift fences narrowed in some places with timbers to thin the line and allow closer inspection by the soldiers. All men of military age were pulled out of line, including foreign nationals without papers. The Turkish soldiers placed the men who were pulled out into wire pens on the pier, and when the pens were full, soldiers marched the men away. About 10 percent of the refugees were men of military age—husbands, brothers, and fathers of the women they were with.

A double line of Turkish soldiers loitered between the first and second gates, and from time to time some of them moved among the refugees, mostly to rob them of whatever money they had left or rummage their bundles for valuables. The third gate, distant from the two closer to the Point, admitted fewer refugees and was less well guarded.

Powell assigned sixty sailors to the rail yard and pier, twenty specifically to keep violence by the Turkish soldiers to a minimum. The sailors’ only authority was their American uniforms and willingness to forcefully step between a soldier and his victim—they were not permitted to draw weapons for the protection of the refugees. The sailors were not shy about coming between a refugee and a soldier who was intent on extracting a last bit of punishment. Powell stood on the pier coordinating the flow of people, signaling to the Turkish soldiers to open and close the gates into the rail yard. He had to work fast. The Turkish deadline gave him only seven days from this morning to remove the refugees from the city. He wasn’t entirely sure how many people were in the concentration camps and backstreets—there were likely tens of thousands more—but he operated on the assumption that those who failed to pass over the pier in the next seven days would be marched into the interior.

The loading was brutal and often chaotic. People were desperate not to be left behind, and they pushed and shoved one another and leaned into the fences and gates. Women were knocked down, children torn from their arms. Sometimes guards would hold back a woman to check her bundle but her family would be pushed through, causing her to be separated from her relatives. She would scream and attempt to push through a closed barrier as her family moved farther forward and disappeared into the tattered and dirty parade moving toward the ships, fully
lost to her. The worst cases were when the women were separated from their children.

The Turks used leather straps, canes, rifle butts, and bayonets to control the crowd, and in a few cases Turkish guards shot male refugees who tried to force their way toward the ships or escape from the guards. “Robbing at the gates and in the yard was rather the rule than the exception,” Powell noted in his diary. Posting sailors on the pier didn’t stop the robberies—with scores of Turkish soldiers on and near the pier and thousands of refugees as targets, there simply were too many incidents for the sailors to intercede in all of them. Powell appealed to the Turkish officers to halt the brazen robberies by bringing their soldiers under control; and the request—officer to officer—slowed the worst of it for a short time near the ships, but the robberies continued among the long lines of people stretching into the streets and soon it was rampant again everywhere. Unable to get the officers present to act decisively to stop the thefts, he called on Noureddin and reported it to him. “It did not seem to interest him to any great degree,” Powell wrote. Often guards at the gates demanded payment as a matter of course before letting people pass. If a refugee failed to produce money, the soldier sent her back to the street.

“Two sides of the Turk’s nature,” Powell wrote, “were evident every day of the evacuation: one in his treatment of refugees, both women and old men, was the robber and more or less of a brute, the other was a soldier doing his duty with a very humane side to him. I have seen them pick up a hat and an old man, or assist a cripple or elderly woman.”

The first gate, closest to the Quay, was the main choke point. The crowd compressed as it squeezed through, leading to shoving, pushing, and pulling. There was the always-present fear of being left behind—of being the last person to reach a ship only to be told there would be no passage out. Women lost shoes, and their clothing was torn as they tried to get through. An old woman had become lost, and in her confusion she was unaware that she was naked from the waist down. She ran about calling for her family. Another woman was separated from her child when it was allowed to pass through the gate, but the gate was suddenly closed, preventing her entrance to the rail yard. She tried to force her
way through and was beaten back by the soldiers. Wild, she climbed the picket fence, which was taller than a man. A soldier cornered her inside the fence and pinned her against the bars with the butt of his gun. She fought back, crazed to gain her child back, and broke away from the soldier, who ultimately let her run to it.

The Greek ships were built to carry cargo, not people, and the refugees were lowered into the deep vertical cargo holds with ropes, and when the holds were full, refugees were spread tightly on the decks, beginning at the aft end of the ship and working forward toward the bow for maximum stowage. Usually, the refugees’ bundles were thrown into the hold first. At one point, a woman became hysterical when her bundle was taken from her and thrown into the depths of the ship. Sailors could not restrain her, and she jumped into the hold to retrieve it. Thirty feet down, she landed on other bundles, which cushioned her fall, and she unwrapped her bundle—it contained her child. The American sailors turned to the work with energy—cheerful even, in this unusual assignment—and carried bundles and rugs and stretchers to the ships. Some carried crippled refugees on their backs; others had a baby in each arm. Many of the bundles—big squares of cloth filled with household utensils and goods and tied at the corners—taxed the strength of the young sailors. The sailors marveled at the strength of some of the old kerchiefed and barefoot women who had carried these bundles for days over miles of rough roads and had kept possession of them through the fire.

The heat was punishing on the pier, with the temperature hovering near one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. There was no shade, and no water to share among the people. The stink was awful. There was a quarter-acre wedge of water between the pier and the Point in which an eddy caught and held the harbor’s ghastly floatage—mostly garbage, sewage, and the carcasses of animals. The disgusting soup splashed against the stonework of the pier and released the smell of putrefying flesh. Occasionally a human body, swollen and naked, emerged among the dead animals and waterlogged garbage. From time to time, in the crush, a woman was pushed into the water, and she stood among the saturated carrion holding her child in the air until she could scramble to rejoin
the crowd, the rags she wore absorbing the harbor’s stench. The noise too was deafening: “The din was terrific,” wrote an officer who was present, “winches rattling, women shrieking, children howling, shouted orders, and through all the steady undertone of shuffling feet and the murmur of a vast crowd.”

THE RELIEF COMMITTEE
had been relying on only two doctors—Dr. Post and Dr. Margoulis, the local Jewish doctor—throughout the postfire ordeal, but on the previous day, Saturday, a third doctor had arrived—Esther Pohl Lovejoy, an extraordinary woman who was the head of the American Women’s Hospital Association. She had arrived on the SS
Dotch,
a broken-down tramp freighter that flew the flag of Imperial Russia, a defunct state. The Near East Relief had chartered the
Dotch
in Constantinople to deliver supplies and evacuate refugees. Packing a few cans of food and several Sterno burners, Dr. Lovejoy, then fifty-two years old, had jumped a ride on the freighter with another American, Ernest Shoedsack, an aspiring filmmaker who was in search of a big subject for a documentary. He was six feet, four inches tall, and Dr. Lovejoy called him “Shorty.” “The trip to Smyrna was very distressing to Shorty,” Dr. Lovejoy would later remember. “He was torn, as it were, between two massacres. The one which had already taken place at Smyrna, and the one which might take place at Constantinople.”
^*

Dr. Lovejoy, born in a Pacific Northwest lumber camp, had grown up in Portland, becoming only the second woman to graduate from the University of Oregon Medical School. She practiced medicine in Alaska, during the Gold Rush of 1899, and Portland, where she became the city’s health director. She had been a strong voice for women and children’s health and an advocate of women’s suffrage. She had turned Portland into a model of public health by writing its first milk- and food-handling ordinances, and she had kept bubonic plague, which was then appearing in West Coast cities, out of Portland by leading a crackdown on the city’s rat
population. Her first husband died in Alaska, her brother was murdered on the Dawson Trail, and her son had died at eight years old. A big-boned and beautiful woman, she had married a second time, but the marriage had ended in divorce. In 1917, she traveled to France to work with the American Medical Women’s Association, which treated the war’s civilian victims. She had stayed in Europe, helping to start the American Women’s Hospital Association, which opened clinics in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Turkey. Dr. Lovejoy had been in Paris, preparing to travel to Russia, when she had learned of the refugee crisis at Smyrna. She had immediately departed for Constantinople, where she had hopped on the
Dotch
.

On the railroad pier, she wore a long loose dress with sleeves to her elbows and a hat with full-circle brim against the sun. “In a city with so large a population,” Dr. Lovejoy later wrote, “there were, of course, a great many expectant mothers, and these terrible experiences precipitated their labors in many instances. Children were born upon the Quay and upon the pier, and one woman, who had been in the crush at the first gate for hours, finally staggered through holding her just-born child in her hands.”

Powell appreciated her presence and consulted with her about handling women who were in the worst conditions. Hysteria—uncontrollable screaming, wailing, and laughter caused by severe mental trauma—was a malady not uncommonly confronted on the pier.

THE HATCHERIANS WERE AMONG
the tens of thousands of people on the railroad pier Sunday morning, September 24.

After he and the other older men had been released by the Turkish guards, Dr. Hatcherian had returned to the house on the Quay and discovered to his great relief that his family was still there, and while his wife appeared emaciated and his youngest child, Vartouhi, was suffering diarrhea from malnutrition, they were safe. The number of people in the house was now greater than before, and they had learned that Americans were transporting people out of the city and that tickets on the vessels were for sale at the American consulate. Mrs. Hatcherian, with another woman, bought
tickets, ten liras each, and returned to the house.
^*
Then, the Hatcherian family, with the tickets, went to another house, guarded by the Americans and next to the consulate, which served as a waiting place for departing refugees. (The house was one of Jennings’s safe houses.)

On September 22, a launch had arrived at the Quay, opposite the house, and the Hatcherians and many others stood in line to board it to be carried to the freighter in the harbor. (It was either the
Versailles
or the
Worsley Hall
.) The smaller boat could take one hundred fifty people and it made several trips, filling the freighter. The Hatcherians were too far back in line to be taken aboard, and the ship departed without them. They returned to the Jennings house, where the Americans gave them bread and the children condensed milk.

The next day, September 23, the Hatcherians had arisen early and watched the horizon for another ship but none appeared. Dr. Hatcherian recorded in his diary:

On Sunday morning, September 24, the children were hungry but there was no food. So Hatcheres, Dr. Hatcherian’s oldest son, had gone out to see if he could buy some. While he was gone, an American sailor announced that it was time for people to line up to go to the railroad pier to board the ships. Others prepared to leave, but the Hatcherians waited, worrying that they would miss the ship, but unwilling to leave without Hatcheres. After about an hour, Hatcheres returned—bloodied. He had ventured too far from the American building and Turkish soldiers had
stopped him, taken his money, and beaten him. With Hatcheres back among them, the family including Araksi, the housekeeper, joined the other refugees leaving the house for the walk to the railroad pier.