The Great Fire (43 page)

As they approached it, by the Aydin Railroad station, Turkish soldiers pulled Dr. Hatcherian and other men out of the crowd to clean the square. He complied but quietly sneaked away when the soldiers were not watching him and rejoined his family, and they moved with the mass of people toward the first gate. It was early afternoon, and the Hatcherians waited in the hot sun. At four o’clock, they saw the
Lawrence
coming into the harbor with Jennings’s Greek freighters trailing behind. Dr. Hatcherian’s heart pounded with joy—there were thousands of people waiting to depart but surely there would be room enough on those ships to take them all aboard. When the Turkish guard opened the gate, the crowd attempted to rush through, pushing and shoving, but the crowd was big and the opening narrow so the Hatcherians were unable to make their way inside.

Inside the gate, Turkish guards stopped them and prepared to search them for valuables, but an American sailor interceded and they were able
to continue moving in line. As they shuffled along toward the opening in a second makeshift fence, Dr. Hatcherian saw that some refugees were getting inside by scaling the fence. Incredibly, he decided to do the same, and with his wife’s help he got over the top and she handed him the children. He was then faced with the problem of getting his wife over the top. He asked a Turkish guard on the other side if he would help his wife over the fence for money. The soldier agreed, got down so that Mrs. Hatcherian could step on his shoulders, and then the soldier stood up. Dr. Hatcherian reached for her at the top of the fence and helped her down. Now, the family was together inside the fence and they rejoined the line. As they moved toward the pier, another Turkish soldier asked him what he had given the other soldier, and Dr. Hatcherian said that he had rewarded him for some help and he offered the second guard money as well. The guard refused and put the point of his bayonet to Dr. Hatcherian’s chest. He ordered him back out of the gate.

The children began to cry and Mrs. Hatcherian begged the soldier to allow her husband to remain with the family. Dr. Hatcherian appealed to an American sailor who stood nearby, but he responded that he could not intervene. The doctor was almost back out of the gate when the Turkish soldier decided to take the money Mrs. Hatcherian had offered him; he allowed Dr. Hatcherian to rejoin his family. Overcome by the tension, Dr. Hatcherian fainted. In a few moments, he regained consciousness and stood up. Then, from out of the crowd, a friend came to him and asked him to go outside the gate to attend to an old woman who had fallen in line and blacked out. It was an awful dilemma for Dr. Hatcherian—abandon his family or refuse to go to the woman’s aid. He decided that he could do little or nothing for the woman without medicine and it was too dangerous to leave his family even for a few minutes. He told the friend that he could not go, and the Hatcherians moved closer to the ship. Now, they could see the people stepping onto the deck. Dr. Hatcherian felt again that he would lose consciousness. He rested, then began again with Vartouhi in his arms. He led his family toward the ship. There was one more Turkish guard to pass, and Dr. Hatcherian lowered his head and walked by him. There was always the chance he would be taken for being
forty-five years old or less, arrested and placed in one of the pens. The guard watched him closely. Dr. Hatcherian felt his gaze, but the soldier did not stop him.

The mad day wore on, and in four hours, Powell, his men, and the relief committee had managed to fill the six ships—sixteen thousand people. Dr. Hatcherian’s family was among the last to be loaded.

Powell went aboard the
Ismini
to talk with Jennings, who had remained on the ship through the loading. The commander was handling the shoreside logistics; Jennings was controlling the ships in the harbor. Powell told him to unload the refugees at Mytilene as rapidly as possible and hurry back to Smyrna for another run. Time was short. Jennings departed with the ships, escorted out of the harbor by the
Lawrence
.

AMONG THE AMERICANS ON
the pier was Mark Prentiss with his whistle and helmet. At the end of the day, he wrote another story for
The New York Times
and sent it via ship to Constantinople for transmission to New York. It was published later in the week. In the first paragraph of the story, he wrote that he was in charge of the ships moving between Smyrna and Mytilene. The story mentioned neither Jennings nor Powell. In describing the scene at the pier, he wrote, “I am certain no refugees were seriously hurt by the soldiers . . .”

THE NEXT DAY, MONDAY
, September 25, no ships arrived. The refugees scanned the harbor, waiting for a telltale line of smoke on the horizon or the glint of sun on a hull.

The problem was the turnaround time at Mytilene. It was taking longer than expected to unload the refugees—it had to be done with tugs, barges, and small boats. It soon became clear that a ship that left Smyrna with a load of refugees for Mytilene would not return to reload for at least thirty-six hours—this would be the cycle time, a day and a half, even though the round trip steaming time was four hours at most.

Jennings sent a message from Mytilene to Powell that the new arrivals had brought the number of refugees on the island to one hundred thousand, and the city was running out of food. He said he feared a riot if food did not arrive within twenty-four hours. This further complicated matters for Powell—he had flour at Smyrna, but the Turks would not allow it to leave the city. Food would have to be transported to the island from Constantinople, but there was the continuing problem of radio communication from Smyrna. Jennings also notified Powell that the
Kilkis
had set out to sea—though he did not know its location. Theophanides was gone from the city. The mysterious departure of the
Kilkis
was a quiet but ominous portent that Jennings did not yet understand.

Jennings also reported to Powell that there were refugees at other towns and cities along the coast—twenty thousand at Aivali just to the north of Smyrna and twenty-five thousand at Vourla, only a few miles to the south.
^*
The Greek government had asked him, he told Powell, to attempt to evacuate them as well. They were close to starvation. This was another dilemma for Powell: it would be impossible for him to send a ship to either of those places—he needed his ships and men in Smyrna. His goal now remained the evacuation of Smyrna. “I gave Mr. Jennings orders to expedite in every way the arrival of the next Greek ships and to have them by 8 a.m. the next morning.” (That deadline was not met because of the turnaround time.) Meanwhile, Powell observed, more refugees
were coming into Smyrna from the distant hills and villages. The crowds were again swelling along the waterfront.

At 11
A
.
M
. Monday, while Jennings was unloading in Mytilene, Powell, taking along John Clayton and Vice Consul Barnes, called on Rauf Bey, the nationalist foreign minister, and together the group drove to Latife’s home in Göztepe for a meeting with Mustapha Kemal. They climbed the same stairs that the guests had climbed the night of the party and entered Kemal’s office. Powell was favorably struck with the Turkish leader: “He immediately impressed you as being a very strong man. . . . All of Mustapha Kemal’s replies to questions were short and complete and answered entirely the question asked without evasion or without hesitation. . . . He informed us that the Nationalist army had already reached the straits and that his troops were now in Arenkiei [a town at Chanak on the Dardanelles Strait], and that, although rumored, there had been no contact with the British forces.” Powell’s interview with Kemal ranged broadly over Turkish nationalist intentions in the Dardanelles, the possibility of an exchange of populations between the Turks and Greeks, and the future of the Near Eastern oil fields. Powell specifically asked Kemal about exploitation of oil in Mesopotamia.

The response was important enough for Powell to immediately dispatch the
Lawrence
back to Constantinople with a transcript. Oil had been Bristol’s chief concern all along. It was precisely the answer that he would be pleased to hear.

On the same day, Powell received a note from Captain Hugh C. Buckle, commander of the British light cruiser HMS
Curacoa,
which remained in the harbor. The captain was concerned for the safety of the British manager of the Aydin Railroad, General de Candolla. (The general was the British secret agent whom Lieutenant Merrill had befriended a week earlier.) De Candolla had remained at the railroad office to avoid having the Turks seize the railroad by declaring it derelict. With war imminent, Buckle wanted the retired general and active secret agent to get himself aboard a British ship, but the captain was reluctant to send British marines ashore. Powell had one of his men deliver the message, and de Candolla returned to the
Curacoa
. Powell had been cultivating good relations with the British, and his rapport with the British officers would play an important part in the evacuation in subsequent days.

Five days earlier, when Powell had agreed to help Buckle load refugees aboard the
Versailles
and the
Worsley Hall,
Buckle had invited Powell and his officers to dinner aboard the
Curacoa
. The American officers had accepted the dinner invitation but said what they could really use was a drink. Of course, responded the British commander, and together the British and American officers had boarded a British launch and motored to the
Curacoa
for dinner and drinks in its wardroom, which was fitted out like a British men’s club—leather arm chairs, books, cupboard with trophies and awards, and a long green-cloth table over which hung a lamp with a yellow silk lampshade.

It had been a convivial evening. Powell was a good storyteller, and he
had related his wartime experiences in the Queenstown flotilla during World War I with the British admiral Lewis Bailey, whom he admired greatly and called “Luigi” to the delight of the British officers present. It had helped the evening’s good feelings that Powell had worn his Distinguished Service Order medal, a red and blue ribbon with a gilt-and-white-enamel cross. Another one of the
Edsall
’s officers entertained the British with his stories of odd characters, including a man who slept in his boots for obvious reasons, and there was a good deal of laughter among the men in the stateroom. “They (the Americans) went back to the ship,” a British officer who was present later wrote, “leaving behind them the impression that if any trouble occurred, it would be pleasant to be in it with them. It was the beginning of a great friendship between the two ships.”

THE NEXT MORNING, TUESDAY
, September 26, Powell was up before 5
A
.
M
. He had received word of the return of the Greek ships. This time, the
Edsall,
with Powell aboard, met them at the Pelican Spit buoy—nine had already arrived, and five more were approaching. Another trailed behind. Jennings had been able to increase the number of ships available for the evacuation—the flotilla was growing in size as the Piraeus ships joined the effort. About fifty ships were now involved—the fifteen now in Smyrna Harbor, others at Mytilene, and still others on their way from Piraeus, including an ocean liner, the
Megali Hellas,
which had been making regular passenger runs to New York but was detailed to Smyrna.