The Great Fire (7 page)

A
t the end of August, American consul general George Horton and his wife, Catherine, visited Sevdikuey,
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a small town of wealthy Greek and Dutch merchants about forty minutes southeast of Smyrna by way of the British-owned Smyrna-Aydin Railroad. They had friends in the town, and August was the month when people of means closed their stuffy offices to escape the city for the countryside or nearby islands. Under the Anatolian sun, faraway objects shimmered in waves of liquid heat and even lizards sought the shade of rocks. Smyrniots treated August as a long afternoon nap.

At sixty-three years old, Horton was an experienced hand in Turkey, and not easily rattled. He had pulled men out of Ottoman jails, saved others from imminent hangings, and interceded with government officials against religious killings. He had served in the Near East through two Balkan wars and World War I, and three decades of consular service, beginning in 1893, had hardened him to religious strife and massacre. But now, as he stepped back on to the train at Sevdikuey at the end of his holiday, he was deeply worried. He sensed serious trouble, possibly a catastrophe.

Sevdikeuy lay at the southern end of the Greek army’s long defensive
line, and Horton had picked up rumors that the army of Greece had suffered serious losses near Afyon Karahisar. The nationalist army was moving west, he was told, and it was pressing the Greek army along the French-operated Casaba rail line toward Smyrna. Telegraph lines had been cut, leaving the Greek command in Smyrna unable to determine the army’s fate or position, and what little news there was came from Ottoman-Greek farmers who were fleeing ahead of the shifting battlefront.

If any American, or European for that matter, knew what was happening in and around Smyrna, it was Horton. In Smyrna as well as the hinterlands to the south and east, Horton’s friends and network of discreet sources kept him informed. Horton’s web included the Onassis brothers, successful tobacco traders in the city, but there were many others—Greek, Armenian, Levantine, and Turkish eyes and ears—upon which he relied for intelligence.

Tall and leaning on a long cane, and typically dressed in jacket and tie, Horton made a formal first impression, but he was actually a sociable old gentleman, a little florid in his language, and he relished his contact with people high and low. He spoke impeccable Greek and French and passable Italian and Turkish, and he had made it his business to parley with local officials, clergy, shopkeepers, foreign consuls, shepherds, fig traders, farmers, waterfront men, and soldiers. Based on the little he had picked up already, Horton was growing more certain that the Greek occupation of western Anatolia was drawing to an end. He had predicted a disaster from the start—comparing Greece’s armed entry into Turkey to ancient Athens’s calamitous invasion of Syracuse two thousand years earlier. (Horton, who had a degree in Greek and Latin from the University of Michigan, was capable of a touch of classical bombast.) He returned to Smyrna convinced that the Greek army’s setbacks portended serious trouble for Smyrna’s Christian population.

From the vantage of his consular postings over thirty years, Horton had watched the religious strife of the Near East evolve from isolated incidents of persecution and cynical retribution to outright government-sponsored genocide. Decaying empires, like decaying isotopes, throw off powerful amounts of dangerous energy. Turkey was a decaying empire,
and Horton was one of a small group of American consular officials and missionaries spread through the Near East who had witnessed the terrible consequences of radical religious nationalism.

AFTER ARRIVING BACK
at the consulate in Smyrna on August 30, Horton began sending agitated cables to Washington with news of the Greek debacle in the east, near Afyon Karahisar, and his fear that the nationalist army might soon approach Smyrna.

He swept up as much unofficial information as he could about the Greek army, which, he was told, was in rapid retreat and burning towns and villages in its path back to the sea. Most people in Smyrna were unaware of the scope of the Greek losses and remained calm and even festive in the final days of August. “The three big kinema theatres on the north Quay were doing a good business,” observed an Englishman in the city, “and the smart uniforms of the Greek officers were everywhere prominent, and one’s thoughts went back to the amusements of Paris and London during our Great War.” Even as the Greek army was falling back toward Smyrna, an Italian opera company performed
Aida
in the big theater at the Quayside Sporting Club.

Horton knew better than to assume the city was safe. His cables to Washington grew more anxious. The first, on August 30, reported the break in the Greek lines at Afyon Karahisar. “Turks have advanced along the Casaba Railroad seventy kilometers,” he wrote. By September 2, the Greek army’s setbacks had become public knowledge in Smyrna, though most people thought the Greek command would reconstitute its line to hold the city based on the dispatch of reinforcements by sea. Greek troops were arriving from Thrace, the easternmost province of Greece. On September 2, Horton cabled the State Department with a careful description of the positions of the Greek forces between Smyrna and the collapsing front and wrote:

“My opinion is that the situation is so serious that it can not now be saved. Panic is spreading among the Christian population, foreigners as well as Greek, and many are trying to leave. . . . I respectfully request that
a cruiser be dispatched to Smyrna to protect consulate and (American) nationals.”

Anticipating an indifferent response from his antagonistic boss, Admiral Mark L. Bristol, in Constantinople, and possibly from Washington too, he added a postscript: “Urgently request your support.” It would take four days for Horton to get an answer to his plea, and when it finally came, it would leave him disappointed. But disappointment was something he had learned to live with in Smyrna. It had hollowed out his natural idealism and left him bilious and frustrated. He already had made it clear to Washington that he wanted a transfer out of Smyrna. Even those entreaties had gone unanswered.

HORTON HAD BEEN A CONSUL
for twenty-nine years. Consul positions at the time were patronage appointments and often went (as Horton candidly put it) to saloonkeepers, broken-down preachers, and political henchmen. Horton had fitted himself into that disreputable list as a former newspaperman. Consuls weren’t diplomats: they were the hod carriers of the foreign service, stamping visas, intervening on behalf of American businesses, and sending commodity prices back to Washington. The pay was low, and a consul could be pulled at any moment to reward someone else with a political favor, but a consul who was a skilled party hack could make the job a sinecure if he chose, and many did. One American consul in the Near East ran a tavern across the street from the consulate. In contrast, Horton took the job seriously.

Horton’s first aspiration had been to become a poet. He had graduated from the University Michigan in 1878 with honors and a passion for Greek poetry. He headed west to Nevada and California, where he had knocked about in odd jobs including, when he was fully broke, teaching school in a frontier town. He wrote verse, married young, and scraped by. It was an adventure that he had relished and, being a natural raconteur, would draw on for years as he told stories about the Wild West. After his young wife died, he traveled to Chicago and snagged a job at the
Chicago Herald
by writing about a carriage horse that wore a
summer hat with holes cut from the brim for its ears. He earned a reputation as reporter with an eye for sentimental human-interest stories, and he was surely the only reporter in Chicago translating the poems of Sappho while waiting around the old Des Plaines police station for a murder that he could bang into a story. He published a volume of his own poetry, climbed higher at the
Herald,
a Democratic newspaper, and wrote editorials praising Grover Cleveland. The president was pleased and surprised Horton with an offer of a Foreign Service job—a plum position in Berlin. Horton asked instead for a posting that was open in Athens. The president gave it to him.

In 1893, Horton had traveled to Athens with his second wife, whom he had married in Chicago. He served there happily, feasting on its sights, collecting stories, and enjoying the parade of characters—archaeologists, artists, and politicians from throughout the world, including the Greek royal family. He befriended Stephen Crane, “a slender earnest young man who was drinking himself to death.” Then, in 1898, the newly elected McKinley administration, exercising its own patronage rights, recalled him and sent a hard-money Republican in his place. Horton returned to Chicago and wrote even more seriously. He published two best-selling novels with Greek settings and moved among a group of rising literary stars of the Midwest. His friends included Edgar Lee Masters and Theodore Dreiser. Walt Whitman praised his poetry, and William Dean Howells his prose. He seemed to have a brilliant literary career ahead, but in 1903, his second wife left him for a wealthy Chicago businessman, and he sank into a paralyzing depression. An anonymous letter from a jealous lover had disclosed the affair to Horton. Unable to concentrate or write, Horton resigned his newspaper job, traveled aimlessly around the country with his young daughter, Dorothy, and her nurse, and eventually ended up in the small upstate New York town where he had grown up. In today’s language, he was most likely clinically depressed.

He was rescued by an assassination. In September 1906, an anarchist shot President McKinley, and he died eight days later. Horton’s friends lobbied the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, to return Horton to the consulship in Athens. Roosevelt was willing to help a promising
American writer. Horton reluctantly sent Dorothy to her mother in Chicago, and he returned to Athens, exploring again his beloved ancient ruins, reciting Attic verse, and handling his old consular duties with pleasure.

Horton had liked the irreverence of Chicago newsrooms, and he had a Chicago journalist’s instinct for the common man, but he also was a romantic. Walking through Chicago’s Greektown, Horton had enjoyed the greetings of Greek American lunch-counter cooks who called him, “
Kyrie Georgios,
” “Mr. George.” He responded to their peasant vernacular in ancient Greek, the language of Pericles, which only further endeared him to them as an eccentric. Horton loved Greece, the idea of it as well as the reality of it. He was a sentimentalist, and he wore his sentiment proudly. It was a characteristic that would hurt him with the diplomatic professionals in the State Department, where a cool indifference to the inhabitants of foreign countries was held in high regard. As events would demonstrate, Horton was anything but detached.

In 1910, the State Department posted him to Salonika. The next twelve years of his career would give him an education in religious conflict and ethnic cleansing.

He had arrived in Salonika, then still an Ottoman city, at a time of political tumult in the Ottoman Empire. Two years earlier, a group of young Ottoman army officers, embittered by the empire’s decline and its territorial losses, had forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to reinstate Turkey’s constitution. Abdul Hamid, ruthless, paranoid, and reclusive, had suspended it three decades earlier, and there was a sense among the army officers, the “Young Turks,” that a return to constitutional government would revive the empire’s fortunes by wresting it from the backwardness of the aging sultan. The return of constitutional government created a brief moment of celebration among the peoples of the multicultural and multireligious Ottoman Empire—Moslems, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. There was a surge of Ottomanism—the idea that the empire’s many different people could live together as equals and in peace in a Moslem state. The goodwill was brief. Conservative Moslems led a countercoup on behalf of the sultan; the Young Turks put it down, and this time the military leaders forced Abdul Hamid’s
abdication. The Young Turks replaced him with his brother, Mehmet V, a puppet.

The doctrine of a liberal and tolerant Ottomanism rapidly evaporated, and soon it became clear that the Young Turks saw the expulsion of Christian minorities and creation of a homogeneous Moslem nation as the way to rescue the empire. They enforced their vision with brutality. Horton watched as Turkish authorities executed a terror campaign against Christians around Salonika and the backcountry of Macedonia. Christians began to disappear without explanation or were found dead in their fields. Horton put his reporting skills to work, documented the terror, and sent numerous descriptions of the harassment and killing back to Washington. Nor was the killing limited to the Balkans. Nearly thirty thousand Armenian and Assyrian Christians were slaughtered in pogroms in Adana, a region in southern Anatolia. These episodes of religious cleansing, however, were mere preliminaries to the slaughter that would follow.

In 1911, the State Department transferred Horton again, this time to Smyrna. He swooned at his good fortune. Smyrna was the legendary birthplace of Homer, and the Aegean coast of Asia Minor once had been home to the Ionian Greeks who counted among their citizens the philosophers Thales, Pythagoras, Anaximander. His favorite poet, Sappho, had written her love lyrics on the island of Lesbos, near Smyrna, and classical allusions everywhere scored the landscape—Phocaea, the Greek city-state celebrated by Herodotus for its resistance to the Persians in 500 BC, still stood at the tip of Smyrna’s harbor. Herodotus himself, the father of history, had born in nearby Halicarnassus.

Horton moved into the America consulate at Smyrna, a mansion at 17-23 Galazio Street with his third wife, Catherine, a beautiful and cultivated Greek woman twenty-five years his junior whom he had met in Athens. His energy, eccentricity, and friendly personality won favor with Turks and Greeks of the city, and he pursued his interests—he played golf at the club in Paradise, went woodcock shooting on nearby estates, and occasionally joined the archaeological dig at Sardis, the ancient capital of the Lydian Empire and its famously rich king, Croesus. Within the year, at age fifty-one, he was a father again. Nancy, his
second daughter, grew into a bright blond girl, and the Hortons sent her to the French convent school in the city.
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