The Great Fire (8 page)

IN THE FIRST FEW DAYS
of September, the Turkish nationalist army had continued to draw closer to Smyrna, bringing its cavalry, infantry, and artillery forward in a rapidly moving line. By September 3, it had taken the city of Ushak, only one hundred and twenty miles distant by way of the Casaba Railroad, and General Nikolaos Trikoupis, the senior Greek commander in the field, had been taken prisoner.

By September 3, Smyrna’s newspapers stopped publishing the reassuring false reports planted by the Greek authorities and plainly reported news of the Greek army’s retreat. A tremor went through the Christian and expatriate residents of the city. The Asia Minor Defense League, a local organization of Greeks, distributed guns and ammunition to its members. The League was a political (and quickly becoming quasi-military) organization formed months earlier by Smyrna Ottoman Greeks when the Greek government in Athens had signaled that its army would pull out of Turkey. Unwilling to accept the return of Turkish rule and the harsh consequences that would follow, the Defense League had hoped to create a force of local Greeks and supportive elements of the Greek army to resist a Turkish takeover of Smyrna. It was a desperate idea, given the strength of the nationalist army, but for Greeks and Armenians whose home was Smyrna, desperation seemed the only response.

It was becoming clear there was no ready escape for most of the Christian residents of Smyrna, and most assumed that the Turkish army would retaliate against the Christian population. Horton had already begun planning for the worst. He encouraged his wife to depart, but she insisted on staying with him.

He also encouraged his friend Socrates Onassis to leave. Onassis was one of the richest Greeks in the city, president of the tobacco exporters association, and the eldest of five brothers who operated a trading company in
the city. On being tipped early by Horton to the possibility of a nationalist occupation, Socrates had sent his wife and three daughters to Lesbos but kept his eighteen-year-old son, Aristotle, with him at their home in Karatas, a seaside neighborhood just south of Smyrna. Aristotle was a small, muscular, and clever young man who liked to have a good time, and a good time often included women who wanted to be paid for their companionship. (It was a trait he took into adult life when he became the world’s richest man.) Aristo, as he was called, was often in conflict with his father, a strict, serious, and observant Orthodox Christian. One of the Onassis brothers had departed for Athens, and two others went to towns east of Smyrna, where they had tobacco connections and where they thought they would be safe. A fourth was already in the countryside. As prominent members of the Asia Minor Defense League, they all were in danger. On Horton’s advice, Socrates, the family’s leader, had also hurried away two ships with cargoes of tobacco and cotton for Britain.

The Greeks in Smyrna recognized Horton’s philhellenism and counted him as a friend. On September 4, the Greek governor Stergiades asked Horton to request American mediation for a peaceful transition from Greek to Turkish occupation. Horton sent the request, along with a recommendation of approval, to Constantinople and Washington. As the Turkish army drew nearer to the city, the Greek metropolitan, Chrysostomos, came to Horton and pleaded for American protection of Smyrna’s Christians.

A stream of Greeks and Armenians—some Ottoman subjects, some naturalized Americans—also showed up at the American consulate and filled its first-floor reception room. Agitated and panicky, they wanted Horton’s help to leave the country. He told them he would do what he could, and he tried especially to assist the naturalized Americans and those he knew would be in danger because they had collaborated with the Greek administration. The people needed papers and transportation. He wrote letters on consulate stationery that might pass as substitutes for authorization to travel and went in search of ships that could be chartered to carry people away. He tried without success to put some of the people who had come to him on British ships. In the meantime, he waited for an answer from Washington.

G
arabed Hatcherian lived in the Smyrna Armenian neighborhood at 109 Tchakildji Bashi Street, near the Basmahane train station. He and his wife, Elisa, had two daughters and three sons. Their youngest child, a girl named Vartouhi, was one year old. Their oldest, a boy named Hatcheres, was thirteen. Garabed Hatcherian was a doctor whose patients were mostly from prominent Armenian families. He was a general practitioner with special training in gynecology. He had lived alone for most of the summer seeing patients and living frugally while his wife and children had been visiting his wife’s family in Akhisar, about fifty miles northeast of Smyrna. With news of the Turkish army advances, they returned to Smyrna on Saturday, September 2.

Dr. Hatcherian was forty-six years old. He had deep-set eyes, a narrow sensitive face, and hair that was parted high on the right and closely cropped near his ears. He conveyed an impression of intelligence, caution, and skill. He looked like a doctor.

He had been born in an Armenian village on the Sea of Marmara, studied medicine in Constantinople, and served four years as a captain and medical officer in the Ottoman army during World War I. While he had been away at war, in the Dardanelles and Romania, Armenians in his home village had been deported or massacred, and the village destroyed. After the war, he had moved to Smyrna, which had put him and Elisa not far from Elisa’s family. Dr. Hatcherian was not rich as were some of the Armenian doctors in the city, but he had methodically built his practice and reputation; the National Armenian Hospital in the city had taken him on the staff, a matter of distinction.

Dr. Hatcherian was not an excitable person or prone to exaggerated fears but the nationalist army’s advance toward Smyrna weighed heavily on him. Like nearly every other Armenian family, his had suffered during the deportations of 1915–16. Many of the most prominent Armenians in Smyrna, including other doctors, had already chosen to leave Smyrna. They had packed their belongings and departed with their families on steamships for Constantinople. Now Dr. Hatcherian had to make a decision about leaving or staying. It was not an easy choice. He had forebodings of what might happen if the nationalist army occupied the city, but he also had begun to assemble a practice that promised to give him and his family a comfortable life in Smyrna in the years ahead. He consulted with others about what to do, including a friend at the French consulate who, as a personal friend of the French consul, reassured him that all would be well despite the disorder and anxiety prevalent in the city. This trouble would pass, the man had said. Dr. Hatcherian was cheered by the advice. Nonetheless, evidence of the war’s brutality, moving ever closer to Smyrna, was obvious to him.

“The streets of the city have become completely impassable,” he wrote in his diary. “Along with the refugees, wounded soldiers are filling the city as hundreds arrive at the hospital in trucks. The situation has seriously worsened.”

Dr. Hatcherian continued to see his patients and carried on as normally as possible, calming his wife and children even as he encouraged the family to take precautions.

“Bread and food supplies have diminished. We start to store food
and, at the same time, to pack our valuables into boxes and sacks. Despite these preparations, thousands like me are firmly convinced that the Turks cannot enter Smyrna.”

Despite the confidence displayed in the diary entry, Dr. Hatcherian had not fully persuaded himself that he and his family were safe. He wrestled with the doubt, and at the same time feared an overreaction that would upset the progress he had made in his life and career.

He turned the matter over in his mind during several sleepless nights. Unwilling to make his wife anxious, he recorded his thinking in the diary: “I held the position of a municipal doctor for almost ten years; I have completed four full years in the military and I have official documents at hand confirming my impeccable service. Therefore, I do not wish to lose my enviable position, achieved after three years of steady work in Smyrna, when the danger seems so remote.”

He decided to stay in Smyrna.

I
n Constantinople, Rear Admiral Mark Bristol often scheduled his work at the U.S. embassy in the Italian villa Palazzo Corpi in the mornings so he could escape to his naval yacht, the USS
Scorpion,
in the afternoons.

The city was crowded, noisy, and unbearably hot, and the streets smelled of a nauseating stew of garbage, sewage, and grilled meat. Even in the fashionable embassy district along the Grand Rue de Pera, street vendors shouted, wood carts clanged over the narrow side streets that cascaded down cobbled steps, beggars harangued tourists, and men with tiny uniformed monkeys and tin cups banged their tambourines.

Bristol’s routine, when he could manage it, was to finish his meetings and written reports in the early afternoon, then ride in his admiral’s barge to the
Scorpion,
a sleek two-masted motor vessel moored six miles up the Bosporus at Therapia, an old Greek resort town of blue and pink mansions where he kept his yacht as a summer residence. There was often a cool breeze at Therapia that lifted off the Black Sea, and it was a pleasant place to sit on the deck with an iced drink or play tennis in the dappled shade of the giant plane and eucalyptus trees.

Constantinople in 1922 was a heaving and rotting city of a million
and a half people—Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Bulgarians, Circassians, Arabs, Persians, Albanians, Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Tartars, and Kalmucks—among others. It was also the temporary home of a hundred thousand Russian refugees, poor soldiers as well as Russian officers and aristocrats, men and women, who had fled Soviet Russia in 1919 and 1920 after the defeat of White Russians in the civil war that had followed the Bolshevik revolution. The Russian refugees were packed into wooden barracks, cheap boardinghouses, and hotels. Russian soldiers, wearing their tsar’s army medals on their tunics, sold paper flowers along the streets to get coins for food, and elegant Russian women whose families had owned country estates waited on tables and sang Russian folk songs for tips in restaurants—the Muscovite and Maxim’s were two American favorites. Maxim’s was owned by a black American who had left his restaurant in Moscow and come to Constantinople with his White Russian wife.

The Bosporus, a thirty-mile natural canal of southward-rushing water, divides Constantinople between Asia and Europe. The Bosporus connects the Black Sea to the turquoise basin called the Sea of Marmara, which in turn flows into the Mediterranean by way of a thirty-eight-mile slim passage called the Dardanelles. The Bosporus is a maritime anomaly of two flows—fresh water on the surface moving from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, and salt water at the bottom moving from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Gorged by the great rivers of Europe (Danube, Dniester, Dnieper), the Black Sea is twenty inches higher than the Mediterranean; the Bosporus is the geological pipe that connects the two, swollen by swift water and swirling currents.

Constantinople sits at the terminus of the Bosporus. Bisected by the river, the city is fissured yet again by a deep inlet on the European side—the Golden Horn. So it is a metropolis of three parts—on the European side, Pera, which in 1922 was the redoubt of Europeans, embassies, including the Palazzo Corpi, hotels, cafés, and brothels; and Stamboul—the site of the old walled city of Christian Byzantium and location of the St. Sophia Mosque. In 1922, the two parts of the city were connected by the floating Galata Bridge, a span first erected in the sixth century by Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great. On the Asiatic side of the
Bosporus lay Scutari—in 1922, the dense urban aggregation of oriental Anatolia. After World War I, Constantinople was a whispering city of down-market intrigue: “The Bosporus,” wrote a navy intelligence officer, “was a dumping of all Europe’s war crooks and spies.”

Punctilious and ordered, Bristol maintained a crisp military demeanor even in Constantinople’s torpor, which was particularly thick and uncomfortable on this day. At his desk in his spacious office on the second floor of the embassy, the Italianate mansion atop Pera Hill, he wore a double-breasted blue jacket with gold admiral’s stripes and a star on each arm, a stiff white shirt, and a tie pulled tight to his thick neck. His blue serge trousers touched his polished black shoes when he rose to greet a guest. A British tailor custom-made his uniforms, and they showed an impeccable fit. Hardly an American of any standing passed through Constantinople without climbing the eleven marble steps of the embassy and traversing its high-ceilinged and frescoed halls to call on the admiral. Built by a Genoese trader in the nineteenth century, the mansion with its grand staircase and parquet floors was a fitting address for Bristol. He was the center of American commerce and diplomacy in the region—he gave speeches to the Chamber of Commerce, arranged transportation on his destroyers for American oil executives, and put himself at the center of the city’s network of American relief agencies.

His first caller on Saturday September 2, 1922, was the manager of the local branch The Guaranty Trust Co., one of America’s largest banks. It was closing its Constantinople office and selling its business to the Anglo-Ionian Bank, a British company with close ties to Greece.

On hearing the news, Bristol exploded. He had worked for two years to bring an American bank to Constantinople, even leaning on a close friend, Lucian Irving Thomas, a director of the Standard Oil Co. of New York, to open an account and deposit company funds to give the bank a good start, and now he was hearing that it was being sold to the British and Greeks. Bristol was perpetually suspicious of the British, and he despised the Greeks. In Bristol’s mind, Greeks were worse even than Jews and Armenians; they were a race of clever and dishonest merchants.

American businesses, he huffed at the young and apologetic bank manager, were always quick to ask for the help of the U.S. government,
but when the government (in this instance, Bristol) wanted their help, they shrugged their shoulders and showed indifference. Bristol was sure that the British were intent on squeezing the Americans out of commerce in the Near East, and making matters worse, the Ionian Bank had connections to Basil Zaharoff, the notorious Ottoman-Greek arms dealer who had helped finance Greece’s army in Turkey and maintained close relationships with both Lloyd George, the British prime minster, and Eleftherios Venizelos, architect of the Greek presence in Anatolia—both detested by Bristol. The bank was probably a subterfuge for British and Greek imperialism or Zaharoff’s personal designs.

As Bristol talked, he frequently raised his chin in the manner of a boxer taunting his opponent. An American bank was necessary for American business, he insisted, though the manager was offering no opposition to the admiral’s argument. His temper let loose, Bristol raged on: there was opportunity here in Turkey, and there was money to be made—money for Americans. The young manager lowered his eyes and agreed with the admiral but there was nothing he could do. He had his orders from New York. The bank had not been profitable and it would be closed. He handed Bristol the papers outlining the sale terms, which included a pledge from the Guaranty Trust Co. to promote the Ionian Bank. Bristol was disgusted. Simply disgusted.

Stern-looking and jowly at fifty-four, with receding hair parted in the middle, Bristol projected military discipline and authority. His barrel chest, dark eyebrows, one of which formed an upside-down “V” like a proofreader’s caret, and a mouth turned down on either side when at rest—all these physical characteristics combined with his piercing dark eyes to give him the aspect of a firm but (in his own way) fair prison warden. He liked to think of himself that way—firm, but fair, a proponent of the “square deal.” He also liked to think of himself as man who dealt in facts. He kept voluminous records, adhered to protocol, and forcefully advocated the interests of his country as he construed them. Sometimes, his construction of those interests was at odds with his superiors’ views back in Washington, but Washington was a long way from Constantinople, and Washington often had other things on its mind besides this bluff old salt.

Bristol’s official title was U.S. High Commissioner to the Ottoman Empire. Since the two countries did not have diplomatic relations, Bristol did not carry the title of ambassador, but that essentially was his job—representing America and looking out for the interests of Americans in the Near East. So broad was his authority that its eastward boundary had never been established. Bristol also was the chief naval officer in the Eastern Mediterranean, officially the Commander of the U.S. Naval Detachment in Turkish Waters. STANAV, in naval jargon. He had two staffs, one diplomatic and the other military, and the broad authority and workload that came with the double assignment suited his industriousness. He had eight destroyers under his command, and on that day in September, six of them were in the Black Sea—two of them at Russian ports and four along Turkey’s northerly coast. The other two were at Constantinople, moored in the Bosporus, within view of the terrace of the American embassy and off Dolmabache Palace—a “wedding cake gone moldy.” Bristol had repeatedly asked the navy for a battleship to add heft and prestige to his naval force, but it had been repeatedly denied.

THE NAVY HAD SENT
Bristol to Turkey in 1919 with the title “Senior United States Naval Officer in Turkish Waters.” It was a modest title for what appeared to be a modest job. At the time, the United States already had a commissioner in Constantinople, Lewis Heck, a thirty-two-year-old graduate of Lehigh University who had worked as a secretary under the former ambassador, Henry Morgenthau.

The State Department had directed Bristol to cultivate cordial relations with the Allies in Turkey and safeguard Americans and their interests in the Near East. Even before arriving at his new duty station, he had chafed at his title and the limits of his authority. He had construed the job as more like a high commissioner—an ambassador. He sought the help of his wife, Helen, and his friend Irving Thomas at Standard Oil to aright this injustice. He encouraged Helen to discuss his situation with Thomas in Washington and use her contacts to help him. “Anyway Irving is the one to fix things,” he wrote to her. “Wait until you see Irving then use your head and you can help me.” Then in a subsequent
letter: “By the way be careful in regard to anything you do there not to go against the (Navy) Department especially so they know it. . . . I know what a ‘long head’ you have when it comes to doing things—you love to do—this is only a hint.”

The letters between them show a determined couple working assiduously on his ascent. The young Heck was no match for Bristol, a tough inside politician with a well-connected wife. Heck was gone by the summer, and Gabriel Bie Ravndal, a Norwegian American and former newspaper publisher from North Dakota with long service in the Near East, replaced him. Ravndal and Bristol battled, and Bristol prevailed over him as well. In less than a year, by working his connections, assuming powers not explicitly denied him, moving uninvited into the former ambassador’s residence, and sending a torrent of correspondence to his naval superiors and the State Department about his need for a grander title, he was named U.S. high commissioner. Bristol had called in chits in all directions, but his promotion to high commissioner actually had come because of the Greek landing at Smyrna. (Ironical, that it was the Greeks who helped him get the job he craved.) The crisis that followed called for the United States to have a person with broad authority in Constantinople. Bristol was standing by. President Wilson accepted the recommendation of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who had been helped along in his thinking by Bristol’s superior officer, Admiral William S. Benson, chief of Naval Operations. Benson would be remembered for his inability to conceive of any use the navy could make of aviation.

Bristol claimed authority over the entire region inside the prewar borders of the Ottoman Empire. His headquarters were in Constantinople, but there were also posts in Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, Baghdad, Samsun, and Smyrna. His staff consisted of consuls, military and commercial attachés, counselors, secretaries, and translators. He consolidated his authority rapidly and set up an extensive system for collecting intelligence employing his ships’ commanders as well as a staff of intelligence officers. For Bristol no detail seemed too trivial for the files he kept on the missionaries. One of his officers provided him with personality sketches of the missionaries in Mersina, a port in southern Anatolia: “Rev. Mr. Willson: About 40 to 45 years old, of the Reformed Presbyterian
denomination; is very much of a ‘stay at home’ does not go out and mingle the people: this may be on account of his not speaking Turkish. He speaks Arabic. His denomination is one of the strictest. Is a fair conversationalist and is fairly broad-minded. Does not think any great results can be obtained by the missionaries in a short time, but hopes for results after a long time by absorption. . . . His wife is a typical missionary type.”

A lot of Bristol’s intelligence was questionable. He once reported that a British general was on his way to Turkey with an important Turkish political prisoner—only to have the State Department wire back that the general was in New York. The British considered him naive in dealing with the Turks, and the State Department suggested removing his principal intelligence officer, Robert Steed Dunn. Dunn had a reputation for dealing in barroom gossip, and the intemperate prose in his reports drew a rebuke from Admiral Harry Knapp, vice admiral of the navy.

Mrs. Bristol had joined her husband in Constantinople in the summer of 1920. He was devoted to her, and she to him. She accompanied him on his sea trips, including one to Smyrna when she had apparently made a remark that was construed as impolitic by Armenian residents. On learning that a Smyrna newspaper had made a reference to it, Bristol wanted George Horton to correct the record. Horton, responding diplomatically to his boss, suggested that it was better not to stir up more attention. There was one other incident, Horton said, that he had struggled about mentioning to the admiral, but felt that he should. He told Bristol of a tea he had attended following Bristol’s stay in Smyrna. “The Armenians present were discussing your party in the most friendly—even enthusiastic way, speaking in English. One young lady remarked that it was a pity that Mrs. Bristol was doing some indiscreet talking.” It seemed that Mrs. Bristol’s opinions about the “races” in the Near East were every bit as strong as her husband’s. Horton offered to interview the lady if Bristol wanted him to, but he advised against it. Bristol agreed that it would not be helpful, but the subsequent correspondence between Horton and Bristol afterward was cool. Sometimes Bristol didn’t respond at all.