The Great Fire

by Lou Ureneck

  The Greek reinforcements that had arrived from Thrace saw the sorry condition and morale of the soldiers on the Quay, and many refused to disembark. By Thursday, September 7, it was clear that there would be no attempt by the Greeks to hold the city. The army was departing, and with the army would go the civil administration as well. Stergiades made an unsuccessful effort to charter ships to evacuate the ethnic Greeks who were Ottoman subjects—traitors in the eyes of the Turkish nationalists. Nothing else would be done. The Greeks and the Armenians were on their own, unprotected.

  By late Thursday, the rearguard of the Greek forces, maintaining its cohesion and ability to fight, held a line less than fifty miles from Smyrna. The Turkish cavalry was now only a day’s ride from Smyrna, and what had been the prospect of a possible Turkish occupation became certain and imminent.

  Around midnight, George Horton boarded the Litchfield and requested that Rhodes land American sailors as guards in the city. The situation, he said, was too dangerous and unstable to leave Americans unprotected. Rhodes consented. He sent twelve sailors with rifles and two machine guns ashore and split them between the consulate and the American Theater. Further prodded by Horton, he summoned the Simpson back to Smyrna so that its crew could provide a bigger landing force. The Simpson received the recall message at 4 A.M. and was back at 7 A.M. Rhodes put sixty-four men ashore: in addition to the consulate and theater, he put sailors at the American Girls’ School, the YMCA, International College, the Standard Oil property, and the homes and businesses of Americans in Smyrna and nearby Bournabat. None were assigned to Jennings’s safe house since the house belonged to a Greek and the people inside were Ottoman subjects. The guards were limited to guarding Americans and American property.

  The sailors were armed with rifles and three additional machine guns and given five days’ rations to allow them to remain at their posts onshore. Unsure that this was a sufficient force, Rhodes, in a quirky move, distributed U.S. Navy uniforms to some of the American civilians. He also detailed four sailors to watch the Washburn house where Merrill was staying, and he detailed an orderly to assist him in his work. He positioned the Simpson to keep a close watch on the Standard Oil dock and tanks.

  BY THE MORNING, FRIDAY, September 8, the Turkish army was twenty-five miles east of Smyrna, and the Greek army continued to load men and material onto ships in the harbor.

  Merrill called on the Greek governor a final time and found him tired and defeated. Afterward, he had lunch with his new friend Lafont at the Union Francaise, where he learned from him of Allied plans to arrange a meeting between Mustapha Kemal and the Allied admirals and consuls general in Smyrna. The objective was to broker a peaceful handover of the city. The French officer said he would be at the meeting, and Merrill eagerly sought to be included. The meeting was to take place the next day, at a secret location just east of the city. The French officer agreed to let Merrill join in, and he told the intelligence officer to meet him early the next day, before sunrise, at the Italian consulate. Merrill was elated at the prospect. He would be in the same room with Kemal. It would make a stirring report to Bristol.

  Merrill returned to the Litchfield where he read the daily roundup of press reports compiled by Bristol’s staff in Constantinople and routinely transmitted to his ships’ commanders. When Merrill saw that the British press was inaccurately reporting that the Turkish army was seeking armistice talks because it had been stopped by the Greeks outside Smyrna, he went to the reporters on board and laughed at the inability of press to get the story right. Nonetheless, being the good fellow that he was, he invited them along on another trip he planned to take that afternoon to the approaching battle line east of the city, and off they went, this time taking along Lieutenant Knauss. Merrill’s French friend also came along for the spectacle.

  They passed through Bournabat on the road to Magnesia, and about twenty miles out of Smyrna they found themselves in a valley between the Greek and Turkish armies with both sides firing artillery, machine guns, and small arms. The Turks were advancing slowly on the Greeks. Knauss recorded the scene:

  The Greek troops passed to the rear singly, in couples and even in sections. All faces appeared weary, tired and beaten. The refugees were employing every conceivable method of conveyance and were a pitable [sic] sight. They collected in herds outside of the town. While the troops have thrown away every kind of equipment, they all keep their rifles. All along the road was strewn articles of all descriptions from sewing machines to baby carriages while dead horses added zest to the scene. However, the Greeks have evidently great confidence in their rear guard as they passed along the road in a leisurely manner.

  The group returned to the city, and Clayton filed a story for the next day’s paper.

  I have just returned from the improvised Greek front about fifteen miles from Smyrna, on the Magnesia road. The Turkish irregulars were advancing slowly, while the Greeks were retreating in good order, defending the road as they retired.

  We were on the front before we became aware that the Turkish advance was so close. As we rounded a bend in the road we heard the Turkish rifles, machine-guns, and one field gun open fire. I left my motor-car and climbed a ridge, from which I could see actually the advancing Turkish lines.

  Merrill still had plenty of energy. He fit in two social calls—the first to the wife of the British consul, Harry Lamb, whose daughter had recently died, and he offered his condolences. His second call was to the family of the Danish consul, Henri Van der Zee, who welcomed him and asked for American protection. Merrill sent a navy orderly with a note to Rhodes and Horton, requesting that the family be included on the protection list at the American Theater. These trips through the city took Merrill past Jennings’s safe house, but Merrill took no notice of it. The refugees seemed invisible to him. His cables to Bristol were filled mostly with critical accounts of the Greek army and administration. Merrill went back to the house he shared with the shipping agent and reporters, enjoyed a big dinner with his friends, and stepped out for a late-night stroll before going to bed.

  By then, the British had taken Stergiades aboard a British launch, which took him to the Iron Duke. A Turkish crowd had gathered at the waterfront as he departed and beat tin pots in celebration. He was the last Greek official to leave the city.

  At 4 A.M., Saturday, September 9, an orderly woke Merrill for his appointment with the French officer to go see Mustapha Kemal. He went to the Italian consulate, where he expected to meet his friend and the Italian colonel. The French officer had told him that the three of them would then proceed from the Italian consulate by car to the secret location to meet Kemal. It was still dark at 4 A.M. and the city was eerily quiet despite the number of people who were sleeping in the streets. The moon still appeared full, and it was low in the southern sky. “As I walked down the narrow paved streets,” Merrill noted in his diary, “the hollow sounds of my footfalls could easily have been heard in Constantinople.”

  At the Italian consulate, Merrill had trouble getting in—doors were locked and no one seemed awake. Finally, after banging on the door, he was let in, and the Italian colonel told him that he was still waiting to hear from Kemal. When word was received, he told Merrill, the French officer would come to pick him up. Merrill returned to his house. At 7 A.M., the French officer came by and said he was going to the French consulate to get updated directions for their mission and that he would return to pick up Merrill. As the French officer departed, an orderly from the Litchfield came into the house and reported that a third U.S. destroyer, the USS Lawrence, had arrived in the harbor and Captain Hepburn was aboard. He wanted to see Merrill immediately. Merrill had no choice—he would have to go to the Lawrence and possibly miss the adventure of meeting Kemal. “I left with fear and trembling,” he wrote in his journal. “I feared Lafont (the French officer) would return and not finding me at the mission would leave without me.” He would miss the adventure of a lifetime.

  CHAPTER 11

  The View from Nifr />
  On September 9, Mustapha Kemal stood at a mountain pass eighteen miles directly east of Smyrna and looked down on his prize. Spread below him were the farms and villages of the Aydin coastal plain; the minarets, domes, and steeples of Smyrna; and the sickle-shaped harbor that bristled with Allied and American warships.

  It had been seventeen years since he had visited Smyrna, and he had been a newly commissioned officer in the Ottoman army. Twenty-two years old and fresh out of the War College in Constantinople, Kemal had been making his way, in 1905, to Syria, his first military posting. The ship on which he was traveling had stopped briefly in Smyrna en route to Beirut, and when it reached Beirut, he had traveled by train to Damascus. Kemal took up his duties there, rounding up Druze brigands in the countryside. It had been tedious duty for an officer determined to make his mark for the empire. Ali Fuat, a young fellow officer and friend from the War College, had made the trip with him. Ali Fuat was now one of Kemal’s most important aides in the fight against the Greeks and the British.

  Kemal and Ali Fuat had come through much together since those early days—they had caroused in the cafés of Constantinople, made careers in the Ottoman army, faced arrest for plotting against the Ottoman government, and fought, successively, the Serbs, Bulgarians, British, Russians, and Greeks—this latest fight begun in defiance of the Ottoman government in Constantinople. Now the Greeks were finished in Anatolia, and Smyrna was within his grasp, and with it the prospect of making real the vision that had propelled him to take up arms against the Allied powers—a Turkish nation.

  Mustapha Kemal had been born in Salonika, the same place George Horton had been posted to before World War I. Kemal’s father, a clerk, died when he was a boy; his mother and aunt raised him. Proud, bright, and strong-willed, Kemal had enrolled in a military preparatory school at age eleven, drawn by the cadets’ uniforms. He had felt himself transformed when dressed as an officer, even when he was a boy, and uniforms and appearances would remain important to him for the rest of his life. He had excelled in his studies, especially in math, and later transferred to a military high school in Monastir (now Bitola, in the Republic of Macedonia), where he also had shown exceptional ability. Then he went on to the Ottoman War College in Constantinople. In his last year, he ranked at the top of his class.

  By then, Kemal already owned a reputation for being high-strung and difficult—and for drinking, gambling, and whoring. He drank raki and talked politics through the night with his fellow cadets and turned out fresh for duty in the morning. (Ali Fuat had introduced him to raki, the liquor that eased his racing mind.) Kemal was not a big man—though he was careful to be photographed to seem tall—but his proportions were perfect and lithesome, projecting a refined masculinity, like a male leopard, and those who noticed his hands (and his feet) remarked on their delicacy. (He liked to show off his feet, removing his shoes to bathe them.) He was fastidious in presentation—even to that which could not be seen. He favored French crepe de chine underwear with its silk nap. He loved clothes. When he was the Ottoman military attaché to Sofia in 1913 he gained the attention of the king of Bulgaria at a costume ball by wearing the elaborate and high hat and blue-and-red uniform of the Janissary Corps, the elite bodyguards of medieval sultans. Out of uniform, he liked to dress as a country gentleman: riding breeches and hacking jacket.

  LIKE SO MANY OFFICERS of his generation, Kemal had been obsessed as a young man with the decline of the empire and the backwardness of the sultan and his government. The inheritors of a fierce martial culture, the cadets who had come of age just before World War I had watched with shame and horror as their imperial inheritance slowly slipped away. They looked back longingly on the Ottoman horsemen and religious warriors who had created a vast Islamic empire in Asia, Africa, and Europe beginning in the fourteenth century. They carried within them the collective memory of a glorious past—fierce, conquering horsemen of an expanding Islamic empire that reached back to Osman, a fourteenth-century Seljuk chieftain and the empire’s founder whose son, Orhan, wrested Constantinople from the Byzantine Greeks.

  The empire had reached its apex under Suleiman the Magnificent, whose armies reached but failed to conquer Vienna in 1529. The empire required expansion to maintain its wealth, and it drew energy from its religious mission, which was to bring Islam to the infidels. Without expansion, it began a slow decline. Without new lands to conquer, the empire slid into indolence, intrigue, and inefficiency. By the nineteenth century, the empire was regarded as the “sick man of Europe,” deeply in debt and backward.

  The Young Turks of Salonika had cast their gaze on the proud Ottoman past; an unbroken dynasty of thirty-four sultans connected them to the tradition of Islamic conquest. In their present, they saw something quite different—a sclerotic state, territorial loss, and humiliation by their former Christian subjects—Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians.

  The Greeks and Serbs had broken free of the empire in the early nineteenth century; in the late nineteenth century, at about the time of Mustapha Kemal’s birth, the British seized Cyprus and Egypt. In 1908, Bulgaria gained its independence and in 1909 Austria seized Bosnia-Herzegovina, also Ottoman territory. Soon, Albania would break away. The empire’s borders were shrinking, and the Grand Porte—the sultan’s government—appeared helpless to stop the disintegration. The anxiety was acute among Kemal’s generation of military leadership, and they sought, often in secret cells, a path toward a renewal of the Ottoman state.

  AFTER SYRIA, MUSTAPHA KEMAL had returned to Salonika, where the Young Turks were plotting against Sultan Abdul Hamid. In 1908, Kemal participated in the coup that forced the sultan to reinstate the constitution, and after the unsuccessful, conservative countercoup, the Young Turks deposed Abdul Hamid and installed his brother as a puppet. (This happened at the time of Horton’s posting in Salonika.) But the Young Turks’ revolution did not stop the empire’s decline, and their anxiety only worsened as more pieces of the empire broke off: Italy seized Libya in 1912, the same year Albania gained its independence; Crete joined Greece in 1913. Finally, like a cannon shot, Montenegro, Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria formed a military alliance and pushed the Ottomans out of Macedonia. Salonika fell to the Greeks. Three men of the Young Turks movement had emerged as the principal leaders; each was fiercely nationalistic. Their names were Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talat, and Ahmed Djemal. They held absolute power. History would remember them as architects of the Armenian genocide during World War I.

  The new nationalist phrase was “Turkey for the Turks,” and the Three Pashas, as they were called, brutally executed the new ideology. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau put it this way:

  Their passion for Turkifying the nation seemed to demand logically the extermination of all Christians—Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians. Much as they admired the Mohammedan conquerors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they stupidly believed that these great warriors had made one fatal mistake, for they had had it in their power completely to obliterate the Christian populations and had neglected to do so. This policy in their opinion was a fatal error of statesmanship and explained all the woes from which Turkey has suffered in modern times.

  Enver in particular admired the Germans and brought them to Turkey to train the army. On August 2, 1914, five days after the start of World War I in Europe, the Ottoman government signed a secret treaty of alliance with Germany. The Turks mined the Dardanelles, and its ships fired on Russian ports. The Allies responded with declarations of war, and on November 13, Sultan Mehmet V, pressured by the governing pashas, signed a fetwah, declaring a holy war against Britain, France, and Russia.

  During the war, Kemal distinguished himself at Gallipoli, then in the east against Russia, and later in Syria and Palestine against the British. He was a winning general in a losing cause. The war ended for Turkey in September 1918 when Allied forces broke through the Bulgarian front. “We’ve eaten shit,” the Bulgarians told their ally Talat in Turkey. The Bulgarian defeat convinced Ludendorff, general of the German
army, that there was no prospect of a German victory.

  The Turks sued for peace in October, and the sultan’s representatives signed an armistice aboard a British ship named, ironically, Agamemnon—for the Greek king who, legend says, had brought his army to Anatolia to defeat the Trojans three thousand years earlier. The Three Pashas fled Turkey for Germany, and Kemal’s resistance to the armistice began almost the moment it was signed. He was in Syria when the end came, and he began shipping arms to the interior of Anatolia to preserve a Turkish fighting force. The new government in Constantinople ordered him back to the capital, which was occupied by the victorious British, French, and Italians.

  What happened next was astonishing: the Allies demanded demobilization of Ottoman forces and prosecution of the Young Turk leaders for their war crimes against Armenians. The Allies (the British, in particular) also insisted on an end to Turkish harassment of Christians. The Ottoman government promised to send an officer to supervise the seizure of weapons and investigate the treatment of Christians along the Black Sea. It picked Mustapha Kemal for the job. He departed Constantinople, and on May 19, 1919, he landed at Samsun—a city on Turkey’s Black Sea coast—and soon made contact with like-minded military men in the Anatolian interior who wanted to resist the armistice. The Ottoman government and the British, who had rounded up other Ottoman leaders who they suspected of trouble, almost immediately realized the giant mistake and tried in vain to recall him. It was too late. The tiger was loose.

  IN THE THREE YEARS after landing at Samsun, Kemal had done the impossible: He had taken Turkey from a defeated nation, prostrate before victors, and transformed it into an assertive power that was intent on dictating its peace terms to the Allies. He had organized an army, a government, and a set of demands—the Turkish National Pact.