The Great Fire

by Lou Ureneck

  Hepburn was arriving with little current information—few of Merrill’s cables had gotten through to Constantinople. He had only just learned from a cable received at sea that the Greek governor had departed the previous day, and he was unaware of the extent of the Greek army’s collapse and evacuation. As the Lawrence approached the inner harbor, passing Pelican Point, the four stacks of the Litchfield came into view. The Litchfield was anchored near the Quay not far from the terminus of Galazio Street. The Simpson was moored off the Standard Oil dock, to the left and about a half mile farther north.

  Captain Hepburn’s eyes swept over the city’s waterfront as he evaluated the situation ashore and his approach for the Lawrence’s anchorage. There were numerous other men-of-war in the harbor, and Hepburn strained to make out their flags and names. Twenty-five years earlier, he had nearly washed out of the navy because of his poor eyesight. A routine vision test after graduation revealed astigmatisms in both eyes and low visual acuity. The navy doctor declared him unfit for duty. His discharge papers were prepared, but an appeal up the chain of command kept him in the service, and as a newly minted ensign, he was sent to the USS Iowa, which soon engaged the Spanish navy off Santiago in the Spanish-American War. As subsequent eye tests showed, his vision had only worsened since then.

  Hepburn was from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the son of a prominent attorney and his second wife, a Frenchwoman, Marie Japy Hepburn. “Japy” became Hepburn’s middle name as well as his nickname. Pronounced with a long “a,” it followed him through Dickinson College, the Naval Academy, and into the navy. Five feet, nine inches tall with thin hair parted at the middle and round rimless glasses, the captain had the long, loose, and kindly face of an English vicar. It would have been easy to imagine him in vestments instead of a naval uniform. At the Academy he had been a good student, and his superiors knew they could rely on his judgment and attention to detail. He had passed the war mostly in administrative jobs, superintending the refitting of a captured German vessel into a troop ship and serving as a detachment commander at a naval base in Queenstown, Ireland. It was hardly heroic duty, but it was necessary and he had done the work well. In June, he had joined Bristol’s staff, and a less efficient officer would not have survived the demanding and ambitious admiral. Hepburn was not without his own ambition, and while he lacked Bristol’s sharp elbows and commanding presence, he had demonstrated his own upward persistence through diligence and hard work. Ultimately, he would go further than Bristol—far further, to the highest rungs of the navy. Along with poor eyesight, Hepburn’s service had been dogged by poor health, with bouts of bronchitis, arthritis, appendicitis, fevers, foot pain, eczema, and an especially bad case of hemorrhoids that required surgery. Maybe it was these chronic minor ills and physical humiliations that softened his demeanor and gave him a sympathetic disposition.*

  The Lawrence anchored to the left side of the Litchfield very near the Quay. Lieutenant Commander Rhodes came aboard and sketched the situation for Hepburn, and then together, they and Merrill, who had also come aboard the Lawrence after being summoned from his house that morning, climbed into the destroyer’s motor launch to go ashore. Davis of the Red Cross brought his portly frame into the launch, rocking it with his considerable weight.

  Ashore, they worked their way through the crowd on the Quay and went first to the American Theater, where twenty-five naturalized Americans had sought shelter in the cavernous interior, and afterward they walked through the nearby neighborhood. Hepburn saw refugees on the streets and squatting in tiny public spaces among their bags, boxes, and small collections household goods—sewing machines, pots, blankets, and rugs. He also saw Greek soldiers in scattered groups of four or six or eight moving silently and sullenly southward along the waterfront, sometimes carrying wounded comrades on litters or even their shoulders. They were mostly unarmed and ragged, and they seemed to pay no attention to their surroundings. A few were riding on donkeys, moving southward along the Quay. The men were exhausted but orderly and showed no panic. These were the last of the Greeks who had come in from the front, and they were among the last of the last to pass through the city. The troop transports had departed from the Smyrna railroad pier the previous day. The Greek rearguard cavalry, which had attempted, mostly with success, to provide time for the retreat, already had passed them by on the way to Chesme. These detritus soldiers were stranded in Smyrna. They would have to either rouse themselves for the fifty-mile walk to Chesme or lose their uniforms and blend into the Smyrna population. They did both.

  Hepburn found the city tense but quiet and the stores and cafés open. With Rhodes, Merrill, and Davis, he went to the American consulate—only a block from the Quayside theater. He wanted to get right to work. Consul General Horton was absent so the captain asked Horton’s vice consul to summon the local American relief committee for a meeting within the hour.

  Hepburn was troubled that American sailors had been put ashore as guards—Bristol had specifically ruled out any demonstration of naval force, and these men were armed, some with machine guns—but given the lack of local police or any civil authority, as well as his inability to know when the Turkish army would arrive in the city, he assented to keeping them ashore for now. He saw that their presence was a reassurance to the Americans in the consulate.

  While he waited for the local relief committee to arrive, Hepburn looked over a big map of the city brought out by one of the vice consuls, and with Rhodes, Merrill, and now Knauss present, he changed the distribution of the guards to reduce their exposure by eliminating protection of the private homes of American businessmen. He also relieved Rhodes of command of the shore force and installed Knauss. Rhodes got the task of making regular rounds of the guarded locations several times a day and reporting back to Hepburn. The naval uniforms that had been distributed to civilians by Rhodes were recalled, and Hepburn ordered the display of American flags at locations where he had decided to keep navy guards. He put fifteen men with two machine guns at the Smyrna theater; four men at a nearby bakery that Jennings had arranged to bake bread for the refugees; twelve men at the American Girls’ School, which was inside a walled-in square block with a courtyard about a mile from the consulate in the Armenian district; twelve men at the YWCA compound, which was in the middle of the city midway between the consulate and the girls’ school; two men at the YMCA; four at the consulate; and sixteen at International College in Paradise. The postings remained a wide and thin distribution of the men, but Hepburn made the judgment that they were unlikely to encounter serious trouble of the sort that required a more substantial defense. The sailors, mostly in their twenties, were dressed in their working whites, flared trousers tucked into white-canvas gaiters, long-sleeved blouses with blue neckerchiefs, and white sailor’s caps pushed back on their heads. They went about the work eagerly, laughing and smoking cigarettes, astonished at the scene in which they found themselves.

  The men had enlisted from every corner of the country, and their names read like the roster of an All-American baseball team: Toney Bello (Newark, New Jersey); John Brown (Nashville, Tennessee); John Bugdonvich (Springfield, Massachusetts); John Ciepiewicz (Chicago, Illinois); Friola Domingo (Boston, Massachusetts); Birchall Hamilton (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); Harry Friedman (Kansas City, Missouri); Sam Honeycutt (Raleigh, North Carolina); John Kilinski (Milwaukee, Wisconsin); Sigrid Landgrun (Buffalo, New York); Freddie Stewart (St. Louis, Missouri).

  As Captain Hepburn worked with his officers at the consulate, they could hear the concussion of Turkish artillery shells, which were falling on the plain between Smyrna and nearby Bournabat. In the harbor, men on the ships could see the Turkish cavalry on the bare slope behind the city entering Bournabat. Some of the Turkish cavalry, coming down from the high pass at Nif, split from the main column and moved south in the direction of nearby Koukloudja, a Greek farming village, and soon it was in flames.

  Within an hour, by about 10 A.M., members of the relief committee, including Professor Lawrence, Presid
ent MacLachlan, Jacob, Jennings, and many of the city’s businessmen, gathered at the consulate, and Hepburn introduced the Constantinople delegation—Davis, Jaquith, Prentiss, and the medical team. Hepburn explained Bristol’s orders—to gather information and protect American property—and asked for the formation of a single committee that would work under the direction of the Constantinople American Relief Committee. Charles Davis would take charge of it, he said. There were no objections. Hepburn said he wanted their help in gathering the facts that would allow Admiral Bristol to direct the resources that would be needed in Smyrna. He said he was keeping the YMCA as the relief committee’s headquarters, despite his concerns that the word Christian in its name might antagonize the Turkish army. He also designated the waterfront theater as the military headquarters onshore. He would work between theater and quarters on the Litchfield.

  The local committee members hung on his words and accepted his directions. They were grateful for his presence, but they made it clear that they were worried about their safety once the Turkish army entered the city. Horton had returned to the consulate by then, and he too said he was concerned, especially for the ethnic Greeks and Armenians in the city who were naturalized American citizens. Most of them were indistinguishable from the refugees, and as Ottoman subjects who had left the country and taken a new citizenship or expressed sympathy with the departed Greek administration, it was likely the Turkish authorities would single them out for retribution. They needed protection, he said, and the only way to ensure it was their evacuation. Hepburn was skeptical. The problem, from what little he had already seen and heard, was not the Turks but the refugees themselves—there were enormous numbers of them, and they were panicky and gathering in large groups outside the consulate. The challenge, he surmised, would be controlling the crowd.

  In response to the committee’s fears, Hepburn said he would maintain the guards, then he proceeded to do what he was trained do—bring order and planning to the task that he had been assigned, which was to protect Americans and American property and evaluate the situation for Bristol, who would decide on next steps. But after two hours ashore, the captain was already feeling the tension between his orders from Bristol—restraint and surveillance—and the local Americans’ strong sentiment for a forceful American presence ashore and evacuation of their community. Until he was directed otherwise, he planned to stick to his original orders—and given that the Greek administration had dismantled the city’s telegraph office before departing and radio transmission remained spotty, he realized there would be limited, or nonexistent, opportunities for consultation with Bristol unless he sent a ship back to Constantinople. He was on his own. The conflict between Bristol’s orders and the sentiment of the Americans (as well as what he would observe) would only grow more intense over the next three days. It would grow into a personal struggle that tested his judgment and conscience. As the situation in Smyrna worsened, Hepburn would become a fulcrum of American action, which tilted between indifference and engagement.

  With his talk to the committee ended, Hepburn sent the relief volunteers back into the honeycomb of neighborhoods to identify places where they could collect and concentrate refugees, distribute food and supplies, and (most important) establish the scope of the problem. He wanted numbers and other information he could take back to Bristol. He set a second meeting for the afternoon. If there was trouble, he told them, they should retreat to the theater for protection. It was agreed that a signal flag would be raised over the theater if danger were imminent.

  The medical team of Dr. Post and nurses Agnes Evon and Sara Corning, present at the meeting and mostly silent, needed no guidance from Hepburn. Deeply experienced in relief work, they had seen more death and suffering than Hepburn or any of his officers. Post, a forty-seven-year-old Princeton graduate with a thick mustache, heavy black eyebrows, and a horseshoe of hair around his otherwise bald head, had been in the Near East since 1911. He had started a hospital in Konya, in central Anatolia, which had served mostly Moslems in a region as big as the state of New York. The hospital’s location, situated along one of the trails used during the Armenian deportations, had exposed him to the Armenian suffering and death during the war. He had gone back to the United States on a speaking tour as an articulate advocate for Armenian relief, then returned to continue his medical work.

  Miss Evon, born in Detroit, was the director of nursing for Near East Relief—she was easily recognized by her broad-brimmed black sunhat and round, black thick-framed glasses. In her mid-forties, she had served in the navy and worked for the Red Cross in Paris during the war and in Czechoslovakia afterward, before making her way to Turkey. Sara Corning, thirty-seven years old and from a small town in Nova Scotia, had cared for sick and wounded orphans in Marsovan and Samsun, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, where she had witnessed the deportations and killings of ethnic Greeks in 1920. The three—the doctor and two nurses—plunged into the city to find a hospital where they could receive and treat sick and wounded people from the streets. Like battlefield surgeons, this was work with which they were familiar and skilled.

  AFTER THE MEETING, at about 10:45 A.M., Hepburn retreated with George Horton to the consul general’s office on the consulate’s first floor to the right of the entranceway. It was a simple space: rolltop desk, swivel chair, two armless wooden chairs, and a typewriter table. As the two talked, Horton’s obvious exhaustion made an impression on Captain Hepburn. His fatigue was written on his face and showed in his posture. His eyes were dull; he had gotten little sleep. He moved stiffly. For the past nine days, Horton had been besieged by pleas for help—some coming even from other consuls in the city who feared for the safety of their nationals and themselves—and he had tried to respond to all of them. He was no longer young; the heat, the long hours, the demands of getting about the city—and especially the looming prospect of a Turkish occupation and what he felt in his stomach would be its inevitable and gruesome outcome—had worn him down physically and mentally. Hepburn had already absorbed the animus toward Horton at the embassy in Constantinople, but he felt a brief moment of sympathy for him.

  As they talked, they heard a commotion outside the consulate, the sound of a human stampede, then they heard shots from the direction of the waterfront. Horton left the office, went to the front door, and saw the crush of people outside. He led Hepburn to the consulate’s rooftop terrace for a look at what was happening. Below them, hundreds of people surged up Galazio Street toward the consulate. Looking toward the harbor, the two men saw a column of Turkish cavalry moving slowly southward and in good order along the Quay.

  The soldiers were dressed in dusty, brown khaki uniforms, and their heads were wrapped in rags that lay back on their necks against the sun. Their faces were brown, their bodies lean, and most had their rifles slung across the croppers of their saddles. They rode quietly except for the sound of the horses’ hooves on the cobbled street. The morning sun glinted off their swords, stirrups, and rifle barrels. Their horses, small and delicate Turkish mountain ponies, walked with a prance despite their evident exhaustion. A steamer in the harbor sounded a single horn in salute. The Quay, lined with thousands of refugees only minutes earlier, was vacant except for the trunks, furniture, and personal goods they had abandoned in their rush to the city’s backstreets. There on the Quay, sitting straight in their saddles and looking directly forward through tired Asiatic eyes, was the embodiment of the fear that had gripped the refugees and triggered them to flee their villages.

  From the ships, terraces, and other vantages along the street, the foreign military officers who watched the procession could not help but be a little thrilled by the display of martial discipline and the battle hardness of the Turkish soldiers. “Swarthy hard-bitten men, with growth on their faces,” a British officer said, “they showed evidence of their long advance of over one hundred miles during the week, but despite a lack of smartness they impressed one with the discipline displayed, and there was little arrogance in their manne
r as they entered the town.”

  The cavalry had entered the city from the north, come down around the Point, past the mansions of Bella Vista, past Jennings’s safe house, where he stood out front watching them go by, past the clubs, restaurants, hotels, and movie houses, and past the consulates, and at the moment they were nearly abreast of the American Theater. Some carried loot: brass jugs, trays, electro-plated goods, guitars, rugs, china ornaments, and one even had a garden table balanced across his saddle. Some had no saddles—they had ditched them to lighten their loads and ride faster in pursuit of the retreating Greek army.

  Their entry into the city had been marked a few minutes earlier by an event that could have been lifted out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. At a place behind the Point, a British officer, Captain Bertram Thesiger, commander of the HMS King George V, was ashore inspecting the British guard at the gasworks when he saw the column of Turkish cavalry moving toward him. He stepped into the road in front of them and raised his hand to signal a halt.

  “Who are you?” asked the diminutive Turkish officer at the head of the column. He was Cherfeddine Bey, a major of the Turkish Fourth Regiment. He spoke in French.

  Thesiger, responding in French, introduced himself as an officer of the British navy. (It would later come out that Cherefeddine misunderstood and thought he was the commander of all British forces in the Mediterranean.) Thesiger summarized the situation in the city—the Greek army had departed and the British and others were holding the city until the arrival of the Turkish army. There was no need for aggressive action; the city was calm.