by Lou Ureneck
One of his first orders of business in Smyrna was to settle a score with the city’s Greek Metropolitan Chrysostomos, a religious and civic leader among the Ottoman Greeks but also a Hellenic nationalist who mixed Greek territorial ambitions with his spiritual duties. He was the bishop who had led the Greek troops on their landing in 1919. The fifty-five-year-old religious leader was no stranger to conflict—he had been removed by the Ottoman authorities as the city’s bishop in 1914 and was only reinstated with the Greek occupation, and even then Governor Stergiades had chastised him for his incessant nationalism. During a church service, Stergiades had risen from his seat and forced the bishop to stop a sermon that was blatantly political. A British naval officer described him: “The Metropolitan, short, thick-set, with gnarled face, looking like a hardheaded business man who had arrived at prosperity only after a hard struggle, and having attained the top of the tree, was determined that those under him should have a taste of the hardships he had once endured.”
Chrysostomos and Noureddin were old antagonists: the bishop had successfully pressed the British for Noureddin’s removal in March 1919 ahead of the Greek landing, and Noureddin had not forgotten.
Late in the afternoon on Sunday, September 10, a French patrol called on Chrysostomos to offer him sanctuary at the French consulate. Chrysostomos declined, saying he wanted to remain with his flock, and as the French force was leaving the Greek church, a carriage with Turkish soldiers arrived and ordered him to climb in. He was told Noureddin wanted to see him, and he was taken to the general’s office at the Konak. In their meeting, Noureddin reminded the bishop of an argument that had occurred between them in 1919 when Noureddin was the military governor. “On the last occasion that I had the pleasure of seeing you,” Noureddin said, “you were good enough to say that I ought be shot. I have sent for you, Lordship, to tell you that you are going to be hanged.”
Guards took Chrysostomos into the street where about fifteen hundred excited Turkish residents had gathered. Noureddin came to the balcony overlooking the street and, realizing that an alternative to hanging Chrysostomos had presented itself, said to the crowd that he was giving the bishop to them to do as they pleased. “If he has done good to you, do good to him. If he has done harm to you, do harm to him.” The mob dragged Chrysostomos by his beard to a nearby barbershop where they wrapped him in a barber’s apron and beat and stabbed him. His eyes were gouged out and nose and ears cut off. The French patrol watched the scene, the men furious at what was happening but under orders not to intervene. Eventually, a bystander shot the bishop to end his misery.
ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, Captain Hepburn sent Lieutenant Merrill to arrange a meeting with Noureddin.
While waiting to be called in, Merrill was “cooling his heels” in the office of Noureddin’s aide, Brigadier General Hassam Pasha, who, like Noureddin, projected the image of a German officer: he spoke fluent German, made a crisp and stern military presence, and delivered his orders and remarks to subordinates with a Teutonic finality. Merrill, in typical form, chatted him up in French and asked him about care of the refugees. The Turkish general said feeding his troops came first, then he led Merrill to a window where they watched Turkish guards lead six thousand Greek soldiers past the government building, forcing them to shout “Long live Kemal” as they passed by. After an hour or so, Noureddin saw Merrill and assented to a meeting with Hepburn. The time was set for 3 P.M.
Hepburn arrived on time with his delegation but was forced to wait an hour before entering Noureddin’s office. In his white uniform and white shoes, Hepburn encountered the khaki-clad rugged and bearded man. He looked at Hepburn through small dark eyes, round and nicked like the bottoms of expended rifle casings. His ears were turned slightly forward at their tops. Noureddin was forty-nine years old, seven years older than Hepburn. He wore a stiff tunic, still dusty from the field, and a Sam Browne belt that girdled his waist and crossed his right shoulder.
Hepburn planned to introduce the relief committee and explain its goals, but his real intent was to gain insight into the general’s attitude toward the refugees and Americans in the city. The captain introduced Barnes, Davis, Jaquith, and Dr. Post, who served again as the interpreter. The conversation would be in Turkish. Hepburn congratulated Noureddin on his military success and explained the work of the committee, which he said had been organized by Admiral Bristol in Constantinople and operated under his auspices. The American navy’s mission, he said, was the ordinary one of looking after American lives and property. Based on the guidance he had gotten from Bristol, Hepburn told Noureddin that he hoped the refugees would soon be able to return to their homes in the interior. Noureddin interrupted. No, he said, the refugees could not return to their homes. The devastation by the Greek army made that impossible. The refugees would be killed if they went back, Noureddin said. “Bring ships and take them out of the country,” Noureddin added. “It is the only solution.”
The response caught Hepburn by surprise. Once again, the script failed to follow what Bristol had laid out for him. (Jennings and the relief committee, of course, had already reached that conclusion based on the momentum toward a general massacre.)
Forced to improvise, Hepburn continued to engage the general and made the point that a removal of hundreds of thousands of people would take time, and that in the meantime food and medical care must be made available. This required bringing the refugees into safe areas, under the protection of Turkish guards; in addition, the relief workers would need a Turkish liaison officer with whom they could coordinate the complicated work. Hepburn handed him a note listing refugee collection points suggested by the relief committee. These included the warehouse at the Point, the football stadium, and the barracks at Balchova. It made no mention of Jennings’s string of safe houses, which Hepburn appears not yet to have noticed. Noureddin said he didn’t have time to read it and the details should be taken up with his commandant but there would be no liaison officer assigned to the relief committee. Dr. Post was translating Noureddin’s words for Hepburn, and soon the general and Dr. Post engaged in a rapid back-and-forth that sounded hostile to Hepburn, who sat and listened in exasperation, guessing at what was passing between them in Turkish. He was reluctant to interrupt more than occasionally for fear of showing discord within his delegation. In one of the pauses, Post told Hepburn that Noureddin was going over an incident from last year that Noureddin said had proved missionaries in Marsovan had supported an Ottoman-Greek rebellion against the Turks.
The Marsovan incident was well known in the missionary community and had turned into a serious point of conflict between the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and Admiral Bristol. Marsovan, a town in the Black Sea region, was home to Anatolia College, a missionary school, as well as a big missionary hospital and orphanage. During the First World War, thousands of Armenians had been deported from the city, and the Turks had demanded that the college’s president, Dr. George White, a Congregationalist minister, turn over Armenian faculty and students. White refused, and the Turks threatened to execute the American missionary staff. White relented, and the Armenians were taken away; the men were executed and the women deported. The school was closed. After the war, White had returned and reopened the school. In 1921, nationalist authorities who controlled the territory around Marsovan suspected the school was sheltering Greek students who were plotting against Turkey. They raided the school and discovered documents and letters that they said proved that the students—and by extension the school—were involved in subversive activities. Among the evidence were a map labeling the area “Pontus,” a Greek word that had been applied to the region for two thousand years, student essays about Pontic autonomy, and a letter written by White, in which he expressed his hope to convert Turks to Christianity. Three teachers, an alumnus and two students—all Ottoman ethnic Greeks—were arrested and executed. The executions spread, and soon five hundred more ethnic Greeks were put to death. The school was closed again. Dr. White protest
ed the actions to Bristol, who, in his diary, suggested the problem was with the school for allowing a student “debating” society.
As Hepburn listened in bafflement to the back-and-forth between Noureddin and Dr. Post, Noureddin had specifically referred to Dr. White’s letter about Moslem conversion. Noureddin, his temper rising, told Post that he had the letter that proved missionary collusion with Greek subversives. (It was a detail that stuck with Merrill. A letter of that sort would be valuable to Bristol in his campaign to discredit the missionaries.) Noureddin asked Dr. Post if the Americans had brought priests—“the Americans are always bringing priests.” (Post was both conversing rapidly with Noureddin and giving Hepburn snatches of the translated conversation.) Post would later say that Noureddin had told him, “You have a saying in your country, ‘America for the Americans.’ We say ‘Turkey for the Turks.’ You have another saying, ‘The good Indian is a dead Indian.’ Well, we believe that the good Armenian is a dead Armenian.”
Hepburn was getting a good insight into Noureddin’s antipathies, but he did not get an answer to his specific question about Noureddin’s disposition toward the refugees: Would they be protected until their evacuation was arranged?
He tried again, being less oblique. The refugees, he told Noureddin, had flocked to American institutions but it was not the American intent to protect them; the intent was to remove them to a place where they would be safe. He put the question again to Noureddin, and this time the general shot back that he resented the question: “Of course they will be protected.” At that moment, the sound of cheers from the street entered the room through an open window, and Noureddin walked to the balcony overlooking the square, the one from which he had spoken to the crowd about Chrysostomos. He gestured to the Americans to watch with him as Turkish soldiers passed by. “Look at them,” he said with pride. “They have come five hundred kilometers in twelve days. Praise Allah.”
Noureddin concluded the meeting by giving Hepburn a copy of a proclamation he had just prepared. It ordered civilians to turn in their guns, prohibited looting, and declared that anyone who harbored a Greek soldier or “functionary” would be executed. The proclamation was posted throughout the city the next day.
BACK AT THE CONSULATE, Hepburn found the relief committee further discouraged. The looting and shooting remained flagrant, and it was obvious by now that the Turkish command had no intention of stopping it. The Americans—principally Davis and Jaquith—feared that the disorder was sliding toward a slaughter of all Christians in the city. The refugees were packing into any building that put them out of sight of the Turkish army and roaming civilian bands with clubs and guns. They were hiding even in mausoleums and in stone-covered graves. (One survivor would remember the smell of the ptomaine gases coming up from a putrefying corpse in the tomb where they stayed for two days.) Jennings’s safe houses were overflowing. So far, Turkish soldiers had left the safe houses untouched.
But the Turkish soldiers had begun pulling the refugees out of their hiding places, including churches, and marched the Greeks and Armenian men they collected out of the city to face firing squads or beheadings. As for the women, “Armenian women were to be seen in groups being guided towards the Turkish quarters,” according to a British account. “What became of them? At the last day it shall be known.” Near the Anglican church at the Point, Rev. Charles Dobson reported that he saw two hundred Christians kneeling and sitting on the road guarded by Turkish soldiers: “I afterwards learned from an absolutely unimpeachable source that these men were subsequently butchered. The method of killing, my informant told me, was by steel to avoid rifle fire.”
At the American Girls’ School, Knauss arrived to find that a band of Turkish soldiers was attempting to break down an inner door. They had gotten past the outer door by claiming they wanted to deliver a Greek priest to the school. When the door finally gave way, American sailors met them inside with lowered rifles. They backed out. Knauss also received a report from one of the sailors who witnessed a rape outside the school: “The Turks had taken a girl of fifteen from her father and mother into an alley. Her shrieks were plainly heard, then the Turks returned and one of them wiped a bloody knife on the mother’s forearm then led them down the street.”
Cabling Bristol, Hepburn reported that he could “not understand attitude (of) military authorities who could suppress disorder in two hours if so determined.” Davis was more direct. Explaining Noureddin’s decision to expel Christians from Turkey, he messaged his headquarters and Bristol, “Believe this is final decision (of) Nationalist Government as solution to race problem.”
The relief committee pressed Hepburn for evacuation of the most vulnerable Americans, the naturalized citizens and women and children—but Hepburn demurred. Horton had even suggested an interim plan worked up by him and Lamb at the British consulate—refugees would be moved to an old Ottoman fort just south of the city and housed and fed there until an evacuation from the country could be arranged.
Hepburn had two concerns that blocked his growing inclination to act. First, an American evacuation would be badly received by the Turkish authorities as a demonstration of a lack of American confidence in their good intentions, and consequently, Bristol would likely be opposed to it. Bristol had made a point of warning Hepburn in their talk before his departure that Hepburn should be careful not to jeopardize the property and businesses of Americans in the city by antagonizing the Turks. Hepburn had another equally worrisome consideration as a military commander: the Turks might object to an evacuation of ethnic Greeks and Armenians who were naturalized Americans on the grounds that they had cooperated with the Greek administration and were therefore traitors, for which the penalty was death. In such case, Hepburn would be faced with a standoff. It would be impossible for him to hand over American citizens, even naturalized ones. (He and Merrill made the distinction between “natural born” and naturalized American citizens, treating the second group as less entitled to American protection.) American prestige—not to mention the American public—would not allow it. Hepburn desperately wanted to avoid a confrontation that would require military force, and he knew Bristol surely would disapprove if one were to arise.
The captain grew increasingly uneasy in his predicament. He was caught between the alarm expressed by the Americans with long experience in the city, toward whom he was being increasingly drawn, and the views of his superior officer in Constantinople with whom he was unable to communicate. His own judgment was in flux. He still had not sent his assessment of the relief supplies that were required in the city. The relief committee by now was unanimous in its view of evacuation, and Horton and others with the longest service in the country worsened Hepburn’s dilemma by pointing out to him that an evacuation would take time to accomplish, and if Hepburn asked for permission, negotiations would ensue and probably last at least a week. In the end, permission would likely be granted but on a person-by-person basis with a demand for names and papers—it would not be a general release for all persons. This would inevitably result in an impasse that would require either American force or capitulation.
Hepburn listened closely to the relief committee’s reasoning and then in his head ran through the arguments for and against evacuation. He decided that for now he had the stated, if not actual, cooperation of the Turkish authorities, and lacking an “emergency” involving Americans, he would maintain the current situation: no evacuation. If an emergency arose, and he still thought it was unlikely, he would act to remove the naturalized Americans to American ships in the harbor. He gave no consideration to the evacuation of the city’s Ottoman Christian residents or refugees.
MEANWHILE THE RELIEF WORK continued. The bakeries remained closed, food that had been brought on the Lawrence was running low, and the Turks had shut the water supply.
Nurse Evon had found her own way to deal with the lack of food. Each morning, she went to the YMCA, gathered a group of Armenian men, and led them through the Armenian Quarter to look through th
e rifled shops and homes for food that had been left behind. The American flag was her only protection, though she was easily recognized wherever she went by her big black-rimmed hat. The men collected sacks of beans, flour, and canned milk. Turkish civilians abused the men as they followed the American nurse, but they refrained from attacking them. After gathering the food, she led them to the YWCA, where they visited their wives and daughters, delivered the food, then returned them to YMCA. “They were, I think,” Miss Evon wrote, “the only living Armenians on the streets from Saturday to Wednesday, and the only Greek men I saw were gangs of prisoners, bound together, being driven through Turkish crowds that cursed and struck them.”
Misses Evon and Corning and Dr. Post also continued to move each day between the YWCA and the Dutch hospital in a car that had been supplied to them by the relief committee. Miss Evon walked ahead of the car with a cane, pushing discarded goods out of the way with a stick, and when she encountered a body, she and Post would carry it to the side of the street.
Jaquith cabled Near East Relief headquarters that no food was reaching the city and that seven hundred thousand people faced possible starvation: “Many deaths attributable starvation/typhus out broken and local hospitals overflowing/Appalling need doctors nurses medicines foodstuff/Deplorable conditions worsened by wailing pleading women babies be safeguarded.”
Then there came an odd and ambiguous warning. The Turkish command told Lamb that the foreign nationals in the city would be safe until the twelfth, Tuesday. After the twelfth, there were no guarantees. By making a submerged threat, the Turks had given him a deadline to remove British nationals. What, Lamb wondered, would happen on the thirteenth?
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, had been a long and trying day for Captain Hepburn, but it held one more surprise.
Throughout the previous week, George Horton had grown exasperated with the way the reporters in Smyrna had been reporting events to the outside world. They were reporting for both American and British papers. Generally, they conveyed a sense that the city had been swiftly and competently occupied by the Turkish army, and an expected massacre of Christians had not occurred. Violence was scattered and light, they reported, and mostly due to hooliganism. Typical of the reports was this from John Clayton: “The apprehension of fear-ridden Smyrna has turned to amazement. After forty-eight hours of the Turkish occupation the population has begun to realize there are not going to be any massacres. Apart from a few looters, who have been shot by the patrols, and a few snipers (who) executed Armenians, Greeks and Turks amongst the victims as a result of private feuds, there have been few killings.” After several days in the city, Ward Price, a correspondent for the London Daily Mail, filed a story that said, “There are rumors of considerable slaughter of Armenians, but, though there has certainly been some occasional killing and looting, inquiries made lead one to believe that the total has been much exaggerated by the panicky population of Smyrna.”