The Great Fire

by Lou Ureneck

  On its way to Smyrna, the Edsall passed several Greek steamers ferrying refugees across the Sea of Marmara, and as it reached the Dardanelles, the crimson glow of Smyrna appeared in the night sky. The smoke from the giant fire, carried on the south wind, soon reached Constantinople, and the Smyrna catastrophe would be revealed there as an acrid smell in the back of the nose.

  CHAPTER 18

  Morning After

  The sun rose Thursday morning, September 14, on a city that was still burning and a harbor whose surface was pocked with the bobbing bodies of refugees. A British ship spotted the body of a Greek soldier who had been nailed to a wood door, in the manner of a crucifixion, and set adrift. A burlap bag containing the form of a standing body unsettled the crew of another British ship when it became fixed against the ship’s hull. Some of the sailors added weight to sink the bag and remove the gruesome sight.

  The fire had turned the line of waterfront buildings along the middle section of the Quay into a charred carcass, and the flames now were chewing their way north and south of the American Theater, though they remained at least a quarter mile from Jennings’s first safe house. New fires were being lit, and areas that had seemed spent roared back into flames.

  It was not to be a one-day fire. It was a natural thing for the people to hope that the inferno would have exhausted itself in the fury of the previous night, and that somehow the fire would fit itself into the comprehensible unit of a single day and night—one turn of a wheel of suffering, beginning and ending with the rising sun. But the morning of Thursday, September 14, did not dawn on a blaze that had gone out. The fire would last another two days, and after new fires were started this day, the fury of the fire on Thursday night would surpass the previous night.

  The only solace for the refugees was that they had gained new places to hide from the flames. In distressed and fatigued packs, they moved down rubble-strewn streets to burned-out areas, where they sought safety in the interstices of collapsed buildings. Not all of them left the Quay. From the ships, sailors watched women who walked up and down the promenade, laughing; one was fully naked, holding her child. They had gone mad, broken by the night of fear and panic.

  The British rescue effort of the previous night started up again in the morning, fitfully, and on a more modest scale now that the refugees could get out of the way of the fire. Until midmorning, the British boats continued to take refugees to merchant ships. British sailors, in their white pith helmets, hauled them up ladders; sometimes the refugees were naked, and the sailors placed them half dead on the decks of the vessels. Some refugees attempted to gain the ships on their own. A woman and her young son approached the merchant ship SS Sardegna in a small boat and begged to be brought aboard. With the ship full, the captain refused. Exhausted, she threw herself into the water to drown. The crew fished her out and brought her and her young son aboard.

  AGNES EVON, DEFYING ORDERS and feuding with the Winona’s captain over his unwillingness to take more refugees aboard, went ashore in the early morning and found more than fifty orphan girls in their black-and-white blouses and aprons who had been lost on the previous day’s march from the orphanage. They were huddled on the southern end of the Quay with Miss Morley. As it happened, Miss Morley had arrived at the Quay the previous night without knowing the evacuation plan; she intended to spend the night with the children on the waterfront. Vice Consul Park also was apparently confused by the evacuation planning, and seeing her on the Quay with the children, told her to bring them to the Passport Pier where they would be put aboard boats and taken to the Winona. Miss Morley had fought her way toward the pier, unsuccessfully, losing children along the way. The crowd made it impossible for her to reach the pier. So she turned back in the direction of the consulate, where she saw the space cleared by Hepburn for late arrivals, and she was taken aboard the Litchfield but without many of the children, who had become lost in the chaos. “Those in the crowd I could find were taken,” she later wrote, “but I could not see many.” In the morning, she had gone ashore, weaving through the mass of people rounding up the children she had lost, and now she had them gathered by the pier.

  Hepburn sent navy boats to the seawall to fetch her and the children, but the wind had come up, and waves in the harbor made the job difficult. The boats rose and fell and slapped against the seawall, making the footing dangerous and everyone wet. Nonetheless, the sailors, working carefully, loaded them all one by one and took them to the Winona.

  By now, Hepburn had acknowledged, at least to himself, that Bristol’s orders were obsolete. The situation that had unfolded before him overnight mocked those orders. Either through naïveté or the admiral’s unwillingness to acknowledge the consequences of a nationalist occupation of Smyrna, the orders had proven to be destructive—to human life as well as American property. The Standard Oil docks had been spared, but tens of millions of dollars of American property had gone up in flames.

  The enormity of the relief operation that would be required was apparent to Hepburn. So was the need to evacuate the entire Christian population of Smyrna—in fact of all Asia Minor. It was an extraordinary thing to contemplate, removing an entire population, but an unavoidable conclusion for an officer who considered himself a realist. If these people remained, they would die of starvation or disease or be killed by the hostile population around them. An undertaking of such magnitude was far beyond the capacity of the relief committee—maybe even of a single foreign government. Even after a decade of slaughter, there were more than a million Christians remaining in Anatolia.

  “It appeared to me now,” Hepburn later wrote, “that the fire had entirely changed the aspect of the matter.” The only feasible path forward was cooperation between the Allies and the United States. Still, Hepburn was reluctant to act on his own. In the morning, he sent Charles Davis to the other senior naval officers aboard the Allied ships to convey his view that an international effort was needed and they should meet for a conference to discuss the proposition. Always proceeding with caution, Hepburn would later note in his report, “My instructions forbade any joint action with foreign naval forces, but I felt sure that they did not contemplate inaction in the face of a purely humanitarian emergency almost without parallel in history and which, in my opinion, could be met in no other way.”

  The USS Lawrence, returning from Constantinople, steamed into the harbor at 10 A.M. It had passed Greek merchant ships moving toward the Turkish coast of the Sea of Marmara to pick up the tens of thousands of refugees who were stranded there. Hepburn directed the Lawrence to the anchorage by the Standard Oil pier, where it was able to report to him that all was well with the navy sailors who had spent the night guarding the facility. He was relieved at the news.

  At noon, Davis returned from his meeting with the Allied admirals with disappointing news: they had declined a joint conference for now and suggested instead that each of the officers forcefully present the case for a coordinated relief effort to his respective government and wait for directions before initiating a relief plan. The Allied admirals had also concluded that it would be necessary, before proceeding, to obtain assurances from the Turks that a relief effort would be allowed and relief workers and sailors from the three nations would be given unmolested access to the city and the refugees.

  The relief committee members who had spent the night aboard the Litchfield returned to shore. Jennings, who had remained on the Quay looking after the women and children in his safe houses, was exhausted and tormented by his pain and fevers, but he was safe. The fire had not traveled as far north as No. 490. The medical supplies that had arrived on the Lawrence would be put to good use there. Jennings was more or less operating these homes on his own. He was a member of the relief committee, but his work, as the days wore on, grew more detached from the work of the committee. He was feeding the women and children in his shelter bread and water, and access to the food would have come through the committee, which was the principal contact with the navy, but Jennings had assu
med management of the safe houses on his own. The gap between Jennings and Jacob, the boss who didn’t want him from the start, seems never to have closed. Jacob remained a leader of the relief committee, but he seems to have had little contact with Jennings in the days leading up to the fire and immediately afterward. In a detailed memo that he later sent to YMCA headquarters describing events in Smyrna, he never mentioned Jennings’s safe houses or his walking circuits of the city to find and rescue women and children. Jennings appears to have made the best of Jacob’s indifference. “We gathered in here [the house at 490] also many children left alone without protection on the streets as the result of the death of their parents, many of whom were massacred in the presence of their children,” he later wrote. “It became evident that one house could not hold all who expected our protection so we also assumed the supervision of several other houses along the Quay …” In all this, Jennings had the help of a prominent Greek resident of Smyrna, a lawyer, who joined him at the safe houses after Jennings had rescued him following the Turkish entry into the city. The lawyer took control of one of the safe houses and served as a translator for Jennings. (Few of the people in his houses spoke English.)

  Davis and Jaquith made arrangements to feed the refugees, but they intended to set up feeding stations only on the Quay. The roaming bands of irregular soldiers and rough civilians made it too dangerous to venture away from the sight of the ships and into the smoldering ruins, even though that’s where many of the people had drifted in search of safety. The committee had flour but insufficient bread—the supply had been exhausted.

  Fear of the Turkish soldiers had not subsided, and some refugees sought to hide in wrecked buildings or the basements of homes that had burned. Those who had family or village connections had tried to stay together, and the Americans searched along the Quay for those who had been under their protection before the fire. Incredibly, the Paterson warehouse on the Quay, which the committee had used to store flour and other items, had not been destroyed, and Hepburn placed guards at its entrance to protect its contents.

  The situation was more than discouraging. It was a monumental calamity without any semblance of an adequate response—or even the plan for an eventual response or a path toward a plan. Jaquith told Hepburn that the Near East Relief would pay the costs of evacuating Greeks and Armenians who had been associated with the American charitable organizations in the city. The problem was finding ships to charter. The job was given to Vice Consul Barnes, who would be singularly unsuccessful. He seems not to have sent any messages to Bristol requesting transports.* The captain of the Winona agreed to take more refugees on board, but he demanded a letter from Hepburn justifying his deviation from orders. He also wanted to be paid. Hepburn provided the letter, and children who had an American connection, through the school or the orphanage, were taken to the Winona. The Turks did not interfere. The Winona departed at 4:30 P.M. with two thousand refugees aboard.

  Jaquith radioed a message to the Near East Relief office in New York: “The survivors perhaps 250,000 must be removed. Turkish officials forbid repatriation. Fifty thousand should be removed immediately.” He said he needed at least a million dollars for relief and repatriation. “Bring all possible pressure,” he advised his New York colleagues, who had repeatedly demonstrated an ability to raise large sums of money from the sympathetic American public. The condition and treatment of the refugees appalled Irving Thomas, the managing director of Standard Oil in the Near East now back in the city, and he cabled the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation for financial assistance. His anger over the Turkish actions at Smyrna would open a split between him and his close friend Bristol. Charles Davis, for his part, pressed the American Red Cross for additional help—beyond the $50,000 that Bristol had sought.

  It seemed impossible that the situation could worsen, but the relief committee brought Hepburn the message that the murderous attitude among the Turkish soldiers and civilians had grown even more ugly. “The impression they had,” Hepburn wrote, “was that every able-bodied Armenian man was being hunted down and killed with even twelve-year-old Turkish boys joining in the killing with clubs.” It was not hard for him to believe: aboard the Litchfield Hepburn himself had watched through binoculars as a man was searched and beaten by Turkish soldiers on the Quay, then bound with rope and thrown into the harbor and shot. Walking on the Quay with a private personal guard, Barnes saw groups of Turkish civilians circulating among the refugees in search of Armenian men. They found one and clubbed him to death. “The proceeding was brutal beyond belief,” Barnes reported. “We were within ten feet of the assailants when the last blow was struck and I do not believe there was a bone unbroken in the body when it was dropped to the edge of the Quay and kicked into the sea.” Unsettled by what he had seen, Barnes decided to return to the Litchfield and saw three Armenians shot on the way back.

  Merrill also went ashore—to get a closer look at the burned city and retrieve from the Washburn house, his former lodgings, Washburn’s Victrola and two bird dogs (puppies) that Washburn had given him. The intelligence officer maintained his inexplicable disdainful attitude toward the refugees and their plight. In his report to Bristol, Merrill scoffed at estimates that put the death toll from the fire at more than a thousand and officially dismissed as a false rumor the report that Turkish cordons had blocked the Quay’s exits on the first night of the fire. But he was clear on the fire’s source. He cabled Bristol, “Am convinced the Turks burned Smyrna except Turkish section conforming with definite plan to solve Christian Minority problem by forcing Allies to evacuate Christian Minorities.”

  By midafternoon Thursday, the fire had consumed the Hotel Splendid and reached the southern end of the Quay and the Oriental Carpet Co., the British onshore headquarters. British sailors were sent to the roof to try to save the five-story building, which was at the head of a half-mile stretch of carpet warehouses. Despite the British efforts, it caught fire later in the day when the wind lifted. Soon the entire carpet-warehouse district was ablaze, burning, as a British officer put it, a million pounds’ worth of carpets “with a fierceness unbelievable.” The warehouses were “one roaring seething mass of writhing flames rising to an enormous height,” and the smoke and smell of burning wool enveloped the city.

  At about 9 P.M., Barnes and Jacob, on the stern of the Litchfield, watched a man light fires around the big storage building on the Passport Pier. Turkish soldiers were stationed around it and did not interfere with the arsonist. After several attempts, the building caught fire and an enormous blaze broke out. The building, which had been a holding place for Armenian men, was packed with barrels of kerosene and ammunition. A witness said the series of resulting explosions created waves of oily flames four times as high as the building. “The explosion must have been repeated fifteen times, of which the first seven or eight went straight up through the building and yet left the walls standing. The eighth or ninth explosion took the centre of the building clean away, and only the end walls afterward remained standing.”

  Yet fires were not the worst of it. Captain Hepburn and the relief volunteers noted what seemed to be a thinning of the refugees’ numbers. He sent a message to Bristol about the ominous development—previously feared and still not fully confirmed. “Number of refugees in sight much less than yesterday. Believe being herded into interior and all such definitely beyond hope relief or evacuation. Within week under present conditions relief workers generally agree there will be no relief problem.”

  Had deportations begun? It was a terrible echo of the past.

  CHAPTER 19

  Garabed Hatcherian

  Dr. Hatcherian had awoken on the morning of Wednesday, September 13, in a good mood. He decided again to check on his house—it was always on his mind. He walked through the Greek Quarter and asked an old Greek man if he had any news of the Armenian district. The man said that some sections of it had been ransacked; other sections not. He advised Dr. Hatcherian against going there. He went anyway, and
on reaching the neighborhood he saw that it was under siege. He continued far enough to see the balcony and door of his home, which appeared closed. The house seemed untouched, but the neighborhood far too dangerous to enter. He returned to the house on the Quay.

  Then, in the afternoon, he saw smoke billowing over the Armenian district, and he and his family watched from a window in the attic. He wondered if the fire had come near his home—he seemed not able to put his home out of his mind. He decided again to check on it, and again he put on his Ottoman medals. Dr. Hatcherian walked toward the house and found people were pouring out of the Armenian neighborhood. It was as if he was walking into the current of a swift river. He was running into and around people who were intent on one thing: moving away from the fire. He fought his way upstream. Women were fleeing with infants in their arms, pulling young children along; men followed with bags and bundles of household goods. As he got closer, he saw two fires, one spreading on either side of St. Stephanos, the Armenian cathedral. He was still at least ten blocks from his house. A Turk who took him for a compatriot said to him, “We did what was due. You turn back.” Not wanting to create suspicion about his identity, Dr. Hatcherian answered, “Very well.” He waited for the Turk to move twenty or so steps away, then followed him step for step out of the neighborhood, keeping the same distance between them. At the Greek hospital, the Turk went right, Dr. Hatcherian left. He took a deep breath.