The Great Fire (12 page)

By 1913, as a consequence of the First Balkan War and intensifying anxiety among the Young Turks, it was no longer safe to be a Christian in many parts of Anatolia, especially along the Aegean coast. Homes were burned or torn down; men, women, and children were slain in the fields.

The Ottoman government unleashed a propaganda campaign against Christians in the schools and mosques. In all this, Germany played an important part—encouraging the propaganda and ejection of Greeks from western Anatolia. Germany had cultivated a close military and commercial relationship with Turkey, coveted its natural resources, and viewed it as a potential client-state. The kaiser had declared himself protector of the Moslems, and there was a persistent rumor (untrue) through the Near East that he had converted to Islam. Ultimately, the German-Ottoman relationship would fuse in August 1914 in a secret agreement allying the two empires in the war against Britain and France.

As in Salonika, Horton witnessed the Christian persecutions in the coastal towns north and south of Smyrna and filed detailed reports to
Washington, inventorying destroyed villages and conveying the brutality in journalistic detail. In one report, he described the frontal decapitations of Greek men working as woodcutters. “The unfortunate men had been tied, and their faces and shins were slashed as they had tried to bend down their faces to protect their throats.” A massacre against Ottoman Greeks in nearby Phocaea left fifty dead, their bodies thrown into the sea or down wells.

The killing escalated with the outbreak of World War I. At the urging of Germany, the Ottoman government stepped up its campaign to remove ethnic Greeks from western Anatolia. Turkish terror drove nearly two hundred thousand Greeks out of the country to the Aegean islands or mainland Greece. Moslems, mostly rough mountain people who had fled the Balkans during the Balkan wars, flooded into Anatolia and took the homes the Greeks left behind.

The Greeks were not the only targets of Turkish terror. Horton became aware of a separate and even bigger terror campaign—the one being waged against the Armenians. Because foreigners traveling to the Anatolian interior often passed through Smyrna, Horton received copious first-person accounts from Americans and others about the killing field inside the country. In a report to the State Department, he wrote: “From what all these trustworthy people of the highest credence tell me, from 800,000 to 1,000,000 human beings are going through this process of slow and hideous torture, and the movement instead of waning is increasing in ferocity, so that before it is finally over, in the neighborhood of 2,000,000 will be affected, a very large proportion of whom will certainly perish as they are driven along for weeks or months without food or shelter and without means of procuring these.”

The accounts of Armenians being rounded up, brutalized, raped, and marched to their deaths flowed into the State Department from Horton’s consular colleagues in Aleppo, Trebizond, Harput, and Samsun. The Protestant missionaries in these places added their own first-person accounts of the horrors. Three thousand women and children made up the first convoy deported from Harput in July 1915. They were marched southward toward the Syrian desert, and on the seventieth day of the trek, after having covered a thousand miles, thirty-five survivors reached
Aleppo. The experience was repeated throughout Anatolia. The paths southward were lined with corpses.

Somehow, Smyrna, the city itself, had remained an exception to the violence. It was generally a liberal city with a tradition of religious tolerance, a lily in a stagnant pond. Smyrna’s prosperity helped cover the conflicts. Its Ottoman governor, or
vali,
was deliberately slow to follow orders that came from the Young Turk government in Constantinople, and he protected British and French nationals and local Christians when it was possible to do so without endangering himself. Occasionally, he had to sacrifice a few Armenians to quiet the Turkish leaders in the capital.

In 1917, when the United States entered the war against Germany, the Ottoman government severed diplomatic relations with Washington, forcing Horton to leave Smyrna. (The United States did not declare war on Turkey, principally because President Wilson did not want to endanger missionary property in the country.) Horton returned to America and made a speaking tour and received an honorary degree from Georgetown University. A year later, the war had shifted decisively in favor the Allies—American troops had joined the war on the western front in Europe, the British had defeated Ottoman forces in Palestine and Syria, and French, Greek and Serbian forces had broken the Bulgarian army on the Macedonian front, opening a path to Vienna. Germany and its war partners sued for peace. The Great War was over, and Horton returned to Smyrna.

He arrived shortly after the Greek landing. He went back to work at Galazio Street and built a relationship with the new Greek administration, and especially its governor, Aristides Stergiades, whom he admired for his learning and religious tolerance. Horton also maintained friendly connections with the Turkish community. Tens of thousands of Greeks who had fled Turkey during the period of prewar depredations were returning to their farms and businesses, reassured by the Allied victory. Some of the Greeks returned from America, where, as naturalized citizens, they had opened candy and flower shops and restaurants in Boston, New York, Newark, and Philadelphia. The Greek lunch counter had become a fixture of urban America.

By 1922, Horton had aged into a respected figure in Smyrna, and
the city’s ethnic groups held him in high regard. He was sixty-three and no longer the scholarly young poet on holiday who also happened to be doing his country’s work as a consul; he had merged his love of the past with a fatherly relationship to Smyrna and its people. Horton more or less appointed himself their protector. The religious hatred in the city had grown acute, and the likelihood of a calamity seemed to him inevitable. As a young man, Horton had not been religious—in fact, he had rebelled against his father’s fundamentalism as a boy—but his attitude changed with time, and he chose to be baptized into the Anglican Church in Smyrna. He moved ever closer in outlook to the American missionaries of Anatolia. He had a flock to care for—Ottoman Christians in and around Smyrna. His paternalism put him in direct conflict with his superiors. It was the old problem of detachment. Horton had no gift for it.

Consul Horton once had loved Smyrna, and probably he still loved it deep in his heart, but he had been worn down by his duties—by the way in which Admiral Bristol had ignored his reports and disrespected his views. Horton was also discouraged about the lack of a redeeming American policy for postwar Turkey that acknowledged the dangers to its Christian population. Like many others, he had advocated an American mandate over all Anatolia to protect the Christian minorities, pull Turkey out of its cruel past, and create a modern democratic state. Horton had tried to make the Christian cause in Turkey an American cause. But he learned, as many others were learning, that American sympathy extended to generous financial support of the Christians; it did not extend to armed intervention or governance, even temporarily, of the Ottoman Empire. It had taken unrestricted German submarine warfare to drag America into war with Germany; America was not prepared to send troops to Turkey to settle matters between its Moslems and Christians.

Saddened by these events, Horton carried on at Galazio Street: he stamped visas and responded to the daily minor requests of American citizens traveling through the Levant, often on their way to Ephesus and the Holy Land. In the evenings, he listened to his wife, Catherine (he called her “Kittens”), play the piano and read aloud to his daughter Nancy. He was only two years short of the enforced age of retirement.
Horton knew the city was living with a false sense of security. At the beginning of the summer of 1922, he and Catherine had sent Nancy to Catherine’s parents in Greece. It was safer there.

BACK IN PARADISE
, the roads were clogged and the rail line busy. Long trains carrying refugees passed through town on the way to Smyrna, each train pulling as many as fifty cars. The boxcars were filled with baggage and household goods; the cattle cars were packed with people. They peeped through the small square holes that were intended to bring air into the cars for livestock, sometimes two or three faces looking out the rough openings. At one point, one of Jennings’s neighbors saw a woman pass a dead child out of the rail car’s window. It had been smothered in the crush aboard the train. Those who could not fit inside the train cars rode on top or hung off the sides. The roads too were full of shuffling crowds of people, some with their arabas, rough wood-wheeled carts, and others with flocks of sheep or a few goats. Some were leading cows or oxen. The boys at International College set up a water brigade for the refugees as they passed on the road by the gate.

The next day, Tuesday, September 5, Horton called the second meeting of the American community to order at the YMCA. By now, Smyrna harbor contained even more warships: in addition to the
Iron Duke
and
King George,
the British had brought two destroyers,
Sparrow Hawk
and
Senator;
the French had two more battleships, the
Ernest Renan
and
Edgar Quintet,
and two destroyers; the Italians had the battleship
Venezia
and two destroyers; and the Greeks had two battleships and two heavy cruisers. The American navy remained absent. Bristol had not yet sent a ship, nor had he even sent a message to the consulate in Smyrna. Given the likelihood of a crisis in the city, Bristol’s lack of a request for information on conditions in the city ahead of the Turkish advance suggests a strange lack of curiosity or a willful isolation of Horton and indifference to Smyrna’s fate.

Horton reported to the Americans that he still had not heard from Washington or Constantinople. The group decided to send a telegram to Admiral Bristol supporting Horton’s request for naval support: “We the
undersigned fully endorse the requests previously made by the American Consul for the sending to this port of sufficient ships of war and marines for the adequate protection of American citizens and property and furthermore we believe the present situation to be of such gravity and danger as to warrant the immediate granting of such requests.”

Neither Bristol nor Washington would ever respond to the cable. It was forwarded by an administrative employee to Phillips and Robert Woods Bliss, the third assistant secretary of state, with a note: “This telegram from Smyrna does not seem to me of particular importance—though it mentions marines, for the first time. It reflects the natural state of mind of persons in a beleaguered city. Its chief interest is that it gives an idea of the variety of American interests in Smyrna.”

Then at the meeting, as Jennings and Lawrence had rehearsed, Professor Lawrence suggested the formation of a committee to organize relief for the refugees. Rufus Lane, a businessman and former consul in the city, spoke in favor: “We did not come here,” he said, “solely to save our skins.” Lawrence made a motion to form the committee, and Jennings rapidly seconded it. The group approved the motion. Jennings offered to collect subscriptions to pay for the effort. Stanley Smith of Standard Oil pledged $350. Francis Blackley, a tobacco broker, offered $150. The group elected Caleb Lawrence as the relief committee’s chairman. It split the other positions between the missionary group and the businessmen, electing another teacher at the school, Samuel Caldwell, as treasurer, and the export agent, Roger Griswold, as secretary.

The group operated under Robert’s Rules of Order with a respect for authority and process that was second nature to them. The scene could have been mistaken for a New England town meeting. (A motion has been made. Now, do I have second? Okay, I have a second. All in favor say, “Aye.” Okay, the Ayes have it. Motion passed.) Lawrence was from rural Maine where the town meeting was the principal form of governance and a way of life.

Professor Lawrence was a natural choice to lead the group. Lean and resolute at fifty-four years old, Lawrence was a missionary teacher who had been in Smyrna since 1896 with only two interruptions—one to complete his master’s degree at Queen’s College in Kingston, Ontario,
and the second required by America’s entry into World War I. He had taken advantage of the second interruption to seek a Ph.D. at Harvard but within weeks of arriving in the United States, the YMCA called on him to serve in Europe. He dropped his studies and went to France where he cared for wounded soldiers and drove an ambulance, at one point distinguishing himself during a German gas and artillery attack on a retreating column of French soldiers by bringing his wounded passengers to safety. A taciturn Mainer with a calm demeanor that inspired confidence, Lawrence was a minister’s son raised by relatives after the death of his mother in childbirth. He taught English and philosophy at International College—a gentle but steady man whose hobbies were weather and astronomy. On many evenings, he invited his children and others to join him at the school’s observatory to view the planets under the dazzling Anatolian sky. He wrote poetry and served as the college librarian, but with his size and build he could have passed for a Maine lumberjack.

As chairman of the Smyrna Relief Committee, Lawrence took responsibility for the city’s numerous orphanages. If there was a commodity that Smyrna had in excess, it was orphans. Missionaries had brought them there from throughout Anatolia because the city was considered a safe location. Lawrence gave Jennings the job of finding flour and bakeries to bake bread, a seemingly impossible job given the numbers of hungry people already in the city. Most had come with only a little bit of food to sustain them on their journey. Others on the committee were charged with setting up food stations, mainly at churches, and distributing whatever bread could be baked. Edward M. Yantis, an agent for the Gary Tobacco Co., a subsidiary of Liggett & Myers Co., was in charge of transportation.

The group pooled their cars and trucks, and soon each was affixed with a small American flag for protection in the event of the Turkish army’s entry into the city. (Horton seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of flags.) In the meantime, Horton had arranged for the Smyrna Theater, which was on the Quay and close to the consulate, as a meeting place for Americans and a sanctuary if they needed it. (Nearly everyone called it the “American Theater” because an American had built it—the
same man who had erected the ice factory.) Horton said he would brief them there twice a day. The theater had a stage and orchestra seating plus three tiers of balconies. The opera
Rigoletto
had been performed the previous week, and at the moment the theater was advertising, in electric lights out front, a French silent movie,
El Dorado,
by the famous French director Marcel L’Herbier.