The Great Fire (14 page)

Lieutenant Commander Rhodes had taken command of the
Litchfield
three months earlier in Norfolk and had brought it to Turkey. He was thirty-six years old, an Annapolis graduate and son of a successful merchant from a small town near Philadelphia. Rhodes was a capable and at times brilliant officer—when he was sober. His quick wit and navigation and gunnery skills had won him the respect of superior officers, and his knowledge of metallurgy and shell design—self-taught—was so extraordinary that the navy had selected him in 1918 to design and build a modern armor and projectile plant in Charleston, West Virginia. His commanding officer had objected to the transfer, but the top brass concluded
that Rhodes, only thirty-two at the time, was the only officer in the navy capable of handling the complicated project. After the plant’s completion, the Bureau of Ordnance took the unusual step of nominating him for a Navy Cross, the second-highest military award (after the Medal of Honor) but navy secretary Josephus Daniels, a teetotaler, reduced his recognition to a Silver Star. By then, Rhodes’s weakness for alcohol was well established. It was a flaw that may have played a fortuitous part in later events at Smyrna.

Rhodes had a soft and aristocratic face with an expression so supremely placid that it seemed to mock the world for its unnecessary exertions. In his Navy photo as a young officer, he wears a look just this side of playful. As an ensign, following his graduation, Rhodes had been cited more than once for being drunk on duty, and he had avoided a court-martial for early-morning intoxication aboard ship in San Francisco only because the squadron was sailing that morning. One of his superiors had recorded that Rhodes was “intemperate” and another reported that he “lacked self-control,” predicting that Ensign Rhodes would have a lifelong problem with alcohol. It was an accurate look into the future.

Several months before being transferred to Turkey, Rhodes had been declared unfit for duty while serving as the executive officer aboard the USS
Huron,
an armored cruiser that was patrolling Asian waters. “There are indications,” a navy doctor in the Philippines wrote, “of mental derangement evident by egotistical and erratic conversation, vague ideas of persecution and grandiosity, inconstancy of purpose and religious enthusiasm.” Rhodes was escorted from the Philippines to the Naval Hospital in Washington for treatment. Adding to his alcohol problem was Rhodes’s wife, Katherine—she was constantly running up debts that he couldn’t pay, and the debtors turned to the navy with their complaints. She also had begun an affair the previous year, and Rhodes, fabulously drunk, had challenged the man to a duel. No shots were fired, but Rhodes had taken a bad fall off a porch and damaged his eye—the second drunken fall in two months. The doctor who examined him in Washington wrote, “This officer has a rather brilliant mind and has for many years had the reputation of being queer and eccentric. He’s also a hard drinker.”

THE
LITCHFIELD
DEPARTED
as the setting sun threw its orange light on the minarets and towers of Constantinople. Rhodes had been briefed on the situation and shown the cables from Horton. Along the way, on the Marmara coast, he and the other men on board saw fires blazing on the Turkish mainland—villages set ablaze by the retreating Greek army or the advancing Turkish army. It was hard to know which. By September 5, the northern detachment of the Greek army, which had largely escaped the Turkish assault, had arrived at Mudania, where it was embarking on Greek ships to reach Thrace, the province of Greece on Marmara’s opposite shore. Rhodes saw troop transports making their way across the inland sea.

The long and narrow design of the
Litchfield
—like other Clemson-class destroyers built immediately after the war—could make for an uncomfortable ride in heavy seas. Its bow rose high and fell hard and the ship seesawed from side to side with twists and shudders. Some sailors could never get used to it and required transfer to less nausea-inducing vessels. Fortunately, on its run to Smyrna, the sea was mostly calm and the wind light. A full moon rose and threw a pale column of light over the dark sea. It was about a thirteen-hour trip to Smyrna from Constantinople at the slow speed.

The
Litchfield
came into the mouth of the Gulf of Smyrna soon after daybreak, Wednesday, September 6, and at 8:30
A
.
M
. it passed through the narrows at Pelican Point buoy. The sun had already risen over the eastward hills and was beating down on the city’s red roofs and reflecting in sparkling shards off the harbor’s calm surface. As it approached the city, the
Litchfield
passed numerous small steamers and boats under sail heading out to sea, all of them overflowing with people and luggage. The exodus from Smyrna was under way.

The
Litchfield
cleared the harbor’s net defenses and dropped its anchor off the Quay at 9
A
.
M
. The harbor flashed with Allied warships. There were also numerous Greek merchant vessels employed as troop and cargo carriers as well as British, American, and Japanese freighters. Already, an Italian battleship had landed forty sailors to guard the Italian school and Italian consulate, both one block from the Quay on Rue Parallele, and the French had landed fourteen sailors who stood outside the
French consulate on the Quay. The British navy had put a small force of royal marines ashore, but kept them at the pier. British officers, working with the British consulate, had gone ashore to plan an evacuation of British nationals. Two British merchants ships—the Magira and the
Antioch
—would leave later in the day for Malta with British evacuees.

The
Litchfield
’s launch was lowered to the water, and Rhodes and Merrill got in it to go ashore. Both in their thirties, and neither a spit-and-polish officer, the two officers, wearing their summer whites, were getting along well, and Merrill, with typical irreverence, was calling his fellow lieutenant commander “Dusty”—Dusty Rhodes. Merrill was “Tip”—nicknamed for his grandfather who had fought the Shawnee at Tippecanoe. Merrill went about his intelligence work like a boy fitting himself into an adventure story. The prospect of a little danger and derring-do appealed to him, and he handled his duties with bantam swagger and a ready quip. He was confident, funny, and not averse to a little luxury when he could manage it, and he soon would manage it in Smyrna. His diary entries, recorded in a hardbound accounts book he had picked up in France, were vivid and detailed and read like notes for a novel that might one day get written. The title might be,
My Lark in Turkey
. Merrill also had a less endearing quality—he seemed devoid of empathy. His observations on the refugees he would encounter over the next several weeks were often heartless; they revealed a man whose sense of personal superiority disconnected him from the omnipresent suffering. Rhodes, on the other hand, would react with compassion though sometimes-questionable judgment.

From the destroyer’s launch, Merrill and Rhodes could see that people were crowded along the waterfront, but on reaching the Quay, they discovered that the mass of people with their bags, trunks, and household possessions was nearly impenetrable. The streets nearest the waterfront were chaotic and congested with soldiers, refugees, cars, carriages, and animals. Having just arrived from the disintegrating battlefront, the Greek soldiers in the streets appeared exhausted and dirty, with torn uniforms and the darkened eyes of chimney sweeps. They were lying in groups awaiting embarkation on troop ships and requisitioned steamers
anchored in the harbor and tied alongside the northerly end of the Quay. The wounded were on litters or in carts.

The Passport Pier (where Jennings had landed with his family three weeks earlier) was nearly unapproachable for three hundred yards in either direction due to boxes, crates, and throngs of people seeking to depart. Furniture, rugs, bedding were piled in heaps. Children slept on boxes. The refugees were standing in clots with their bundles and animals (goats, chickens, donkeys) while others from their group madly sought places for them on the small fishing boats along the seawall that were taking aboard passengers who could pay outrageous prices. Others—the commercial class in the city, men in straw boaters and white summer suits and women in big sunhats and calf-length summer dresses—waited in long lines at the steamship agencies. Their carriages and cars stood by on the Quay with servants prepared to load their luggage on the passenger boats alongside the pier.

Merrill and Rhodes threaded their way through the people toward the American consulate. With the harbor on their right, they walked south along the Quay past the French consulate, the Sporting Club, Cafe de Paris, and the Boston Bar, turning left on Galazio Street. At the consulate, they found George Horton busy arranging for the departure of naturalized Greek and Armenian Americans. Horton pulled himself away from the people and briefed the officers on the military situation and Greek administration of the city.

By Wednesday, September 6, the line of Greek resistance had fallen back to Salihli, less than sixty miles from the city. The rear of the Greek Southern Army, to the extent that it was still a cohesive force, was marching westward at night (under the light of the same full moon that Rhodes and Merrill had seen from the bridge of the
Litchfield
) and fighting rearguard defensive actions during the day.

Horton described his meetings the previous day with the Greek military commander general Georgios Hadjianestis and the Greek governor Stergiades. They had offered opposite views on the prospect of the Greek army holding the city against the Turks. Stergiades had told Horton the Greek soldiers were unwilling to fight any longer, but Hadjianestis asserted
that a fresh division of Greek troops had arrived that morning from Thrace and he planned to put a defensive line between the city and the advancing Turks. Horton also reported that he had gathered together Greek and Armenian naturalized Americans in a place near the waterfront to prepare for their embarkation on a small steamer he had leased with their money, a notion that Merrill found fanciful. “We will be glad to see them go tomorrow morning,” he noted in his diary, “as they would very likely swear at the Turks in Greek behind American flags were they staying on for the big show.” His view was typically insolent, and it seemed to draw on the reservoir of animus that he had brought with him to Smyrna. He had been in the city less than an hour, and already he was condemning its Greek residents for cowardice.

After the meeting with Horton, Rhodes and Merrill returned to the harbor and got back in the naval launch to call on the flagships of the other Allied navies. Merrill was gathering information, and Rhodes was tagging along. They were both more or less enjoying themselves; so far it was light duty and the scene was interesting to behold. They went first to the
Iron Duke
and found that Admiral de Brock was ashore. They went next to the
Kilkis
to talk with the Greek admiral. The
Kilkis
was one of two Mississippi-class battleships in the Greek navy, both of which had been purchased from United States just before the outbreak of the world war. The Greek admiral also was ashore. Rhodes and Merrill then went to the
Edgar Quintet,
the French battleship where they found Rear Admiral Henri Dumesnil, the fifty-five-year-old commander of the French fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. The admiral, a cheerful but odd-looking man who had small dark eyes, a large nose that turned left and full lips, welcomed them. He was friendly and talkative.

Merrill spoke to him in French. Dumesnil told them that he had met with Governor Stergiades and General Hadjianestis and (similar to Horton’s experience) had received conflicting messages about defense of the city. Enjoying the company of the two American officers and bringing them into his confidence, the French admiral went on to criticize Admiral de Brock, who had said he would only protect British nationals.

Merrill asked the French admiral if he thought it was feasible for the Allies to take control of the city between the departure of the Greek army
and arrival of the Turks. Responding forcefully, Dumesnil said he had considered the possibility and added that he would not stand by and let the population be massacred or the city burned. He threatened to block Greek military transports if he did not get a Greek guaranty of its intentions to enforce order in the city. (It was bluff talk; the Greeks refused to guaranty order, and the French did nothing.) Then, relaxing a bit, the admiral introduced his wife and daughter, who were aboard, and Merrill, practicing his southern charm as well as his French, pronounced them “delightful.”

Merrill was proud of his command of the language—one line of his family had been French. He had been born in Natchez, Mississippi, at his family’s home, Brandon Hall, once the largest slaveholding plantation in the rich delta country of Adams County. Among his ancestors were the Surgets, the enormously land-rich French planters in Mississippi, some of whom returned to France after the American Civil War. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been Mississippi governors and another grandfather had been a Confederate army officer.

Merrill and Madame and Mademoiselle Dumesnil passed pleasantries, and the women asked after Admiral and Mrs. Bristol and sent their regards. The admiral’s wife invited Merrill for tea later in the day. Merrill was clearly enjoying himself and buoyed by the meeting with the ladies, and after he and Rhodes said their good-byes, they returned to the
Litchfield
for lunch with the Chicago reporters, Vice Consuls Maynard Barnes and James Park, and two American businessmen.

Always seeking some excitement along with intelligence work, Merrill went back ashore after lunch and hired a Studebaker to drive to the front. He took Clayton and Brown with him. (Rhodes remained with the ship.) Merrill and the two newspapermen took the road out of the city that followed the Casaba rail line, cutting first to the north toward Magnesia and then east to the interior.

On the narrow road, they made slow progress against the tide of refugees and soldiers moving toward the city. They encountered a flood of people walking quietly, steadily. They had with them cows, sheep, goats, and even dogs and cats, and some were leading water buffalo that pulled rickety two-wheeled carts loaded with carpets, kitchen utensils, furniture.
The unshaven footsore soldiers, pants torn at the knees, walked among the refugees. Some soldiers rode on donkeys and a few on camels. Merrill estimated the number of soldiers at about five thousand. At one point, a mounted Greek officer fired a shot to stop their car, but when he saw Merrill’s uniform, he continued on his way. After about two and a half hours, the three Americans had made only about fifteen miles—their Studebaker was moving not much faster than a walk. With the numbers of people on the road seeming to increase as they pushed farther east, Merrill decided it would be impossible to reach Magnesia and turned back to Smyrna.