The Great Fire (15 page)

Back in the city, Merrill resumed his adventure. He had gotten back too late for tea with Madame Dumesnil so instead he called on the director of the Aydin Railroad, a retired British military officer. The British officer and his wife, an American, invited him to stay for dinner and the three of them talked into the evening. Merrill accepted an invitation to return the next day for lunch. By day’s end, he had sent two cables to Bristol describing the scene in the city and asserting that the Greek army was devastating the countryside on orders from Athens. “Greek troops in panic and pouring into Smyrna. No fight in them.” For sure, the Greeks were furiously loading military supplies and men aboard ships at Smyrna for a rapid evacuation, but there was no panic, just exhaustion, and Merrill did not indicate how he had established that Athens was directing devastation of the countryside. The Greek military command had been out of communication with its forces for almost twelve days since the offensive had begun. But it was a message that would surely please the admiral.

Meanwhile, Constantine Brown, who had obtained a letter of introduction from the Greek high commissioner in Constantinople, had gone to interview General Hadjianestis. The government in Athens had already sacked the general for his failure to anticipate the Turkish attack, but the field commander who had been named as his successor was out of communication with headquarters and unaware of his promotion. So Hadjianestis had continued to serve. Unknown to him and the government in Athens, his successor had been captured at Dumlupinar and was a prisoner of war in Magnesia. The second replacement for Hadjianestis was on his way from Athens and would take command later in the day.

Hadjianestis had been an odd choice to lead the Greek forces in a military campaign that by any measure would have been extremely difficult. He was fifty-eight and reputed to be mentally unstable, possibly insane. A ladies’ man, “he was tall and thin, straight as a ramrod, and extremely well groomed, with a pointed gray beard and the air of an aristocrat.” He looked like Don Quixote. Years earlier, as a young officer fighting in the Balkans, he had faced a mutiny of his troops, an event attributed to his strange manner and maniacal discipline, habits that he displayed in Turkey. At an inspection of battle-weary troops at the front, he paid close attention to their haircuts. As commander in chief of the Greek forces in Asia Minor, he had directed the land war against the Turkish nationalists from his flagship in the harbor while he was having a Quayside mansion fitted out with expensive furniture and Turkish carpets.

Brown met Hadjianestis at Hotel Splendid on the Quay, seated at a big table inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The general assured him that the Greeks had won “smashing victories” in the last two days. Then, anticipating a question from the reporter about why he was in Smyrna and not with the troops, the general said, “You know, my legs are made of glass, and I can not take the chance of breaking them.” (In two months, the general, showing increasing signs of mental deterioration, would be executed by a firing squad in Athens for high treason.)

At 8:30
P
.
M
., a second U.S. destroyer, the USS
Simpson,
arrived in the harbor. The
Simpson
came alongside the
Litchfield,
and the ship’s commander, Lieutenant Commander Harrison Knauss, went aboard for a briefing by Rhodes. Knauss, a fellow Pennsylvanian and classmate at Annapolis, was a serious, even pensive officer. Knauss had skippered President Wilson’s yacht,
Sylph,
and during the war he had served as the executive officer aboard a destroyer, USS
Jacob Jones,
that lost sixty-six men when a German U-boat sank it in the North Sea. Once ashore at Smyrna, he would write some of the most sympathetic and moving accounts of the refugees.

THE CITY
’
S POPULATION WAS
swelling, its food stores diminishing, and, with a hostile army fast approaching, Smyrna’s defense was growing more
doubtful. There was no serious indication that the powers represented by the war ships in the harbor would intervene.

The Smyrna Relief Committee, monitoring the arrival of refugees by train and on foot, estimated that thirty thousand people were arriving each day. Dispersed and wandering in search of shelter and food, the refugees had become impossible to accurately count but they were everywhere except for in the Turkish Quarter.

Like the Gravos family, many of the refugees looked to the churches for a resting place. Armenians jammed the courtyard of the city’s biggest Armenian church, St. Stephanos. Many of the Greeks gravitated toward St. George or St. Photini, the Orthodox Cathedral, which was on Frank Street, several blocks south of the YMCA. The entrance to St. Photini’s stone-paved courtyard was reached through a narrow passageway of homes and shops under its tall belfry, one of the city’s principal landmarks. A British officer making a walking tour of the city went into the courtyard and offered this description: “Old wrinkled women, lying on the pavement in rags, or propped up against a wall, asleep. Babies in mother’s arms, or sometimes two or three on an old sack, in a row, looking like waxen images. Will they ever awaken again, one wonders? The mothers in many cases sit staring blankly in front of them but ready to spring at the first person who would dare harm their child. Women with hair all over the place, and wild eyes.”

By the time the
Litchfield
had arrived on Wednesday morning, the Americans’ relief committee already had already formed itself into an effective working group and was using the YMCA building as its headquarters.

Jennings was out seeking flour to buy and ovens where it could be baked into loaves of bread. Searching the city in Jacob’s Chevrolet and on foot, Jennings identified bakeries, both big and small, and negotiated payments for their production of the big round loaves that could be distributed by the hundreds to refugees. The city had nearly fifty small bakeries, nearly all of them owned by Greeks, and two big steam bakeries, also owned by Greeks. The two big bakeries were in the European Quarter, not far from the YMCA. The other bakeries, though, were scattered throughout the city, with each small neighborhood containing at
least one bakery. Most of the ovens were fired by wood or charcoal, now-scarce commodities that Moslems from the countryside typically brought into the city. Jennings went up and down the streets, opening doors and seeking to communicate with bakery owners. He had local assistants at the YMCA who spoke Greek, and they could help him arrange prices and payments. The money was coming from the donations of other relief-committee members, principally the American businessmen. There were other foreign nationals in the city—Italians, French, and British—but only the Americans had organized a relief effort. Jennings’s assignment required him to walk long distances, and exertion was difficult for him. His lung capacity had been reduced by more than half as result of his bout with tuberculosis, and he suffered an ongoing case of cardiac asthma. The heat worsened his discomfort, but he kept on, wearing his loose jacket and tie and straw boater, up one cobbled street and down another, making deals despite his almost-constant low-grade fever.

Back in Utica, on the day the doctors had informed Amy that Asa soon would die, they said their collective diagnosis was acute tuberculosis, a bacterial infection of the lungs. In the days and weeks that followed, his condition had steadily worsened. His weight fell to eighty-five pounds. He gasped for breath; the pain in his chest and back had grown worse. To Amy, he seemed barely alive in the hospital bed: a thin and fragile creature in bedclothes. Among the torments that Amy experienced as she watched him waste away was her awareness of her husband’s ambition. He had often told her that he wanted to do something important with his life. Now, Amy saw, the prospect of some future achievement was slipping away as his life was slipping away. But she kept up her belief, at least for him, that he would recover, and Asa had continued to fight for his life.

In the eighth week of his hospitalization, he announced to Amy that he wanted to leave the hospital. He needed air, he told her, and he wanted her to take him to the Adirondack Mountains where the air was clean and he could bring it into his diseased lungs. He was sure clean air was the thing he needed. Reluctantly, the hospital released him into Amy’s care, and she put him in a car and took him to a lodge and set of
cabins at Seventh Lake, a pristine surface of blue among the Adirondacks’ tall spruce and pine trees. There was a breeze, and the air carried the scent of the conifers around their cabin. The setting was peaceful, the air cool and pleasant, but Asa’s condition only worsened. There was no magic in the mountain air. Amy took him to another doctor, and this time Asa received a new diagnosis, actually an additional diagnosis: He had developed Pott’s disease, a condition in which a tubercular infection travels from the lungs to the spine. The new infection had inflamed his vertebrae and eroded the cartilage discs between several of them. His spine had begun to curve and collapse. The pain was awful. Losing the support of his spine, his body folded like a cloth puppet. There was no choice but to put him in a full-body plaster cast, which allowed him to move only his head and arms and parts of his legs. He insisted on a return to Seventh Lake, and Amy complied. She set his bed near the cabin window, where he could catch the mountain air, and she read the Bible to him, especially the story of Job’s unjust punishment and test of faith. So much of Job’s suffering mirrored Asa’s. “And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life. So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown.”

Amy was nearly out of hope, and possibly because he saw the direction of her thoughts, Asa said to her, “Amy, I can’t die. I have great work to do and I must go to see Jerusalem.” His words only left Amy more confused and upset. Jerusalem? What had Jerusalem to do with his battle? She wanted him only to live. “I could not understand,” Amy later wrote, “how he would be able to do either (work or travel) for I was not asking more than that his life be spared, which seemed so much.” Thereafter, he often returned to the theme of Jerusalem—the place to which he must travel. The word itself became a talisman.

One night at Seventh Lake, he could hardly breathe. He struggled, but the gasps could not bring enough air into his lungs. He was suffocating. Amy summoned the local doctor, who said Asa required surgery to understand and remove whatever it was that impeded his breathing. As Amy prepared to drive him to the hospital in Utica, Asa began coughing up pus. At first, he and Amy thought he was expelling the
whitish tissue of his lung. His death seemed at hand. The coughing lasted through the night, but in the morning it ceased, and the pus stopped coming up. He breathed more easily; his temperature returned to normal.

The doctor explained what had happened: a cold abscess had formed in his thorax and broke open in the night. Its contents had come up through his larynx. The development was an important turn, but he was not healed, and Amy decided on a new next step. She took him to Clifton Springs, a Christian sulfur-springs resort in the Finger Lakes district of New York. She learned massage, and for an hour and a half each morning and each night, massaged Asa’s back and chest. In between, she placed him in the healing waters. Slowly, he returned to health, or at least turned away from a sure slope toward death.

By 1907, he was back to his pastoral duties at the Barneveld Methodist Church. Their second child, Asa Wilbur, was born that year, and he lived. Asa was working again, but the damage from the illnesses he had endured was permanent. The collapse and curvature of his spine had reduced his height by five inches and left him with a hump on his back. It had also displaced and enlarged his heart. He would suffer near-constant pain, fevers, and a shortness of breath his entire life, and they were with him as he searched for flour and ovens in the back streets of Smyrna on September 6, 7, and 8, 1922.

With his perpetual smile, but with the odd gait forced on him by his misshapen back, Jennings worked his way through the crowds, searching out the means for feeding the refugees. Finding surplus food of any sort was difficult. Because of the war, there had been spot shortages of food in Smyrna even before the Greek army’s retreat. Jennings realized that there would be only one adequate source of flour before emergency supplies arrived—the departing Greek army, which had been feeding more than two hundred thousand men. So that’s where Jennings went—to the commander of the Greek forces, General Hadjianestis, who had already rejected the relief committee’s requests for supplies. The Greek army’s warehouses contained more than a million pounds of flour. The greater part of it was kept in a warehouse at the Point. The Greek general yielded to the persuasions of the little motor of a man in
front of him. Unfortunately, for the committee and the refugees, the gift came too late. As the Greek troops departed the city, looting soon broke out, including at the warehouse, and in a very short time the Turkish army would seize the warehouse and everything in it to feed its troops.

Despite his effectiveness with the bakeries, Jennings was removed from his Feeding Committee assignment. His boss, Jacob, now back from vacation, took Jennings’s place and assignment as the ranking YMCA member on the relief committee. Pushed aside, Jennings fell into the role of courier—everyone else’s assistant. He became the committee’s errand boy. It appeared that Jacob was unwilling to let loose of the judgment he had formed about Jennings before his arrival at Smyrna—that he was not the man for the job.

Jennings was unperturbed. As a Methodist minister, he was familiar the Methodist pledge:

And so he did, finding ways to be useful. Providentially, while making his rounds of the city, Jennings had come in contact with a prominent Greek doctor, Demetrius Marsellos, who was preparing to leave the city with his family. He had a mansion on the north end of the Quay, at No. 490, in the neighborhood of grand residences called Bella Vista. He offered it to Jennings for the relief committee’s use. After consulting with Horton, Jennings accepted the house and rapidly turned it into a first-aid station and shelter for injured and pregnant women. The city’s hospitals were overwhelmed with patients, many of them refugees with serious wounds they had suffered in flight from their villages. In many villages, Moslem civilians had turned to violence against their Christian neighbors. Jennings’s aid station and safe house became the only available source of medical help and sanctuary for women who were unable to enter—or get themselves to—one of the city’s hospitals. He set off one large room as a maternity ward.