The Great Fire (44 page)
The rising sun cast a burnished copper glow on the surface of the harbor as the
Edsall
steamed alongside the Greek ships at the buoy and led them toward the railroad pier. The air was still, the day already hot. From the
Edsall
’s bridge, Powell had a good view of the Quay from the rail yard on the far left to the Custom House Pier to the far right. The line of refugees all along the Quay was two miles long, and tens of thousands were already amassed at the rail yard gates.
Powell managed to tie up five ships at the pier by 8
A
.
M
., working in the fifth ship at the tip of the pier’s crooked digit, and the loading recommenced at 8:30. A small number of British and Italian merchant
ships chartered by the American Relief Committee also came into the harbor to embark refugees, and the
Worsley Hall
departed for a second trip to Mytilene with its decks and holds packed with people. Then came another stroke of good luck—Admiral Nicholson, who was aboard the flagship
Curacoa
as commander of the Second Light Cruiser Squadron, sent a note to Powell asking if the British could lend a hand to the Americans in the loading of the Greek ships. Going ashore to help the Americans was a dicey matter for the British—two Turkish planes were buzzing Nicholson’s ship, acting aggressively, and matters remained tense at Chanak. Powell happily accepted the request and got permission from the Turkish command to land British sailors on the condition they were unarmed and restricted to the pier. Admiral Nicholson sent all the men he could, about one hundred and thirty, retaining a small crew to man the cruiser’s guns in case of trouble.
During the day, Powell broke free of the pier for a while to meet with the Allied officers aboard the French ship
Edgar Quintet
to discuss seeking an extension of the evacuation deadline—it was only five days off, and at least another 150,000 refugees remained. It was agreed to seek the extension. There was another matter Powell wanted discussed—the treatment of the men who were being removed from the pier. They were being routinely beaten and marched off without any explanation as to their fate, though most thought it was deportation (slow death) or execution (quick death). Powell wanted the naval officers to bring pressure on the Turks to stop the brutality. The subject was discussed, and Barnes, the young American consul who had replaced Horton, suddenly became an expert in international law and argued that it was an internal military matter and not a matter for the relief group or the foreign navies. Barnes, whom Bristol was supporting as the next consul in Smyrna, continued to show an inexplicable antipathy toward the refugees.
Powell was not persuaded by the young vice consul. “Knowing that the policy of the United States is at all times, and during the world war, while neutral, was to intercede for the sake of humanity where possible, and without overstepping the bounds of neutrality, I felt that no demands could be made but that Admiral Dumesnil when he went to Noureddin
Pasha could bring up the subject.” Powell wanted Dumesnil to make it known to the Turkish command that the “neutrals” took an interest in the fate of the men. Maybe a show of concern would save some lives.
THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CONDITIONS
of the refugees grew worse with each passing day. The sailors brought more refugees aboard on stretchers, and more were dying on the pier. The bodies were removed to the city for burial or burning. Many of the refugees appeared to Powell as if they would die en route to Mytilene. “One poor old thing sank exhausted on her bundle,” wrote a British officer. “She was noticed by one of the seamen, who went up to her and put his hand on her shoulder to persuade her to lie down. She was already dead, and even in that short time the body was quite stiff.”
The British sailors made a big difference—they were stationed closest to the ships, and they organized and packed the refugees onto the decks and in the holds so that more could be loaded. If the deadline of September 30 was to be met, Powell said, it would be because of the British help. “The fear and smell in that unwashed crowd were appalling,” wrote a British officer. Captain Buckle of the
Curacoa
was on the pier every day with his men, and he and Powell got along well. “There was never a hitch or misunderstanding of any kind,” Powell wrote in his report. The British captain deferred to Powell’s directions on the pier, and Powell consulted with British Admiral Nicholson every day.
The refugees, even in their weakened state, remained difficult to handle. Panic from time to time would shudder through the mass like an electrical current. The robbery worsened. Rape had been a commonplace, and the women on the pier showed the trauma of it. A British officer who was present wrote, “The women were nearly all on the verge of hysterics. Those who were seen as passably young bore traces of the worst brutality; many were speechless, and those who could talk were unintelligible.”
Some of the women, desperate to board the ships, were frightened of what awaited them even there. The same junior officer wrote:
It was quite obvious that the holds contained no further living perils; but the ladders were small and vertical, and to many of the poor crazed creatures it must have seemed that they were being forced down there so as to be deprived of all chance of escape from further outrage. I remember one girl well: a strong, buxom creature, her dusty face streaked with tears, fighting like a tiger cat against all the well-meant efforts to get her down the ladder. What she feared we never discovered, but her struggles held up all the work, and finally she was seized, pinioned, and lowered bodily on a rope, shrieking and struggling to the last.
In some cases, Dr. Lovejoy was called to help. Sometimes the refugees were beyond help. In one instance, a woman came on board carrying a baby in the fold of each arm. According to the British officer’s account, she looked down at them lovingly and shooed the flies from their face as she sat crooning and swaying in the shade of the ship’s bridge. The babies were strangely quiet and still. The officer touched the cheek of one, then the other. “In all the heat,” he later remembered, “they were cold, icy cold. They had been dead for hours. But the mother hugged them to her breast and talked to them in baby talk.”
For the British and American sailors, one of the most heartrending aspects of the evacuation was watching the separation of families—men from their wives, mothers, and children. Occasionally a man would dash from the crowd and past the barrier in an attempt to evade the guards—if he was able to get far enough past the barrier before being shot, the American sailors often made it difficult for the Turkish guards to pursue him. But these cases were the exception. Very few men escaped. Dr. Lovejoy observed:
As family after family passed those gates, the father perhaps of 42 years of age, carrying a sick child or other burden, or a young son or sometimes both, father and son would be seized. This was the climax of the whole terrible experience for every family. In a frenzy of grief, the mother and children would cling to the father and son, weeping, begging and praying for mercy but there was no mercy. With the butts
of their guns, the Turkish soldiers beat these men backwards into the prison groups and drove the women toward the ships, pushing them with their guns, striking them with straps or canes.
The Turkish soldiers sought men of military age, but they seized boys as young as sixteen and men as old as sixty. At the end of the day, the men (and boys) were marched into the city and put to work clearing debris and piling bodies into heaps and burning them. Later, they would be marched out of the city.
“They would be used as a labor corps in Smyrna for twenty-four hours,” wrote a British officer from the
Curacoa,
“clearing up the filth and nameless things that still lay about and stank in the corners—relics of the fire and the massacre. Then they would be marched into the interior to a concentration camp. But none ever reached it.” Describing “a convoy of these wretches starting off,” the British officer reported, “they were surrounded by a troop of cavalry who, every now and again, broke into a sharp trot, belaboring the prisoners with carbines and swords to make them keep pace. The prisoners were kept without food and without water. When a man fell, he never got up again.”
The same British officer offered a man in one of the pens a pack of cigarettes. According to his account, the man’s response was, “‘Tomorrow, sir’—a shrug of the shoulders, a little gesture of finality—‘tomorrow, I die.’”
Through the chaos, heat, and shrieks, Dr. Lovejoy continued her work. She walked up and down the pier to watch for the sick, especially women in labor. A British naval surgeon had come ashore and performed emergency-trauma work at the end of the pier, and from time to time, Dr. Lovejoy presented him with the worst cases. The American sailors brought her the maternity cases. In one instance, a British sailor took her aboard a ship that was about to depart. They descended into the hold, packed with a mass of people humid with breath and stink. A woman was in labor. Dr. Lovejoy wrote:
With great difficulty we got her out and placed her on the deck behind a chicken coop. Her clothes were in rags, her hairpins gone
and her long hair hanging loose. She had lost her shoes and her feet were bare and blistered. She was dirty like the rest of the refugees, but I noticed that her chemise was made of fine linen, hand embroidered. She spoke English, and when I asked her sister, who was with her, what they had to wrap the baby in, she opened a small bundle of baby clothes, which the young mother had clung to during the burning of Smyrna, and the subsequent two weeks on the Quay. Daintily made by hand, edged with fine lace and tied with ribbons, these little things aboard that refugee ship testified to a home life which seemed as remote and impossible as the Elysian age—the age of love, and innocence and joy.
ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
, Powell, counting down the hours to the deadline, refused to stop the loading even as it grew dark. The moon had returned to the sky as a thin crescent. Powell sent some ships away, brought others to the pier. He had the
Litchfield
shine its spotlights on the pier to allow the work to continue through the night. The
Curacoa
directed its beams on the pier too. Work that had been difficult in daylight proved almost impossible at night, even with the beams of the searchlights.
As Powell stood on the pier, one of the ship’s lights revealed the forms of men swimming toward the warships. They had quietly slipped into the water and hoped to be taken aboard by the naval crews. Powell was standing with the Turkish captain of the port when the wakes of the swimmers became apparent, the disturbed water showing its phosphorescence. The Turkish police began firing at the swimmers, their bullets pocking the black water. The port officer asked Powell to pick the men up and return them to his soldiers. This surely meant execution. It seemed that one of the swimmers already had been struck by the firing. It was a tense moment. Powell was sympathetic to the men, but he also needed the cooperation—even permission—of the Turkish authorities to continue the evacuation. He had developed a good relationship with the port captain, in particular, and had found him helpful in the loading process. Powell did not want to endanger the partnership. It could bring
the entire evacuation to a halt. He agreed to pick up the swimmers but said he would not hand them over to the soldiers. Instead, he told the port officer, he would return them to shore and the crowd. In deference to Powell, the Turkish officer consented.
At about the same time, some members of the relief committee attempted to sneak three refugee women and a man in a boat to the dark side of one of the Greek ships. The Turkish guards also saw this. Powell sent a boat around and brought the four back to shore and (like the swimmers) sent them back to the Quay. Powell assured the port captain it wouldn’t happen again.
The loading ended that night at 9:30
P
.
M
.—forty-three thousand had been sent away this day.
At night, the refugees who had not been loaded were pushed from the pier back to the streets. The American guards were withdrawn, with the exception of a few men who remained on the pier overnight. Despite the difficulty of moving the people back and forth each day through the gates, Powell judged it too dangerous for people to remain on the pier at night without a full complement of American guards.
The sounds of the night added their macabre touch. Some of the ships in the harbor were in the habit of playing music from their speakers, and the sounds of Caruso singing
Pagliacci
drifted over the still water. There was also the pitiful and mournful sound of refugees, praying, crying, and occasionally screaming. “A sudden wailing came down the wind like the shiver in the reeds when a gust strikes them,” wrote a British officer who stood on deck one night. “It died away, then started again and became louder until it was like the sound of countless marsh-birds giving their lonely haunting cries.”
The sad nighttime sound of the refugees remains one of the details most often found among the firsthand accounts of the evacuation. Dr. Lovejoy was one of those who had remembered it. She described it as she had heard from the balcony of the American house next to the consulate where she stood one night with an Armenian girl helping the relief committee: “There was a strange murmur of many voices rising and falling along the waterfront. The sound was mournful, like the moaning of the sea, increasing in volume as the darkness deepened. The language
was unfamiliar, the tone minor and the effect weird and indescribably uncanny. ‘What are they doing?’ I asked this girl. ‘Praying,’ she answered simply. ‘Praying for ships.’”
One morning, as the guards reassembled for the day’s loading, the body of a Turkish soldier was found floating near the base of the pier. He was pulled out and recognized as one of the cruelest guards working the pier on the previous day. Apparently, one of the American sailors stationed on the pier overnight had quietly decided to end the soldier’s career as a tormentor of refugees.
