The Great Fire (13 page)

Later in the day, still not having heard back from Washington or Bristol and operating without instructions or protection, Horton asked the commander of a French ship in Smyrna harbor, the
Edgar Quintet,
to send a cable to another French ship, in Constantinople, for relay to the American embassy. The ship’s captain agreed: “
Consul General Estas Unis a Smyrne vous prie demander Admiral Bristol si celui ci a bien recu ses telegramme.
” (“The consul general of the United States in Smyrna asks Admiral Bristol if he has received his telegram.”)

JENNINGS, AS CHAIRMAN
of the Kitchen and Feeding Committee, went to work procuring flour and ovens. By now, there were tens of thousands of homeless and hungry people in the city. They were arriving each day by the thousands. Those who had the money—and there were very few from the countryside who had money—were attempting to depart on steamers and coastal ferries. The ticket offices were jammed with prosperous residents, and the lines stretched into the streets. Others—the great mass of others—found a piece of pavement on which to wait, hoping that providence would provide for them. The calamity could not have come at a worse time for those who had left their farms, and that was most of them, this being the time when the fig, raisin, and tobacco crops would be brought down into the city for sale. The greater part of their crop already been gathered but much of it was undelivered, which meant no payment for the season’s work. The wheat crop also was in harvest. Kemal, in fact, had timed his attack for late August because granaries would be full, providing food for his army. The people on the streets didn’t know what would come next: Would the Greek army hold the city? Would the British and Americans protect them? Would they
eventually return to their farms? There were no answers. The women brushed the flies from their children in the heat and waited.

The flow of people from the backcountry continued into the night, and families attempted to claim small spaces in which to sit and pull some bread or cheese from a wrapped cloth to distribute among their children. A British observer offered this description for a London newspaper: “Those who were still left on the Quay at night camped on the water’s edge, and one saw the remarkable spectacle of mothers preparing their children’s beds for the night within three or four feet of the water so that they would be in a good position next morning to get on board some vessel. Those who could not get on the Quay had to make their beds on the footwalks of the side streets leading to the Quay, and it was pathetic to see how they had endeavored to arrange their little furniture to give their three or four square yards of footwalk some appearance of a home. One very frequent article of furniture was the sewing-machine, neatly packed in its wooden cover bearing a well-known name.”
^*

By the night of September 5, there were more than a hundred and fifty thousand refugees in the city. At Paradise, the Jenningses continued to watch columns of people and animals pass on the road to Smyrna. The ragged parade continued into the night, wood wheels creaking, sheep bleating, pots and pans clanging. It was as if the entire Anatolian landscape for hundreds of miles back from the coast was disgorging itself of frightened Christians.

T
he Gravos family gathered outside their home in Gritzalia, a village in the high country east of Smyrna. The elder Gravos had one last look before beginning the trek to Smyrna with his wife, children, including twelve-year-old Theodora, and extended family. Maybe they would return; maybe this trouble was temporary. The figs hung black, purple, and pendulous among the big green leaves of the trees, ready for picking; the grape harvest had already begun on the vines that ranged on the hillsides outside the village; the olives would be ripe in another month.

The family group was nine—mother and father, three sons, and Theodora and her two younger sisters and Theodora’s aunt. Theodora was a brave and curious child, and she observed her mother and father and three older brothers making ready for the trip. There were food and blankets to pack; possessions to worry over. In the meantime, Theodora watched her two younger sisters, two and a half and three and a half years old.

The day was hot, and the women covered their heads with cloths against the sun. The cicadas beat their little drums in the eucalyptus
trees, speeding the rhythm with the increase in heat until the sound was simply one long buzz.

It was a terrible decision to abandon one’s home, but the Gravos family no longer felt safe. The anger of their Moslem neighbors had simmered for three years—the Turkish residents had been powerless against the Greek soldiers, and they had suffered the dominance of Gritzalia’s Christians, but Mustapha Kemal and the nationalist army were routing the Greeks, and it was their turn now, and the Greek villagers understood that they must remove themselves from the fury that soon would be unleashed. A Greek already had been hung from a tree for firing at a hodja from a minaret as he had called Gritzalia’s Moslems to prayer. Accounts were being settled. The Turks came out of their homes to watch the Greeks pass by. Occasionally, they threw stones at them or uttered curses.

Gritzalia was Theodora’s world—her universe. She knew her small home and the dirt street that passed in front of it, the church with its red-and-gold iconostasis and the sight of the
papas
with his black robe and toadstool hat, and her aunt,
thea,
and the shops in the village that she visited with her mother and the orderly lines of the hillside grapevines and the red grasses that waved on mountains, and the flat shaded place above the village where Greek families gathered on religious holidays for picnics. She knew the taste of blackberries—Gritzalia was famous throughout the mountains for its blackberries—and the scent of the pine trees that made the mountains green.

Gritzalia was a village in three parts—the upper village was Greek and Turkish; the middle village was Turkish; the lower village was Greek. Situated at the crossroads of five trails that wended their way to the main road to the east toward Casaba, it had been a prosperous place for its two thousand inhabitants, split evenly between Ottoman Greeks and Ottoman Turks. Caravans often stopped there for final provisioning before making the long march into the depths of Anatolia, and beyond.

By the first week of September, all the Greeks were leaving Gryzvalia, and many were already on the road that led north down the mountain to the main road that cut west through the pass and descended to the coastal plain and Smyrna.

The Gravos family soon fell into a long line of people moving along the main road. These other people had come from villages and farms farther east, Casaba, and even Ushak, and they already had been walking for days. The road down from the mountain was a series of switchbacks among the cutbanks, and it was only the weight of the big animals in harness that kept the carts from careening down the steep pass. Out of the mountains, the landscape was mostly treeless rolling plain of grass, low bushes, and rocks broken by cultivated fields, orchards, vineyards, and villages. They passed through the town of Boudjah with its Levantine villas. The road wound visibly into the distance in both directions, east and west, and the line of people, animals, and carts could be seen for miles. It was as if there was some gigantic and medieval agricultural procession under way, and it was moving inexorably westward toward the sea but at the slow speed of the heavy-hipped oxen.

Theodora was in that big and pitiful parade of black-garmented women and farmers and priests and barefoot children and shopkeepers with hats and vests and leather shoes. Strangely, there would appear a woman with a parasol. The old people, bent or crippled, had the most trouble. Sometimes they had to be carried on litters or on the backs of family members. The heat and the exertion were too much for others. They died along the way.

Young Theodora saw that some of the people on the road were soldiers, and they seemed very tired and those that seemed to have been hurt were being helped by other soldiers. Their uniforms were torn, and some were bloody, and they were dirty. Sometimes, soldiers would pass on the backs of camels or donkeys. The Gravos family, in this winding serpent of tattered humanity, crossed the Meles River and entered Smyrna from the north. They found a Greek Church, St. John’s, and rested there on its floor and benches. It was a small church, built with green stone, but it was crammed with people who were frightened and a long way from home like the Gravos family. Theodora looked after the small children. Her father found a friend, a resident of Smyrna, and he took them all to his house for safety. They slept there that night.

A
dmiral Bristol spent Sunday of the Labor Day weekend aboard the
Scorpion
hosting a lunch for eighteen guests including British naval officers, some of his ships’ commanders and their wives, the Japanese high commissioner, and prominent Americans in Constantinople including Nataline Dulles, Allen Dulles’s younger sister who was a Red Cross nurse in Athens. They dined on the ship’s deck under a canvas canopy and within view of the Summer Palace Hotel at Therapia.

Big luncheons aboard the
Scorpion
were common occurrences, and the yacht was well furnished for fancy dining. One of Bristol’s early acts as high commissioner had been to order china for entertaining, down to finger bowls and oyster forks. After lunch, Bristol and his guests went ashore at Therapia for a tennis tournament.

On Monday, Labor Day, he led a group, mostly Americans, on a picnic to the Sweet Waters of Asia, a pleasant retreat of brooks, wooden bridges, and greenery along the Bosporus once favored by sultans for their royal outings. The picnic lasted into the evening. Bristol dressed for these excursions in civilian clothes—blue sport coat and tie, white trousers and white bucks, and a summer homburg. He enjoyed taking snapshots of the gatherings. He and Helen were childless, but the outings put them at the center of an admiring family of naval officers and their
wives, many of whom dressed casually in the latest fashion: cloche hats and dresses at the knee and revealing bathing suits (by 1920s standards) for swimming in the Bosporus.

Bristol had grown up on a small farm in southern New Jersey and muscled his way up in the navy. More than once his ascent had nearly faltered, but he had been saved by the intervention of friends and his own indefatigable nature. (A family friend who went to elementary school with Bristol in Glassboro, New Jersey, remembered that Bristol’s favorite poem was “Invictus”: “In the fell clutch of circumstance / I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.”) Glassboro, during Bristol’s boyhood in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a company town that manufactured glass, and his family lived in nearby rural Clayton Township. He attended Glassboro Academy, the local public school, and received an appointment to the Naval Academy from U.S. Rep. Thomas Ferrell, a one-term Democratic congressman from Glassboro.

Ferrell had been a labor leader at the glassworks, and as a congressman he had sought to ban companies from recruiting foreign labor, which competed with native-born Americans. Immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were flooding into the country at the time, creating a backlash in some quarters because of fears that the Italians, Greeks, Serbians, and other foreigners took American jobs and depressed wages. With Ferrell’s letter of appointment, Bristol went off to Annapolis at age fifteen, only slightly younger than most of the entering cadets. He graduated four years later in the middle of his class.

One possible explanation—though remote—in Bristol’s background that may account for his animus toward Greeks and Armenians could be the nativism that motivated Ferrell. Perhaps the dislike of Europe’s poor and darker-skinned immigrants had floated in the air that Bristol had breathed as a boy in Glassboro.

While he was definitely not from a patrician family, and he seemed to lack the air of irony and ease that was often a gift of the upper class, Bristol, as the American potentate in Constantinople, was surrounded by young men of privilege of the sort that had populated the Naval Academy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These young
men often worshipped the strong-minded and up-from-the-farm admiral. One such man, though not so young as the others was Robert Steed Dunn, a Harvard graduate from a prominent Newport family, who served as one of Bristol’s intelligence officers. An extraordinary man by any measure, Dunn would ultimately shape and encourage Bristol’s contempt for the Armenians in Turkey.

Dunn came to the navy late in life—he was forty-one years old when he joined in 1918—commissioned as a junior-grade lieutenant. By then, he had already worked as a reporter in New York for the great muckraking editor Lincoln Steffens, joined the first expedition to attempt the summit of Alaska’s Mount McKinley, made the first ascent of Mount Wrangle, explored Siberia and the Aleutian Islands, covered the war in Europe with John Reed (from inside Germany and Romania), and ridden with General Pershing in Mexico in search of Pancho Villa. Dunn brought his adventurous spirit to Bristol’s naval staff, sometimes disappearing with only a sidearm into the Anatolian interior on self-appointed intelligence missions. Dunn was with Bristol when Bristol made a trip to Tbilisi to meet with the premier of the new Armenian republic, created by Sevres, and he made two long trips himself, mostly on horseback, through the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia, befriending some of the Turkish nationalists’ highest leaders. He interviewed Mustapha Kemal in 1920. In the end, he may have turned out to be a better journalist than intelligence officer and contributed to skepticism in Washington about Bristol’s judgment. Dunn showed astute powers of observation (landscapes and faces were a specialty), and his writing was superb, but the State Department was not happy with his methods or results. The problem with Dunn—and the same could be said about Bristol—was that, in summing up the religious conflicts in Turkey, he judged the Armenians to be as brutal as the Turks, arguing from a position that assumed Armenian history began at about 1919. The mass slaughter and deportations of Armenians during World War I seemed to not have made a strong impression on either of them. Bristol was an early form of a type that would emerge later in the century—the holocaust denier. Dunn left Constantinople in 1922, but he remained close to Bristol, who always referred to him as Bobby. In his letters to the admiral, Dunn called him Mark.

AFTER THE LABOR DAY WEEKEND
, Bristol returned to Constantinople. His first order of business on Tuesday, September 5, was a routine inspection of the USS
Simpson,
a destroyer moored in Bosporus. (This was the day of the second meeting of the American community in Smyrna.) Afterward, he had several meetings at the embassy including a long conversation with Miller Joblin, the regional general manager of Standard Oil of New York. Bristol lectured him on the importance of controlling costs and the danger of hiring local people. (“He quite surprised me,” Bristol noted in his diary, “by stating that he intended to develop an organization with local employees. I told him I didn’t think he had sufficient experience and knowledge . . .”) It’s hard to know what the oil executive made of Bristol’s confident assumption that he knew more about operating an oil depot than his guest but the performance was typical Bristol—full of strongly held opinions delivered with the utmost confidence.

By Tuesday, September 5, Bristol had already received three cables from Horton—the first, addressed to the State Department, requesting naval protection; the second reporting that the British were evacuating their nationals; and the third asking for his mediation to save Smyrna from possible arson and again asking for naval protection. Bristol got around to answering these messages late in the day Tuesday. He cabled Horton that a destroyer would arrive in Smyrna Wednesday morning, and he warned Horton not to take any action that could be construed as favoring one side. (It was obvious to both men that this meant Horton should not favor Greeks over Turks.) By the time Bristol’s cable arrived in Smyrna, Phillips had already cabled Horton that the navy was directing Bristol to send a destroyer to Smyrna.

For the trip to Smyrna, Bristol chose to send the USS
Litchfield
whose skipper, Lieutenant Commander John B. Rhodes, had been at the big lunch aboard the
Scorpion
on Sunday. Bristol directed his chief of staff, Captain Arthur J. Hepburn, to prepare the orders and have the ship under way that night. Bristol also ordered one of his intelligence officers, Aaron S. Merrill, a young lieutenant commander from Natchez, Mississippi, to make the trip with Rhodes. Bristol wanted his own eyes and ears in Smyrna: he didn’t trust Horton, and Rhodes might also prove unreliable,
though for different reasons. Bristol had complete confidence in Merrill, and Merrill, in turn, revered Bristol.

Small and light, young Merrill had been the Naval Academy’s bantam boxing champion. He was bright and sociable with curly brown hair and brown eyes and popular among the other cadets for his athleticism and patrician yet irreverent ways. He enjoyed a good laugh—especially at someone else’s expense. While on a trip to Bulgaria with Bristol, he had found it amusing that their car frightened the animals of the local peasants, causing them to upend the peasants’ carts. Merrill had joined Bristol’s staff in 1919, and he relished the work and pursued it with zest. His admiration of Bristol’s leadership made its way into the letters he sent
home to his mother in Mississippi. The letters also showed that Merrill had absorbed Bristol’s point of view: the Greeks were unlikable, and to know a greasy Armenian was “to dislike his lying, thieving ways.” In praising the light-skinned Russian refugees in Constantinople, he wrote to his mother that they “would make far more desirable (American) citizens than the weekly thirty thousand Polish Jews and Italian bootblacks that are pouring in.” Merrill and Robert Dunn also were close friends, having met stateside in Newport in 1918; in fact, Merrill had originally recommended Dunn to Bristol as an intelligence officer.

In January, Merrill had married Louise Witherbee, the daughter of Walter C. Witherbee, a mining magnate and one of the richest men in America. Louise had grown up with Japanese servants, thoroughbred horses, and a palatial floating summer home on Lake Champlain so big that it had a first-floor ballroom. Merrill had returned to New York for the wedding at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, then Louise had joined him in Constantinople, where she added sparkle and prestige to Admiral and Mrs. Bristol’s social circle.

When Merrill got his orders on Tuesday to board the destroyer for Smyrna, no doubt he was eager to get into the action. By September 5, word had reached Constantinople that the Greek-Turkish stalemate was broken. Everyone by then knew something very big was unfolding to the south, and Merrill was particularly well informed since staying abreast of the military situation was his job. The Smyrna trip was a chance for him to please the boss and enjoy an adventure—the frequent letters home to his mother read like a boy having a great time at summer camp.

Two hours before the
Litchfield
was scheduled to depart, two reporters—John Clayton of the
Chicago Tribune
and Constantine Brown of the
Chicago Daily News
—sniffing a big story, bounded up the ten marble steps of the U.S. embassy and called on Bristol. They wanted to hop a ride to Smyrna aboard the destroyer. The American and British press were well represented in Constantinople, and Bristol often met with reporters and other writers to propound his views on background. John Dos Passos was among those who had passed through the city and interviewed the admiral. (Ernest Hemingway would be a regular at his press briefings later in the month.) Bristol knew Brown and Clayton well and was particularly close to Brown, a British citizen in his twenties who had grown up in the United States and married an American girl from Iowa. Brown had replaced the previous
Chicago Daily News
reporter, who had been transferred after mixing it up with Bristol. Dapper with a pencil-thin mustache, Brown was a regular at Bristol’s parties aboard the
Scorpion
. Something of a scamp, he had outfitted a houseboat as his living quarters in Constantinople, and during Bristol’s evening parties at Therapia, he would bring his boat alongside the
Scorpion,
providing a non-naval deck for an ample bar. Prohibition was in force back in the United States, and navy rules forbade alcohol aboard its ships. A plank was laid between the
Scorpion
and Brown’s houseboat, and partygoers could move back and forth to get cocktails from a bartender who was detailed to serve drinks as navy musicians serenaded guests on the
Scorpion
’s deck.

Both Brown and Clayton had covered the war in Europe, and both were prepared to go anywhere for a good story. Clayton had gained notoriety after the war by sneaking into the Soviet Union, via Finland, on skis to report about starvation in Petrograd and the dissatisfaction of Emma Goldman, the American communist, with the Soviet system. She had been a guest of the Soviets at the time, and Clayton scored a major scoop. In Turkey, Clayton had shown some annoying independence earlier in the year when he had filed long and vivid stories back to Chicago about the Turkish massacres of thousands of Ottoman-Greek civilians along the Black Sea. Bristol had worked hard to keep the stories
out of the newspapers, and ultimately, to his satisfaction, the stories were never published. Clayton remained in Bristol’s good graces.

Bristol was a student of the new field of public relations. He controlled the press by staying on message and using his authority to provide transportation to news hotspots and allowing reporters to use the naval radio system for transmitting stories at no charge. He agreed to let them board the
Litchfield
but, as he noted in his diary, he made it clear that he wanted them to “uphold my interests.” By the summer of 1922, Bristol’s interests were widely known to anyone who had come in contact with him. They were the primacy of American commerce in shaping an American policy toward the Ottoman Empire and rehabilitation of the image of the Turks as brutal oppressors of Christian minorities. The two reporters, having more than once been on the receiving end of Bristol’s tirades, got the point and agreed to the conditions of travel.

The
Litchfield
departed Constantinople at 7
P
.
M
., Tuesday, September 5. Like all American destroyers of the day, it was a small warship, 314 feet long and 31 feet wide, giving it a narrow profile, easily distinguishable by its array of four aft-leaning smokestacks. It was armed with four fifty-caliber guns, a smaller antiaricraft gun, torpedoes, and depth charges. It had been built to find and destroy submarines. The ship carried eight officers and a crew of about 115 men. It could travel as fast as 35 knots (40 mph) under full steam, but a typical cruising speed would be about 14 knots (16 mph). The
Litchfield
was ordered to steam at the slower “economical” speed; Bristol was in no hurry to get the destroyer to Smyrna.