The Great Fire (6 page)

A center of cultivated leisure, Smyrna published dozens of newspapers—eleven in Greek, five in Armenian, seven in Turkish, five in Hebrew, and four in French. Book publishing houses prospered. The city had concert halls, seventeen movie theaters, playhouses, grand hotels, private clubs with extensive menus, yacht races, hunting estates, a racetrack, and the first golf course in the Near East. It also had 226 saloons, 24 distillers, and 465 coffeehouses, which often were small gambling parlors. There was nothing a Smyrniot liked more than a wager. It had
first-class steamship service to London and New York, a French department store, and a football league and stadium. It sent athletes to the early modern Olympics.

Divided by religion and ethnicity, Smyrna was a city of districts—there was the Armenian Quarter, the Greek Quarter, the Turkish Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, and the Frankish or European Quarter, though by the end of the nineteenth century the truly wealthy Levantines had moved to one of the city’s nearby towns, the richest of which was Bournabat, with homes on the scale of the Newport robber barons. The servant staffs of some of the Levantines could populate small villages. A good deal of the Levantine treasure had come as a consequence of the so-called capitulations, special privileges foreign governments had negotiated with the sultan to encourage trade. One of the privileges was exemption from taxes. One sultan, his treasury depleted, took out a loan from a Levantine family at Smyrna.

The people of Smyrna could listen to opera from Italy, waltzes from Vienna, intricately sung Asian-modal melodies in the seaside cabarets, or Anatolian folk tunes in the city’s hashish dens and brothels. Ever sensual, Smyrna loved its lemon sherbet and short dresses. Its penchant for frivolity outshone even its celebrated neighbors of the Levant. Compared to Smyrna, Athens was a dusty village, Beirut a backwater, and Salonika an aging slum. Even Alexandria—also founded by the insatiable Macedonian boy-king Alexander the Great—was a lesser flower of cosmopolitanism. Chateaubriand said Smyrna was another Paris; a Greek soldier, evoking the city’s ancient Greek past as he approached it from the sea, called it “the bride of Ionia, the city of a thousand songs.”

Smyrna had one more distinction—it was the first city in the Holy Land to receive American missionaries.

The first two missionaries assigned to the Near East departed Boston in 1819 to make New England Congregationalists of the region’s inhabitants—Jews, Moslems, and Orthodox Greeks. The two young men, Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, in whose hearts the missionary spirit of America burned bright, stopped first at Smyrna on their way to Jerusalem. They intended to reclaim Jerusalem for the Jews by converting them to Christianity, a necessary precondition (as they understood the
Bible) for the second coming of Christ and a reordering of the world according to God’s plan.

Their pilgrimage gripped America’s religious imagination. From its beginnings, America had seen itself as a New Jerusalem. (The wilderness of the New World had sprouted innumerable Canaans, Salems, Goshens, Jerichos, and Bethels. Maine even had a Land of Nod, Indiana a Nineveh, and New York a Babylon.) Pliny and Fisk sent letters home for publication, and they were read in small towns all over America. Every rock, spring, cave, and dry riverbed of the Holy Land held a fascination for Americans. A powerful bond was conjured between America and the Near East. The Pliny-and-Fisk journey shaped American attitudes toward the Near East for a century—and it played an important part in forming American foreign policy. No American president—not even the personification of isolationism, Warren G. Harding—could ignore it.

Pliny and Fisk were the vanguard, though in time the mission altered from conversion to service through schools, orphanages, and hospitals. Many men, and eventually many women, some of them single and traveling with other women, would follow, at great risk and personal sacrifice. Jennings was planted firmly in that tradition.

AS JENNINGS DREW CLOSER
to the city, his eyes swept along the Quay, from north to south, taking in the grand homes, hotels, and theaters down to the big Custom House Pier and its swarm of small boats and barges. There, he saw a long row of redbrick warehouses, trading depots, and banks and export offices. Behind these buildings, and slightly south, minarets appeared like white candles climbing a steep slope. They marked the city’s Turkish Quarter, a dense neighborhood of narrow half-pipe streets and alleys, a bazaar shaded from the sun by cloths stretched between poles and buildings, and stacked stucco homes with second-story bow windows.

Jennings and his family came ashore at the Passport Pier, about the midpoint on the long Quay.

The new arrivals found themselves pressed among Turkish porters, piles of shipping crates, and hundreds of other passengers, some, like
the Jennings family, just arriving, and others departing for Constantinople, Salonika, Alexandria, or Beirut. The Turkish stevedores—
hamals,
in Turkish—carried enormous loads on their backs, pianos or a dozen chairs. The waterfront was busy with men pushing, lifting, loading, or just loitering, and all about them there were animals—cats, donkeys, horses, and camels. The camels, seeming a little drunk in the loose-jointed swing of their legs, regularly came into the city, threaded nose to tail, led by a tiny donkey and loaded with cargo, from carpets to spices, from the high arid interior of Anatolia.

Greek soldiers stood guard at the pier and important buildings. Other soldiers were walking along the waterfront or sitting in chairs around tin-topped tables outside the numerous cafés. Despite the military presence, the atmosphere was casual, genial, and seemingly carefree. The city sparkled in Jennings’s eyes, and it seemed both secure and calm.

Ernest Otto Jacob, who was running the Smyrna YMCA, met Jennings at the pier. (The Smyrna Y’s nominal director was in Constantinople on vacation.) Jacob was thirty-six years old; he had a serious look and close-set eyes, and his receding hairline gave him a high smooth brow. His career was on a fast track at the Y, though recently one of its leaders had spotted in him a tendency toward being difficult to work with—maybe through a worrisome streak of narcissism. The YMCA had sent Jacob to Smyrna to inject energy into the three-year-old chapter and get it moving, and it was Jacob who had opposed Jennings’s appointment to Smyrna. Jacob was very much a YMCA type of the period—well educated, committed to reform through Christian values, modern in his outlook, and full of aspiration and vigor. There’s no record of the expression Jacob wore when the little man with the hunched back came ashore as the new boys’ work secretary. Jennings twisted his neck sideways to look up through his thick glasses at the much taller Jacob. He shook his hand and smiled.

The YMCA had arranged for Jennings and his family to stay at a home near the campus of International College, a preparatory school for boys in the nearby suburb of Paradise, a name chosen because of the town’s profusion of flowers. The family’s belongings, contained mostly in one big trunk, were loaded for the five-mile trip, which would take the
family along the Quay and then (with a right turn, heading east) through the Greek and Armenian neighborhoods of Smyrna before turning south through the dry hills, spiked with cypress trees, to the American enclave at Paradise. Looking around at his new surroundings, Jennings was eager to get his family settled and begin his work. Wilted in the heat but wide-eyed about the exotic scene around them, Jennings and his family rode off to Paradise.

O
n the morning of August 26, 1922, two hundred miles east of Smyrna, Mustapha Kemal, supreme commander of the Turkish nationalist army, put field glasses to his eyes and scanned the hills to the north and west of the stone bunker in which he was crouched.

He was at the summit of Kocatepe, a 6,100-foot peak overlooking the ancient Hittite town of Afyon Karahisar, the junction point of two major rail lines and the forward salient of the Greek army. The day’s first light was only beginning to seep from the eastern horizon, making visible the bare hills and valleys of Anatolia’s western plateau, which rolled like yellow-brown combers to the west. It remained mostly dark, but the field glasses gathered the scarce predawn light and Kemal could make out the slopes, rocks, and dug-in Greek positions. Everything was still except for the slow push and scratch of a tortoise somewhere on the mountain, the song of a bird at the approach of the day. The Greek soldiers were mostly asleep in their tents and redoubts, though a few were returning from a dance in Afyon, which was inside their line.

With Kemal were the pashas Fevzi, Ismet, and Noureddin, the core command of his army. Fevzi, the nationalist minister of defense, was the army’s steady keel: senior, conservative, broad chested with a thick mustache, and a devout Moslem. He recited the Koran to his soldiers on the battlefield. Ismet was chief of the general staff and closest to Kemal, a
boyish-looking tactician and latecomer to the nationalist cause, always worried but well prepared; and Noureddin, commander of the First Army, the bearded and bloody scourge of Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds.

In the half-light, spread below Kemal on the downward slopes to the right and left, was the Turkish First Army, coiled for an attack. Secretly, Kemal had left his headquarters in Ankara nine days earlier and, traveling at night, made his way to Kocatepe. Kemal was forty-one years old and already he had been given the exalted title “Ghazi,” Moslem warrior. He wore a miniature Koran around his neck even though he was not in the least religious. He thought religion was for old women, mere superstition. He had assembled his idiosyncratic worldview from the ideals of the French Revolution, the militarism of Prussia, the poetry of Turkey, and the cafés and brothels of Salonika.

Among the poets he had absorbed as a young man was Namik Kemal, the Ottoman patriot.

Kemal was small, wiry, and blue eyed with high cheekbones and a light complexion. Always attentive to his appearance, he wore knee-high black boots, jodhpurs, a khaki tunic, and the Turkish officer’s kalpak, a black lambswool hat. Robert S. Dunn, an American intelligence officer who had met him in Ankara in 1920, said Kemal first struck him as a “well-trained superior waiter.” In that meeting Kemal was dressed nattily in a slate-blue lounge suit, white pique shirt, and black bow tie, and his blond hair was combed straight back in the style of college men of the day. As Kemal spoke, Dunn’s impression changed. “The whole face was sensitive rather than cerebral, subtle and mercuric rather than domineering. I felt his power of concentration, ruthlessness with an instant grasp.” As a battlefield commander, Kemal dressed without adornment. His kalpak,
the rough hat of the martial Anatolian male, was a powerful symbol of his identification with the people. He won battles by fusing his will to the Islamic faith and endurance of his peasant soldiers.

Kemal had decided to concentrate his forces for an overwhelming assault at Afyon Karahisar, a strategy that would (if successful) separate the Greek army from the rail line back to its base in Smyrna, cut off its supplies, and impede its retreat. It was risky, and his generals had argued against it. If it failed, they had told Kemal, the army might be finished. Kemal trusted his intuition, which so far had been flawless. He was striking at the strongest point of the Greek line, counting on surprise and ferocity to prevail. The Greek line was terribly long, a three-hundred-mile spinnaker of tired but battle-tested troops that reached from the Sea of Marmara in the north to the port of Ephesus on the Aegean coast on the south.

Only weeks earlier, British officers had visited the Greek line and reported it to be strong and battle worthy. An intelligence report said (prophetically) that the Greeks were excellent offensive fighters “strong, active and enduring, and impetuous to close with the enemy. Their impetuosity, however, makes coordination with them difficult.”

The forces along the entire front were evenly matched: The Greeks had 225,000 men and an advantage in machine guns, field guns, and motorized transport. The Turks had 208,000 men and an advantage in cavalry and heavy artillery. The Greeks had the Evzones, elite mountain fighters dressed in the traditional uniform of woolen leggings, pleated kilts (400 pleats for each year of the Turkish occupation of Greece, beginning in the fifteenth century), baggy-sleeved shirts, and laceless decorated shoes. They were armed with bolt-action Mauser rifles and daggers.
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The Turkish army had a cavalry of skilled horsemen that attacked with long curved swords and sharpened lances, and foot soldiers armed with a bastard mix of German, French, Italian, and Russian rifles.

The Turks had the advantage in command; they had Kemal.

Kemal’s soldiers, faithful Moslems, revered him; some thought he could not be killed on the battlefield. He may have believed it himself. Nowhere had his courage, brilliance, and ruthlessness been more vividly demonstrated than at Gallipoli, where he had contributed to the devastating defeat of British forces early in World War I. Gallipoli had made his reputation. Seeking in that first year of the Great War to seize Constantinople and divert Turkish troops that were threatening their ally, Imperial Russia, the British had attempted to storm and hold the westward peninsula that flanked the Dardanelles. The fighting had lasted for nine months, an Allied disaster that had cost 120,000 lives. Winston Churchill, author of the campaign, had lost his job as first lord of the Admiralty over it.

At the start of battle in April 1915, Britain had landed troops at two Gallipoli beaches. Turkish forces, under the command of German general Limon Von Sanders, were dispersed on the fifty-mile-long mountainous peninsula in anticipation of an assault, though without a clear sense of where it would occur. Kemal had commanded a division that was being held in reserve so that it could be moved rapidly to reinforce the Turkish forces that would engage the British landing force. Kemal had learned the location of the British landing soon after it occurred and quickly, and on his own initiative, marched his troops to confront the enemy force. Moving through the rugged and thorny terrain toward the landing, Kemal, traveling ahead with a small advance party for speed, encountered a regiment of Turkish soldiers in flight from the British. “What are you doing?” he asked. They were out of ammunition, they said, and they were retreating from the advancing British. Kemal ordered them to drop to the ground and remain in place. He told them they could fight with bayonets. “I don’t order you to attack. I order you to die. In the time it takes us to die, other troops and commanders can come and take our places.” Seeing the halt of the Turkish retreat over the rocks and low bushes of the hillside, the British force—soldiers from
Australia and New Zealand—also stopped and inexplicably lay down. The pause gave Kemal time to bring up the rest of his division. In the end, very few of the Turkish regiment had survived, but Kemal’s orders halting the fleeing regiment had saved Gallipoli for the Turks.

Now seven years later in the interior of Anatolia, Kemal had given the order to prepare for an early-morning attack. This time, it was his army that would make the uphill assault. Turkish soldiers sharpened their bayonets, filled their cartridge belts, and prayed to Allah. Kemal had ordered the infantry of the Turkish First Army to slip quietly in the darkness to within a few hundred yards of the Greek line.

Over the preceding weeks, Kemal had covertly brought forces down from the north, to this point, moving them at night and hiding them under trees to avoid exposing them to Greek air surveillance. At this moment, in the region around Afyon Karahisar, the Greeks were unaware that they were outnumbered three to one. Based on private British intelligence, the Greeks had expected an attack in the north, near Eskishehir, where Kemal had ordered numerous campfires lit each night to create the illusion of a concentration of Turkish troops.

The Turkish attack was going to be a bone-breaking and bloody charge. The Greeks were dug into the mountaintops to the north and west, giving them command of the steep slopes, valley, and town below. Kemal’s plan called for Turkish infantry to fight uphill toward the Greek machine guns and rifles, then overwhelm the Greek trenches, where the fighting would require bayonets, daggers, and bare hands.

Kemal had been preparing for this moment for three years. Almost single-handedly he had built a nationalist movement, begun a revolution, created an army, opposed the sultan, rebuffed the victorious Allies who had attempted to impose a treaty on Turkey, and engaged the Greek army in a series of brutal battles that despite many Greek victories had ended in stalemate. Exactly a year earlier, the Greek army had crossed the Sakaria River and come within sixteen miles of Ankara, the nationalist capital, and a Turkish defeat seemed imminent. The Sakaria battle had raged along a line sixty miles long and twelve miles deep for twenty-one days, one of the longest continuous battles in history. The deep-seated hatreds of the two armies had brought a terrible fury to the battlefield.

On both sides, the urge to war was fanned by nostalgia for old empires, Byzantine and Ottoman, and for what each side thought was rightfully its own.

“Greeks and Turks alike fought with reckless courage, threw themselves into the storms of lead in a white madness to get at each other with cold steel,” wrote a British agent in Turkey at the time. “A Greek regiment refused to take cover or use trenches: the divisional staff came up into the line with it, and both were wiped out by machine-gun fire. A Turkish battalion wavered: the brigade general ran forward over the open, pulled up the colonel, blew his brains out with his revolver, steadied the battalion, and was himself blown to pieces by Greek riflemen. One division lost three-quarters of its men, another was blotted right out. Seven divisional generals were killed in close fighting.”

The Battle at Sakaria had ended without a clear victor. Both sides celebrated their successes. For the year that followed, the contest had remained static as diplomacy favored the Turkish cause. In the eyes of the Allies, everything short of a complete victory was taken to be a Greek defeat; for the Turks, everything short of annihilation of their army was viewed a victory.

Kemal had put the quiet year that followed to good use: obtaining arms and supplies from Italy and Soviet Russia, playing the Allies against one another and drilling his army. In the meantime, the Greek soldiers, many of whom had been fighting in one war or another for ten years, had waited, suffering summer heat, winter cold, lack of food, political discord in the ranks, and abandonment by the British. The Greeks had one friend—Lloyd George, who encouraged them forward with speeches in Parliament but sent neither arms nor aid.

Just before dawn, the battle began with a furious artillery assault. The Turkish guns coughed enormous exploding shells and caught the Greek troops by surprise. The Turkish foot soldiers attacked. Kemal had ordered his generals to fight with their troops. Nothing was to be held back. The Greek machine guns rattled, and the Turkish bodies piled high, but the soldiers continued to swarm uphill, and by 9:30
A
.
M
. all but two of the mountains held by the Greeks had been taken. At one, Chigiltepe, on the Turkish left flank, a young Turkish officer in command,
shamed at his failure to achieve the summit, committed suicide. Kemal scorned the useless sacrifice. At the second point of stubborn Greek resistance, to the right, Kemal appeared among his troops, cursed and insulted their fighting spirit, and told them they were inadequate to their women. Roused to anger, the Turks charged up the hill to the stuttering guns of the dug-in Greeks. Wave upon wave of Turkish assaults overcame the Greek positions, and soon, the Turks stood atop both hills. In the meantime, the Turkish cavalry, charging with guns and sabers, had swung behind the Greek line, attacking it from the rear. Kemal won the day.

The Greek troops fell back to a broad high meadow between the mountains thirty miles to the west at a village called Dumlupinar. Here, it became clear to the Greeks that they had retreated into a trap formed by quickly moving Turkish troops. Elements of the First and Second Turkish armies closed the line of escape, a narrow pass that carried the single rail line westward to Smyrna. An attempt was made to retreat over the hills to the north, but without success. Half of the Greek army in the Afyon sector was killed or captured; the other half, those who had managed to exit the valley before the escape door had been shut or had avoided it altogether, retreated back toward Smyrna. Mostly leaderless, pursued by Turkish horsemen and harried by armed and vengeful Turkish civilians intent on killing Greek soldiers, the Greek troops left a scorched trail of burned villages on the way back to the sea. Meanwhile, the Greek army to the north of the main point of Turkish assault had maintained a semblance of command and coherence and was fighting its way back to the Sea of Marmara in the hope of reaching Mudania and Panderma, from which ports it could be evacuated back to Greece.

It was a complete and humiliating rout, and the Greek Southern Army’s retreat back to Smyrna was a chaotic rush to the sea. News of the Greek disaster would take days to reach Smyrna and Constantinople. Communication lines had been cut; the frontier closed. Kemal issued terse daily communiqués, and in the cities away from the battlefields, people were unsure who the victor was—or who it would turn out to be.