Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (14 page)

The wives left behind in Bournabat hoped that the internment of their husbands and sons would force the British government into reconsidering its strategy towards Smyrna. But the Admiralty in London displayed a remarkably cavalier attitude towards their own nationals, despatching planes on a third bombing raid in mid-June. This proved even less successful than the previous two. The pilots managed to hit the American Girls’ School and the Scottish Mission Hospital, severely wounding four French children.

When news of this third raid reached Clifford Heathcote-Smith, now serving as an intelligence officer in Athens, he wrote a highly charged letter to ministers, urging them to treat Smyrna as a case apart from the rest of Turkey. ‘The all-powerful Governor-General, Rahmi Bey, has persistently adopted an attitude of benevolence towards British subjects,’ he wrote, ‘often against the wishes and instructions of other Turkish and German authorities.’ He reminded Whitehall that the city’s population ‘is composed, in its large majority, of our friends – Entente subjects, neutrals, Greeks and Armenians’.

Heathcote-Smith’s letter struck a chord with the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. He had never been comfortable with the idea of bombing Smyrna and now called an immediate halt to the raids. The city was to be spared any future attack from the air. It was the best possible news for the Levantine families. The interned men were quietly released by Rahmi Bey and allowed to return to their homes in Bournabat, Cordelio and the other suburbs.

The bombing raids served as a reminder to Smyrna’s inhabitants that they were living in a country at war. For a brief moment, their lives had been in real danger, but no sooner had the attacks been brought to a halt than the war once again receded into the distance. The only reminder of the conflict was the occasional dogfight that took place in the skies above the city.

One of these exhilarating battles was witnessed by Horton and two of his colleagues. They were chatting on the terrace of the consulate when they noticed two British aircraft swooping in from the sea. These were being chased by a third aircraft – a German one – approaching from the east.

It rose to a great height over Mount Pagus, hovered momentarily in the still spring air, then swooped down and opened fire on the two British planes. One was raked with shot, cutting the fuel supply to its engines. ‘[It] sank slowly and obliquely to earth,’ wrote Horton, ‘exactly like a wounded duck.’ The German craft trailed its victim for a moment in order to survey the damage, then made a steep ascent and banked into the clouds. Horton later learned that the two English pilots managed to crash-land their plane in a vineyard, suffering only bruises and a broken ankle.

As the second British plane circled the city, the German fighter gave hot pursuit. Horton and his companions watched a life-and-death air battle played out before their eyes. ‘The rapid fire of the machine guns, though very distinct, did not have a vicious sound,’ he wrote. ‘Tat! Tat! Tat! Tat! – such a noise as a boy might make by beating on a table with the flat side of a ruler.’

The two planes fought and feinted for what seemed like an eternity, dodging gunfire with deft manoeuvres in the air. To observers on the ground, the battle was curiously graceful – a display of lethal acrobatics that was watched with reverence and respect. Yet this was a fight to the death and the outcome was dependent on the skill of the respective airmen. After more fencing in the clear blue sky, the German pilot locked onto his adversary and peppered the craft with bullets. In seconds, the fight was over. The British plane flipped onto its belly, then went into a long nosedive.

The pilots managed to prise themselves from the cockpit, but they must have known that they were doomed. ‘First fell the hapless bodies of the Englishmen like inanimate bundles,’ reads one eyewitness account. ‘Then came the slowly descending wings.’ To Horton, it looked ‘for all the world like a huge dragon-fly, falling, falling. On account of the great height and the distance from us, it appeared to be coming down slowly, which of course, was an illusion.’

When the plane finally hit the ground, it exploded into a fireball. The aircraft was ‘smashed to a pulp and charred to cinders’. Nevertheless, the corpses of the airmen were recovered and put on display. ‘The Turkish soldiers stripped the mangled corpses and sold the clothes as souvenirs . . . the bodies were exhibited to the crowd, a piaster being charged for the sight, and photographs were taken and sold.’

The German military authorities, however, were appalled by the behaviour of the Turks. ‘They destroyed the plates and photographs and ordered a military funeral.’ This was held on the day that followed the dogfight. The procession to the British church passed through the heart of the city and thousands of people lined the streets. The English pastor, Reverend Brett, gave the funeral address, ‘and a sadder and more impressive one I have never heard’, wrote Horton. As the men’s scorched remains were interred, the German pilot, Buddecke, circled about the skies dropping flowers on the men’s final resting place. It was a curiously civilised gesture in a time of dirty war.

The British were able to continue their dogfights over Smyrna for as long as they controlled the little airstrip on Long Island. Their continued presence infuriated Liman von Sanders, who vowed to recapture the island and rid the bay of Smyrna of British soldiers.

On the night of 4 June, he landed a sizeable Turkish force on the southern tip of Long Island. They were heavily armed and expected to have to fight for every inch of land, but as they crept gingerly up the beaches, they were met by absolute silence. The only signs of life came from nesting seabirds and a few goats.

Although the Turks feared some sort of trap, they soon found that they had the island to themselves. The British had left some days before, abandoning equipment and empty drums of kerosene. The failure of the Gallipoli offensive had ended all talk of any future military action on Turkish soil. The continued occupation of Long Island was no longer considered necessary.

The Turkish flag was soon flying over the island and news of the ‘victory’ was flashed back to Smyrna. The official celebrations that followed provided Horton with an opportunity to meet Liman von Sanders – ‘my first contact’, he was later to write, ‘with German military pomposity’. The general had become a laughing stock among the Levantine community; his visit to Smyrna was preceded by tales of his behaviour at a formal dinner in Constantinople, at which he had fretted and fumed over his seating position at the high table.

Now, at a glittering party hosted by the Austrian consul, von Sanders refused to be introduced to anyone. ‘His Excellency wished only to refresh himself from his labor by talking with young girls,’ noted Horton with malicious relish. ‘There was a pert young Levantine miss with whom he fell hopelessly in love and he took rooms on a narrow street directly opposite her house. Here he installed himself at a window and gazed across the way hour after hour.’

It was to no avail, as their relationship remained a platonic one. The girl had no desire to get entangled with a man old enough to be her father.

The German capture of Long Island was greeted with weary resignation by many in the city. All now knew that any hope of deliverance by British forces was at an end. ‘People used to walk the quay and scan the horizon for the delivering vessels,’ wrote Horton. But most knew that the Allies were far too preoccupied with the western front – and the aftermath of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign – to contemplate landing in the bay of Smyrna.

For the Allies, the war was indeed going from bad to worse. By the summer of 1916, senior generals were unclear about how to break the stalemate. The British government had introduced conscription in May, aware that a conflict of attrition could only be won by harnessing all the human lives they could find. Now, Allied military tacticians began planning a mighty thrust eastwards against German forces close to the River Somme.

‘The wire has never been so well cut,’ wrote General Haig on the eve of battle, ‘nor artillery preparations so thorough.’ Yet when the men went over the top in July 1916, they found themselves attacking heavily fortified positions that had survived the artillery barrage. By the end of the day, 21,000 men were dead or missing.

The situation on the home front was no less grim. There were shortages of food and fuel, and inflation was starting to hurt the moneyed classes. The time was fast approaching when the government would have to introduce rationing for essential supplies.

In Constantinople, the conflict brought changes that were more subtle but nevertheless had far-reaching consequences. The exigencies of war allowed Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha to push forward and extend their programme of Turkification. The first stage of this had been to rid Turkish soil of its Armenian population. Now, the government passed laws insisting on the use of Turkish – rather than Ottoman Arabic – on all documents, even those in private offices.

Yet there remained one goal still to be accomplished. The country’s Aegean coastline continued to be home to large numbers of Greeks whose sympathies with the Allied cause were undiminished by the depressing news coming from the western front. At some point in early 1916, it was decided to deport to the interior the Christian communities living along this coast.

Whether or not this was done with Liman von Sanders’ approval is difficult to gauge; he later clamed to have been against the deportations. Yet they were certainly done with his knowledge and he raised no objections to the manner in which they were undertaken. ‘The old men, the women and the children were grouped into convoys and were driven into the interior under the lash of the Turkish soldiery,’ wrote the Frenchman, Félix Sartiaux, who compiled a report on the deportations at the end of the war. ‘No transport, no provisions were provided and these pitiable convoys were forced to struggle across the sun-scorched and wind-swept plateaus of Anatolia.’

Few coastline villages were spared the terrifying ordeal of eviction and deportation. The Gallipoli province, Brussa, Buyuk-Dere, Isnik, Kyzicos, Merefte: all were cleansed of their Greek populations by the Turkish military. ‘I can state from personal experience that the Greek communal buildings – churches, schools, hospitals, baths – were wantonly desecrated and defaced and mercilessly ransacked, even beams and window-frames being removed.’ So wrote Arnold Toynbee, who added that once the families had been evicted, ‘the private homes were thoroughly plundered and then occupied by Moslems.’

Eyewitness accounts of the deportations, later published by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, make for distressing reading. ‘The sight is ghastly,’ wrote one observer. ‘Large and small living skeletons roam through the town . . . More than 180 died on the way; the women dropped their new-born babies to keep up with their companions.’

Another saw a mother collapse and die on the steps of Baloukeser station. ‘Her little hungry children who thought that their mother was asleep, were trying to wake her up and crying and begging for bread.’

More than 200,000 Greeks were to endure the horrors of deportation. Yet Smyrna itself was once again spared. All who lived within the confines of the city – and that included the bourgeois suburbs – remained untouched by the government decrees emanating from Constantinople.

Some Levantine families flaunted these decrees quite flagrantly, hiding conscripted Greeks in the cellars of their houses. One Whittall girl remembered her parents hiding a Greek deserter who had been drafted into the Turkish army, an act of treachery that could easily have cost them their lives. ‘By day, our deserter remained hidden in the Turkish bath [while] the sofa in the cooling room was his bed at night.’ She added that he only ever emerged from his hiding place after dark, when he was given a meal. ‘He was very young, hardly more than a boy, and I remember my surprise when I first saw him, and being told not to say anything about his presence in the house.’

Ministers were deeply unhappy at the way in which Rahmi Bey’s Levantine friends behaved as if they believed themselves to be untouchable. As the battlefront news became increasingly bleak, the government sent Rahmi an order to deport to the interior all the city’s Levantines, including families like the Whittalls and the Girauds.

Rahmi Bey summoned George Horton to his office and explained his predicament. If he refused to obey the directive from Constantinople, he was told that he would be removed from office. But if he carried out the government order, then the Levantine deportees were unlikely to survive. He told Horton that he intended to play his ‘double game’ for as long as possible, undertaking a limited fulfilment of the government’s orders so that he would be seen to be doing something. ‘I will begin with the
vauriens
, the disreputables, and the poor devils who would be miserable anywhere,’ he told Horton, ‘and proceed slowly in the hopes that there may be a change before I reach the others.’

He asked Horton to send a telegram to Constantinople, protesting against the inhumanity of the measure. ‘Say “deportation begun”,’ he told him, ‘and that will throw sand in the eyes of the Germans.’

The deportations affected about one hundred people – a far cry from what Enver and Talaat had intended. Nor were any of the Levantines of Bournabat sent to the interior. But the military guards in charge of the operation were nevertheless rough and ruthless, evicting people from their houses in the early hours when they were least able to resist. ‘[They] were not even given time to put on their shoes,’ wrote Horton. ‘They were [then] locked in dirty prisons, without food, were beaten and were threatened that, if they did not raise large sums of money, they would be sent on foot to Sivas – a sentence equivalent to a lingering and painful death.’

As the winter of 1916 approached, Horton began to question how much longer he would be able to remain in Smyrna. America was still a neutral power but the geopolitical climate was changing fast. Relations between the United States and Germany had been fraught ever since the sinking of the
Lusitania
eighteen months earlier. Now, Germany informed Washington that she was commencing unrestricted submarine warfare on all vessels approaching the British Isles. It was also discovered that she had struck a secret alliance with Mexico, in which the two countries were to ‘make war together [and] make peace together’. Mexico’s reward for joining the war effort was to be large areas of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.