Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (17 page)

Brigands also attacked the small watermill that lay just a stone’s throw from his house and seized two of the men who worked there. ‘[They] trussed them like fowls, carried them outside, hacked them to pieces and threw them in the mill race.’

Emboldened by their success, the brigands lit upon a more enticing target: prosperous Bournabat. They did not dare approach any of the great houses, preferring instead their old practice of seizing hostages who could then be ransomed. Their first target was Alp Arslan – Rahmi Bey’s young son – who was being cared for in Bournabat while his father sought employment with the new government.

Alp was returning home from Miss Florence’s school with two friends, Eldon Giraud and Stefa Caligah, when the boys noticed a strange-looking carriage parked outside the cemetery. Eldon hung back, for he was suspicious, but the other two continued walking.

‘As Alp and Stefa reached the carriage, I heard a shout and looked round. I saw two men grab Alp, push him into the carriage and drive off at a furious pace up towards the Magnesia road,’ wrote Eldon.

The men were indeed brigands – and they were led by the feared bandit, Çerkez Ethem. They took Arslan to the remote slopes of the Nymph Dagh and then sent a message back to Bournabat, demanding a large ransom.

Many years later, Alp Arslan gave an interview to a Turkish newspaper about his abduction. He could still recall the terror of being seized and remembered sobbing uncontrollably when he heard the voices of search parties combing the wild mountainside. The bandits warned him to keep quiet, informing him that they had slit the throat of their previous victim.

Alp remained in captivity for twenty-three days. The bandits were demanding an exorbitant sum – 53,000 gold coins – and it took time to raise the money. However, the Whittalls and the Girauds were eventually successful in buying back Arslan’s freedom. When he returned, he was carrying the dagger and jewel-encrusted girdle of Çerkez Ethem – gifts of the bandit. They remain in the family’s possession to this day.

There were many who criticised the tactic of paying off the bandits, but James La Fontaine, a neighbour of the Whittalls, explained why the Levantine community of Bournabat had been prepared to dig deep into their pockets. He said that everyone owed a debt of gratitude to Rahmi Bey, ‘whose extraordinary generous and considerate treatment of enemy subjects will ever be remembered by those who lived, during the war, in Smyrna’.

Many of Smyrna’s inhabitants were appalled by the return of brigandage and shocked by the dramatic deterioration in relations between the different communities. Everyone had appreciated that the months that followed the armistice would be difficult. But now, for the first time in years, the city’s spirit seemed to have been broken.

At this critical moment in her history, Smyrna was adrift. All eyes turned to Constantinople in the vain hope that Turkey’s capital might have an answer to their woes.

The view from the imperial Palace of the Star was always at its most spectacular in the few minutes before dusk, when the minarets of Stamboul were sharpened by the evening sun and the water was veiled in autumn mist. When palace retainers gazed out of the windows on the evening of 12 November 1918, however, the sight chilled them. A huge squadron of vessels could be seen approaching the city. No fewer than thirty-two Allied ships were sailing up the Bosphorus – a combined fleet of British, French and Italian vessels.

Sultan Mehmet VI Vadhattin, only recently installed on the throne, was immediately told of the extraordinary events taking place just below the palace. He was so distraught that he could not bring himself to be a witness. ‘I can’t look out of the window,’ he said. ‘I hate to see them.’

There was a tense atmosphere on most of the Allied ships, because of the great uncertainty as to how they would be received by the Turks. Nevertheless, on the single Greek vessel, an armoured carrier, a riotous party was under way. ‘The Greeks are very jubilant at going as conquerors to Constantinople,’ wrote an English captain sailing with the fleet. ‘I expect the Turk will turn round and scupper some of them if they don’t keep quiet.’

But the Turk was not given the chance. On the following morning, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson landed in Constantinople, accompanied by 3,000 soldiers of the Middlesex battalion. They marched up the steep hill into Pera – the European quarter of the city – and set up a military headquarters in the English Girls’ School. When the Ottoman government protested, claiming that occupation was not part of the armistice terms, Wilson curtly informed them that the soldiers were merely members of his staff.

He was being disingenuous, for the city very soon fell under Allied control. Although the sultan remained on his throne, his puppet government was powerless to act. Real power lay with the three Allied High Commissioners – British, French and Italian – who dictated their terms to the subservient grand vizier.

As Christmas 1918 approached, the Allied powers found that they held in their hands the fate of Constantinople, Smyrna – and even Turkey itself. The vanquished Ottoman army had disintegrated and the country was fast imploding. When a young army officer named Harold Armstrong arrived in Constantinople, he was shocked by the demoralised state of the people. ‘I found the Ottoman Empire utterly smashed, her vast territories stripped into pieces and her conquered populations blinded and bewildered.’ He noted that the Turkish people accepted their defeat with weary resignation: ‘any terms of peace could have been imposed without resistance.’

The Allies should have acted immediately, dictating their terms and forestalling trouble. But instead of taking decisions, the victorious governments vacillated and played for time.

The large numbers of Greeks in Turkey were convinced that their hour had come. Those in Smyrna had already manifested their joy at the Allied victory. Now, their compatriots in Constantinople followed suit. Blue-and-white Greek flags were strung from churches and a gigantic portrait of Venizelos was erected in Taksim Square. The Greek community’s greatest moment of triumph came in February 1919 when the French war hero, Marshal Franchet d’Espérey, landed on the quay at Galata. He assumed the role of Christian conqueror, riding to the French embassy on a white horse – the gift of a Greek – in mocking imitation of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror’s entry into the city in 1453.

The heady optimism of the Greeks was not without reason. There was a growing feeling among British ministers that Turkey should lose control of both Constantinople and Smyrna – a policy that struck a chord with the British electorate. There had been widespread revulsion at the treatment of British prisoners of war at the hands of the Turks. When the government published its report into their sufferings, the British press allowed itself free rein to attack all things Turkish.

The Times
was outspoken in its criticism; the
Morning Post
was well-nigh hysterical: ‘All the crimes committed by Nero, Caligula, Attila and Abdul Hamid, sink into insignificance beside the millions wantonly murdered in Turkey during the last few years.’ It concluded that the offences of the Turks ‘could not have been worse unless actual devils had had the work in hand’.

It was one thing for newspapers to express such sentiments; quite another when they came from the mouths of British ministers, yet many in the government agreed with the leader-writers of Fleet Street. Lord Curzon, the foreign secretary, wrote a document entitled ‘The Future of Constantinople’, into which he poured his loathing of all things Turkish. ‘For more than five centuries, the presence of the Turk in Europe has been a source of distraction, intrigue and corruption . . . of oppression and misrule . . . It has been an equal obstacle to the proper or good government of his own people, whose resources have been squandered in the polluted
coulisses
of Constantinople.’

Curzon believed that the defeat of Turkey presented the Allied powers with a unique opportunity to punish the Turks with the utmost severity. ‘Let not this occasion . . . be missed of purging the earth of one of its most pestilent roots of evil.’ He wanted the Turks out of Constantinople.

But if Turkey was not to govern its own capital, it raised the question of who would. Nor was it clear who was going to govern all the rest of Turkey’s majority-Christian areas. Lord Curzon was adamantly against awarding Constantinople to Greece, arguing that her army would be incapable of brokering a peace. France was the next to be rejected, on the grounds that she was Britain’s principal rival. So, indeed, was America. And Britain herself was already overburdened with global responsibilities. Curzon felt that only an International Commission could be trusted to rule a city that was home to so many rival and competing nationalities. It was a solution that would have suited Smyrna, whose non-Turkish population was proportionately far larger than that of Constantinople.

Curzon intended his commission to be overtly biased towards Christianity. He wanted to expel the sultan-caliph from Constantinople and reconsecrate the great Byzantine basilica of St Sophia, converted into a mosque in 1453. This proposal found support among his senior colleagues. Many viewed such a move as Britain’s moral obligation, incumbent upon her status as a Christian world power.

‘The Empire,’ wrote Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, ‘has been given to us as a means to that great end for which Christ came into the world, the redemption of the human race. That is to say, it has been given to us to make it Christian.’

British ministers seemed clear as to their goal but unsure as to how it should be implemented. Their indecisiveness was to prove disastrous in a country that was in desperate need of direction. The brigandage already taking place around Smyrna rapidly spread across the country with the result that great tracts of land were completely out of control, ruled by bandits and local warlords. In the absence of any intervention on the part of the Allies, the hitherto impotent Turkish government finally decided to act. It proposed sending a senior military figure to central Anatolia in order to quell the unrest. One candidate was favoured above all others: Mustafa Kemal – later to be known as Ataturk – who had come through the First World War with an unblemished record.

Kemal had fought with stubborn determination against Anzac forces in Gallipoli and worked hard to halt the British advance in the Middle East. At the war’s end, he had travelled to Constantinople – an out-of-work commander who was humiliated by the Allied occupation of Turkey’s capital. On one occasion, jovial British officers in the Pera Palace Hotel asked the waiter to invite him over for a drink. Kemal replied sniffily: ‘We are the hosts here. They are the guests. It is fitting for them to come to my table.’

A few days later, he asked the
Daily Mail
’s correspondent, George Ward Price, to take coffee with him in the same hotel. Ward Price found Kemal sober in both his manners and dress. ‘He was wearing a civilian frock-coat and fez,’ he wrote. ‘A handsome and virile figure, restrained in his gestures [and] with a low, deliberate voice’.

Kemal was sanguine about Turkey’s defeat. ‘We took the wrong side in this war,’ he told Ward Price. ‘We should never have quarrelled with our old friends, the British. That we did so was a result of the pressure exercised by pro-Germans like Enver Pasha. Well, we have lost and we must now be prepared to pay heavily for our misguided policy.’

He expected the Allied powers to divide Turkey between them and hoped that the British, not the French, would hold the lion’s share. ‘If the British are going to assume responsibility for Anatolia,’ he continued, ‘they will need the cooperation of experienced Turkish governors to work under them. What I want to know,’ he concluded, ‘is the proper quarter to which I can offer my services in the capacity.’

Ward Price duly passed on his offer to British intelligence but it was treated with scorn. ‘There will be a lot of these Turkish generals looking for jobs before long,’ was their answer. They would live to regret their rejection of Kemal’s advances.

Kemal soon found offers coming from other quarters. An underground resistance movement called Karakol had been founded in Constantinople with the aim of smuggling arms and officers to the Anatolian heartlands. Allied forces had yet to reach the easternmost parts of the country and Karakol’s leaders urged Kemal to head to the countryside where he would provide a rallying cry for the fledgling resistance. Kemal vacillated for months in the hope of being appointed Minister of War. He was granted three audiences with the sultan in the months that followed the arrival of the British forces, but was given no assurances of a post in the government. Demoralised by their attitude, he renewed contact with nationalist officers who were trying to stop the demobilisation of the Turkish army in Anatolia.

It was not until April – by which time Kemal had abandoned all hope of serving in the government – that he was finally given the post of inspector-general of Turkish forces in northern Anatolia, with special responsibility for bringing order to the region. Kemal immediately accepted, aware that he was presented with a unique opportunity to save Turkey from humiliation. Just before leaving Constantinople, he was summoned to an audience at the imperial palace. It was at this meeting that the sultan uttered his famously ambiguous words: ‘My pasha, my pasha, you may be able to save the nation.’ That is precisely what Kemal intended to do, but in a very different fashion from that envisaged by the sultan.

His campaign was to be given an unexpected kick-start by the Allied peacemakers who were assembled in Paris. The fate of Smyrna was the subject of heated discussions – and those entrusted with safeguarding the city’s future were about to take a decision that would plunge Turkey into another war.

When talks began in the French capital in the early days of 1919, scores of nations, would-be nations and pressure groups sent delegations to the world’s largest peace conference. Jostling for position alongside presidents and prime ministers were brigands, princesses, deposed kings and Albanian warlords, all hoping to gain something from the spoils of war.