Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (26 page)

Churchill agreed wholeheartedly and could not imagine how Lloyd George could continue to back Constantine. ‘Here was a potentate who, as we saw it, against the wishes and the interests of his people, had for personal and family reasons thrown his country, or tried to throw it, on the enemy side, which had also turned out to be the losing side.’

Churchill added that ‘the return of Constantine therefore dissolved all Allied loyalties to Greece . . . just at the moment when her needs were greatest and her commitments were becoming most embarrassing to herself and to others, she had of her own free will sponged the slate.’

News of King Constantine’s return might have been expected to unsettle the Levantines of Smyrna. Although they had mistrusted Venizelos, they could at least be sure that he had the full backing of the British government. Yet they received the news from Athens with their customary insouciance, seeing no reason to fear any change of policy towards Greek-administered Smyrna.

As 1920 drew to a close, the Giraud family decided to throw a New Year’s ball that was to be more colourful and extravagant than any Bournabat had witnessed for many a year. It was to be held in the mansion of Charlton Giraud, proprietor of the mighty Giraud trading empire, which stood in the heart of Bournabat.

To ten-year-old Eldon Giraud, Charlton’s son, the preparations left him spellbound. A veritable army of workmen were busily transforming the family’s botanical garden into a fairytale landscape of marquees and magic lanterns. Ponds, lakes and flower-beds had all been enclosed in tents of silk. It looked like the setting for a medieval jousting tournament.

Inside the house, the human activity was even more intense. For three weeks or more, dozens of chefs, butlers and liveried footmen had been hard at work. In the kitchens, the famous Greek pastry chef, Madame Dimitroula, was putting the finishing touches to her celebrated game pies. In the pantry, a team of waiters were mixing gin slings in preparation for the evening’s festivities. To young Eldon, it was clear that this was to be a party that would be remembered for many years to come.

All the Levantine dynasties received invitations and Charlton also invited every British, French and other Allied officer who was stationed in Smyrna. General Hanbury was included on the guest list, along with the senior Greek officials serving in the administration that governed the city. The only person not in attendance was Stergiadis; he did not have time for such frivolity.

As the long-case clock struck six, Eldon was summoned to his room by the family governess in order to get changed into his fancy-dress costume. ‘I wore a blue blouse, red trousers and a white sash,’ he later recalled, ‘and was presumably supposed to represent the French flag.’ His sister, Joyce, ten years older than Eldon, was dressed as a seductive Columbine.

Elsewhere in the city, the great and the good were dusting down Victorian frock coats and polishing swordsticks. Wives and mistresses were looking forward to wearing ball gowns that had not seen the light of day since before the First World War.

As the first of the cocktails were poured – and the orchestra struck up a polka – the young bachelors began flirting with the unattached women. Eldon Giraud watched in amusement as Olivia Rees was chased by Major Johnston (she later married him) and Helen Xenopoulo was courted by Monsieur Destribat (his declaration of undying love was not reciprocated). Eldon’s sister, Joyce, was meanwhile being tailed by Major Philgate, one of the British officers in Smyrna, who proposed marriage to her (an offer she accepted but later declined). And all the while, two Greek male diplomats, Messrs Kamara and Romano, were casting loving glances at each other. ‘They went everywhere together,’ wrote Eldon, ‘[and] I think they were pansies.’

As the evening wore on, the tempo increased and the dancing grew more extravagant. When the clock struck midnight, the assembled guests toasted Joyce Giraud, who was going to be twenty-one in the New Year. They then toasted the New Year itself and saluted the fact that their charmed lives were seemingly unassailable. Neither war nor civil strife was able to touch them.

No one present paused to consider the reality of what was taking place in eastern Anatolia. No one foresaw that menacing forces threatened to destroy their fragile world. As they danced through the night in Charlton Giraud’s candlelit villa, no one realised that this was the ball to end all balls; that Smyrna would never see its like again.

‘It was a brilliant affair,’ wrote Eldon Giraud towards the end of his life. ‘And even to this day, it is still talked of by the older generation.’

In the months that followed the return of King Constantine, there was intense diplomatic activity as the Allied powers wrestled with the thorny issue of how to bring peace to Turkey. It was a well-nigh impossible challenge. The Turkish nationalists had no intention of allowing a single Greek soldier to remain in Turkey, while the Greeks refused to contemplate the abandonment of Smyrna and its hinterland.

At the London Conference in February 1921, British, French, Greeks and nationalists attempted to thrash out some sort of compromise, but the talks were fatally undermined by Lloyd George, president of the conference. He continued to back Greece, even though King Constantine was now at the helm. Indeed, his attitude towards the Greek delegation was so favourable that they were left with the impression that he wanted them to make further inroads into Anatolia.

Lloyd George’s relations with the Turkish nationalists, never good, swiftly deteriorated during their time in London. He harboured an intense dislike for Bekir Sami Bey, the leading representative of Mustafa Kemal. In an aside to King George V, Lloyd George said; ‘A little while ago I had to shake hands with Sami Bey, a ruffian who was missing for the whole of one day, and finally traced to a sodomy house in the East End.’

Lloyd George added for the king’s edification that Bekir Sami ‘was the representative of Mustafa Kemal, a man who I understand has grown tired of affairs with women and has lately taken up unnatural sexual intercourse’.

Lloyd George soon lost interest in attempting to broker any compromise at the London Conference. At a private meeting with the Greek delegation, he effectively gave them the green light for a new military offensive. His only fear was that the Greek forces might be beaten by the Turks. ‘If the Greek army sustained a reverse,’ he told them, ‘it would make the Angora Government impossible to deal with.’

A reverse was the very thing the Greeks were determined to avoid. Having purged the army of Venizelos-backed commanders, they prepared themselves for action. Just five days after their meeting with Lloyd George, Greek forces prepared to push even deeper into Anatolia and deliver what it hoped would be a knockout blow to Mustafa Kemal’s troops.

The Greek generals in charge of the operation might have been wise to consider more carefully the ultimate goal of their military adventure. They were faced with two alternatives, each of which had as many drawbacks as advantages.

Their first option was to establish an impregnable frontier between themselves and the Turks – a mined and fortified, barbed-wire border that would safeguard the Megali Idea from Kemal’s ramshackle but increasingly effective army. Although costly in financial terms, this would bring safety and security to the Greek-administered zone.

The second option was to penetrate far inland in order to hunt down and annihilate the nationalist forces. Whilst having the advantage of taking the fight to the enemy, this also brought the corresponding risk of their over-extended supply lines being ambushed.

The Greek General Staff’s preferred option had long been the first – a secure frontier – but each time they seemed to have achieved it, they found themselves confronting newly emboldened Turkish forces that kept up relentless attacks on their forward positions.

The problem was compounded by the topography of Anatolia. The Greek army had occupied much of the flat pastureland that stretched inland from Smyrna. They had ‘liberated’ village after village before coming to a halt at the foot of the escarpment that swept dramatically upwards to the great Anatolian plateau. This lowland position afforded them a most unsatisfactory frontier. Their border guards were continually harassed by Turkish irregulars, and communications with Smyrna were threatened by bands of guerrillas. The only possibility of preventing such attacks was to neutralise the Turkish forces dug in on the top of the escarpment and then create a new frontier on the plateau itself. But it did not take a military genius to realise that the only practicable line for such a frontier lay a further 150 miles to the east – on the edge of the desert-like land in the heart of Anatolia.

A frontier so far from Smyrna was sure to bring many more problems. ‘It vastly increases the area which the invader has to occupy,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘lengthens his communications, leaves mountains hospitable to guerrillas in his rear, brings him up on to the inclement plateau, and yet does not present him with a physically strong frontier which he can hold without effort.’

The Greek General Staff plumped for the worst of all options. They decided to scale the escarpment, capture the Turkish positions and then create a new frontier right there, on the edge of the plateau.

It was a high-risk enterprise. The two armies were almost evenly matched, with some 35,000 men apiece, but the Greeks were far better equipped, with machine-guns, motor transport and air cover. As a result, the Greek generals remained optimistic about capturing the commanding heights above them.

Arnold Toynbee, reporting on the offensive for the
Manchester Guardian
, wrote a series of vivid eyewitness despatches from the battlefield. He arrived at Greek battle headquarters at the end of March 1921, just in time to join the troops as they prepared for battle. The Greek strategy was to scale the escarpment in two separate advances. A northern group was to drive up and over the broken ridges towards the town of Eski Shehir; the southern group, meanwhile, was to assault the town of Afyon Karahisar.

Toynbee joined the northern offensive, hitching a lift in a motor ambulance over the rough tracks that led up to the escarpment. ‘As we climbed painfully up the heights,’ he wrote, ‘. . . I began to realise on how narrow a margin the Greeks had gambled for a military decision in Anatolia.’

The craggy landscape was littered with weapons’ dumps and artillery stockpiles that would supply the 7th Division when it led the Greek right flank into battle.

Greek military headquarters soon received good news from the southern group. After encountering stiff resistance from Kemal’s forces, they managed to overrun the Turkish defences and were steadily fighting their way into the town of Afyon Karahisar. The northern group faced a much tougher challenge. They were no longer fighting bands of poorly disciplined irregulars. The great escarpment was defended by forces belonging to the new nationalist army, under the capable command of Colonel Ismet. He had thrown all his energies into planning the defence of the escarpment, aware of its strategic importance.

‘A good deal of the ammunition and the arms were brought from Erzerum, Diarbekir and Sivas,’ wrote Colonel Arif, who was organising the defence of the high ground, ‘on camels and in ox-carts under the worst possible weather conditions, across roadless deserts and over mountains.’ The Turks were caught in a race against time to bring weaponry and ammunition to the front line. Much of it had been smuggled out of Constantinople and taken to the east. Now, it was hauled back overland to the battlefront. ‘Workshops were improvised so that every single weapon might be examined and repaired,’ wrote Colonel Arif. ‘Men walked on foot from the East under the same hard conditions. Women undertook the hardest part of the transport – when ox-carts were broken or stuck in the mire, they carried the heavy loads on their backs.’

The Greek 7th Division made slow progress up the escarpment. Toynbee, at the rear, picked up only rumours of the murderous hand-to-hand fighting that was taking place on the hills above. ‘As we approached the southern end of the defile,’ he wrote, ‘the guns began to be heard. That afternoon, it was too late to visit the front line and I sat there discerning nothing but the extreme tension in the air.’

As darkness fell, an eerie silence descended over the landscape, broken by the occasional low boom of heavy artillery. ‘A column of smoke began to rise sluggishly from behind the hill to our left rear . . . As it grew dusk, this smoke caught the reflection of the unseen fire below, and stretchers came down slowly from over the hill to our left front, where the artillery observers were standing on the sky-line. Then, as the light vanished, it grew suddenly very cold.’

On 29 March, after an intense battle that was fought largely in hand-to-hand combat with knives and bayonets, the Greek 7th Division began to sense that the Turkish resistance was in trouble. The men in the vanguard clawed up the slopes of the upper escarpment with renewed confidence, fighting for every inch of land. After many hours of combat, they at long last caught a glimpse of the top. They were within sight of their goal.

The battle for the ridge was murderous and fraught with danger. ‘All along the northern rim of the crest, there was a tilted outcrop of limestone scrag,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘turning the slope for a few yards into a precipice and here, where the nullahs met the scrag, lay most of the Greek dead.’

After one final push, the Greeks found themselves in possession of the heights of Kovalitsa. They had fought without a break for almost two days and now controlled the highest area of the escarpment. Toynbee hung back while the last few pockets of Turkish resistance was snuffed out. Then, when the all-clear sign was flashed down the slopes, he made his way up through the splintered forest of mangy scrub oak until he reached the highest area of land.