Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (30 page)

As autumn turned into winter, this looked increasingly unlikely. Churchill hit the nail on the head in his analysis of the Greek military campaign. ‘The Greeks had involved themselves in a politico-strategic situation where anything short of decisive victory was defeat,’ he wrote, ‘and the Turks were in a position where anything short of overwhelming defeat was victory.’

What neither side had contemplated was the scale of the Greek defeat, nor the consequences of the Turkish victory.

PART THREE

Paradise Lost

Wednesday, 6 September 1922

S
hortly after breakfast on Wednesday, 6 September, Hortense Wood – a venerable spinster who lived in the heart of Bournabat – was witness to a most alarming sight. From the window of her drawing room, she noticed a great column of soldiers shuffling through the village square. Intrigued by the spectacle, and curious to know where they were going, she made her way down the long drive towards the main gate of her property.

It did not take her long to realise that something catastrophic had happened to the Greek army in central Anatolia. ‘[I saw] endless streams of disbanded Greek soldiers,’ she wrote in a letter to her niece. ‘A miserable rabble, ragged, weary and wan; and with them were hundreds of refugees, both Greek and Turkish, plodding their way under a burning sun, through clouds of hot dust swirling in the air.’

Just a few moments earlier, Hortense had checked the thermometer hanging on the balcony outside her house. It was already thirty degrees in the shade and uncomfortably humid. She felt desperately sorry for these downtrodden and exhausted refugees.

‘It was a most pitiable sight,’ she wrote. ‘They looked like so many hopeless mendicants, not knowing whither they were going or what was to become of them: poor women dragging along small children – strangers with none to help or guide them. I can’t forget the sight of one of these women, sobbing as she went along, with three little children holding onto her torn skirts and looking frightened and bewildered at the scene around them.’

Hortense Wood was one of the first eyewitnesses to the fallout from the crushing defeat that had befallen the 200,000-strong Greek army in central Anatolia. For much of the previous year, these battle-hardened troops had clung to their perilous positions on the western bank of the River Sakaria. Desperately short of supplies – and subject to constant attacks by Kemal’s nationalists – they had nevertheless stood guard for almost twelve months over the eastern frontier of Greece’s empire in Turkey. Most knew that their situation was hopeless. Greece was almost bankrupt and the army’s guns and munitions were in an advanced state of decay. King Constantine had long since packed up his bags and headed back to Athens. In his place was a recently appointed chief of staff, General Hatzianestis, who was widely held to be mentally unhinged. There were days when he refused to get to his feet, believing them to be made of fragile glass. George Horton’s considered opinion was that he should be locked up ‘in a lunatic asylum’.

By August 1922, Greece’s only hope of an honourable exit from the crisis lay in the diplomatic negotiations taking place in London and Paris. Yet no resolution was forthcoming. The Turks wanted the Greeks off their soil; the Greeks could not bring themselves to abandon the Megali Idea. Kemal’s nationalists meanwhile bided their time. Their army was well trained and newly equipped with weaponry secretly supplied by the French and Italians. By late summer, the soldiers were restless and impatient.

The order for battle was finally given by Mustafa Kemal on 26 August. ‘Soldiers,’ he told them, ‘your goal is the Mediterranean!’ The Turkish army struck at dawn and swept all before it. Five Greek divisions were destroyed in the opening wave of battle. More than 50,000 men were taken prisoner. Those who escaped fled from the field in absolute disarray.

The same story was repeated again and again, wherever Greek forces were stationed. Divisions were crushed; battalions were left with scarcely a man alive. Outgunned and outmanned, they turned and fled, pausing just long enough to torch every town and village that lay between them and the sea. If the Megali Idea was to be cast aside, then the Greeks wished to leave behind a charred and devastated wasteland.

The still-smouldering city of Afyon Karahisar fell back into Turkish hands within forty-eight hours of the beginning of the Turkish offensive. Ushak was the next big town to be captured. By the beginning of September, Kemal’s forces seemed unstoppable. The Greek army had disintegrated and was fleeing to the coast with all possible speed.

The Turkish forces were stunned by the magnitude of their victory. Their good fortunes were further increased when they captured Greece’s battlefield commander-in-chief, General Tricoupis. When Kemal asked the general whether he had anything to say for himself, he meekly asked whether he could send a message to his wife.

The first wave of rumours about the Greek army’s dramatic collapse reached Smyrna within hours. They were dismissed as idle gossip in the city’s brasseries and clubhouses, for no one could believe that such a large army could be put to flight with such apparent ease. Besides, the city’s inhabitants were too busy enjoying the autumn sunshine to worry about events taking place many miles to the east. ‘Arriving at Smyrna on Tuesday morning, August 29th, we found it bathed in sunshine and blissfully ignorant of the terrible fate overhanging it and many of its people.’ So wrote a Manchester businessman who was enjoying a few days’ sightseeing in the city. Trade had picked up since the dark days of 1921 and the port was once again busy. ‘It was a scene of abounding life and vitality, with files of porters trucking raisins and figs to the labourers loading the barges waiting to be filled and towed alongside the steamers bound for Europe and America.’

The city’s bourgeoisie were taking renewed pleasure in the customs of old, spilling onto the quayside for their evening promenade. ‘The open air and indoor cafés, with their orchestras or singers . . . [were] busy and crowded, while the Opera House was filled with an enthusiastic audience showing their appreciation of the artistic efforts of an Italian opera company.’

The Greek military continued to offer an upbeat assessment of its strategic situation. In its first communiqué, it stated that the army was engaged in a tactical withdrawal. In its second, it claimed that Greek forces had scored a great victory.

Grace Williamson, a nurse working in the English Nursing Home in Smyrna, watched the scenes of daily life taking place in the streets below her window in those last days of August and concluded that rumours of an impending catastrophe were nonsense. Like most people, she felt there was nothing to worry about. ‘The day was a bright fine one with a hint of autumn in it,’ she wrote, ‘and the quay was very gay with the different processions and their flags and banners.’ She noted that ‘the women were all out in their gayest and finest clothes [and] the bright parasols made the whole scene most picturesque and bright.’

Yet she had a niggling suspicion, one that she could not pinpoint, that something was awry. ‘I remember saying to my friends that people were not as gay as they seemed and there was something at the back of their minds.’ She was sufficiently disconcerted by their distracted manner – and by ugly rumours filtering into Smyrna – that she decided to recommence the diary that she had kept throughout the duration of the First World War. She thought it would be diverting to chronicle the rumours and tall tales that were spreading through the city.

George Horton was also disquieted by the dramatic reversals said to have been suffered by the Greek army, although he saw no reason to cancel his holiday in a Greek village to the south of the city. But his anxiety turned to alarm on 6 September when he was brought news that the first battalions of defeated troops were just a few hours from Smyrna. He rushed back to the city and arrived just in time to see the first regiments – those seen by Hortense Wood from her drawing room – make their entry.

‘In a never-ending stream they poured through the town towards the point on the coast,’ wrote Horton, ‘. . . silently as ghosts they went, looking neither to the right nor left. From time to time some soldier, his strength entirely spent, collapsed on the sidewalk or by a door.’

The sight of thousands of ragged Greek troops passing along the quayside sent the first ripple of alarm through the city, especially when it became apparent that there were large numbers of refugees in their wake. When Garabed Hatcherian, a senior physician of the Armenian National Hospital, strolled back to his home in Chalgidji Bashi Street that afternoon, he found his path blocked by many thousands of homeless people. ‘[They] are pouring into the courtyards of the churches, into hotels, asylums, houses, gardens,’ he wrote, ‘and, finally, wherever they can find a spot to sit down.’

Hatcherian felt a weary sense of déjà vu at seeing all these displaced people. In the First World War, the entire Armenian population of his village had been deported or massacred and their houses destroyed. Concerned that the influx of refugees was the prelude to something of wider significance, he decided to make a mental note of everything as it unfolded. This would eventually be incorporated into his written account entitled
My Smyrna Ordeal
.

Already, on 2 September, the Hatcherians’ house had become home to several members of the extended family. Among the refugees fleeing from the interior of the country was Garabed’s brother-in-law, Costan, who brought news that the Greek mayor of Akhisar had left his post. He also informed his uncle that the Greek government had secretly decided to abandon the interior of Anatolia and that it was contemplating withdrawing its troops from Smyrna as well.

Hatcherian refused to believe such stories. ‘This last piece of information seems improbable,’ he wrote, ‘since the Greek army, under the protection of its fleet, could create around Smyrna a strategic barricade in order to make it possible for the Christian population to be evacuated to the Greek islands.’

In the absence of any certain news, people began to display the first signs of panic. Housewives stocked up on bread and pulses while their husbands attempted to contact relatives living in the countryside. Yet there remained a general feeling that the city itself would be safe. ‘It seems very unlikely that brutalities would take place in Smyrna,’ wrote Hatcherian, ‘where so many Europeans live.’

There was a more tangible reason why people remained confident that Kemal’s army would not enter Smyrna. There were twenty-one foreign warships in the harbour – including eleven British, five French and one Italian. Many of these vessels – previously stationed in the Mediterranean – had headed to Smyrna on receiving intelligence of the Greek army’s defeat. Two American destroyers, the USS
Litchfield
and
Simpson
, had also recently arrived and it was rumoured that the mighty USS
Lawrence
was also en route to the port. Such a formidable presence in the bay reassured a population that was betraying signs of jumpiness. Few doubted that these vessels would act as a deterrent, if ever Mustafa Kemal should contemplate entering Smyrna by force.

By late afternoon on 6 September, thousands of troops and refugees had poured into the city and it was clear to everyone that the interior of the country was in complete turmoil. Grace Williamson found herself caught up in the rapidly growing disaster, for many of the sick, pregnant and exhausted refugees had knocked on the doors of her nursing home, begging for help. ‘Crowds and crowds of every sort and description of Greeks,’ she wrote. ‘Women with trousers and weird costumes carrying babies wrapped in gay colours and caps.’

Grace noted that the Greek ships in the bay were taking away the soldiers as quickly as they could be embarked; she assumed that they would soon take off the refugees as well. ‘But where will they put them?’ she asked herself. ‘This is a huge country and there must be 40, 50 or 60 thousand, perhaps more.’ There were, in fact, many more. At least ten times that number were making their way to Smyrna, carrying nothing more than their children, a bottle or two of water and perhaps a few provisions.

The scale of the impending disaster had not escaped the notice of senior diplomats in Europe and America. Several days previously, Henry Morgenthau – America’s former ambassador to Constantinople – had warned that Kemal’s nationalists were likely to follow their military victory with a massacre. ‘Unless Britain asserts herself by showing that she, and somebody else, has an interest in protecting these Christians, the Turks will be as merciless as they were with the Armenians.’

Although his warning fell on deaf ears in London and Washington, in Smyrna, one man had already realised that the city was facing an altogether more serious crisis than anything it had endured during the Great War. Herbert Octavius Whittall had read between the lines of the Greek military despatches and concluded that the occupying forces had been absolutely and convincingly routed. His concern was not that the Turks would cause havoc if and when they entered the metropolis. Rather, he feared that the vanquished Greeks would indulge in gratuitous acts of pillage and vandalism as they passed through the bourgeois suburbs of Smyrna.