The Great Fire (17 page)

O
n September 9, Mustapha Kemal stood at a mountain pass eighteen miles directly east of Smyrna and looked down on his prize. Spread below him were the farms and villages of the Aydin coastal plain; the minarets, domes, and steeples of Smyrna; and the sickle-shaped harbor that bristled with Allied and American warships.

It had been seventeen years since he had visited Smyrna, and he had been a newly commissioned officer in the Ottoman army. Twenty-two years old and fresh out of the War College in Constantinople, Kemal had been making his way, in 1905, to Syria, his first military posting. The ship on which he was traveling had stopped briefly in Smyrna en route to Beirut, and when it reached Beirut, he had traveled by train to Damascus. Kemal took up his duties there, rounding up Druze brigands in the countryside. It had been tedious duty for an officer determined to make his mark for the empire. Ali Fuat, a young fellow officer and friend from the War College, had made the trip with him. Ali Fuat was now one of Kemal’s most important aides in the fight against the Greeks and the British.

Kemal and Ali Fuat had come through much together since those early days—they had caroused in the cafés of Constantinople, made careers in the Ottoman army, faced arrest for plotting against the Ottoman
government, and fought, successively, the Serbs, Bulgarians, British, Russians, and Greeks—this latest fight begun in defiance of the Ottoman government in Constantinople. Now the Greeks were finished in Anatolia, and Smyrna was within his grasp, and with it the prospect of making real the vision that had propelled him to take up arms against the Allied powers—a Turkish nation.

Mustapha Kemal had been born in Salonika, the same place George Horton had been posted to before World War I. Kemal’s father, a clerk, died when he was a boy; his mother and aunt raised him. Proud, bright, and strong-willed, Kemal had enrolled in a military preparatory school at age eleven, drawn by the cadets’ uniforms. He had felt himself transformed when dressed as an officer, even when he was a boy, and uniforms and appearances would remain important to him for the rest of his life. He had excelled in his studies, especially in math, and later transferred to a military high school in Monastir (now Bitola, in the Republic of Macedonia), where he also had shown exceptional ability. Then he went on to the Ottoman War College in Constantinople. In his last year, he ranked at the top of his class.

By then, Kemal already owned a reputation for being high-strung and difficult—and for drinking, gambling, and whoring. He drank raki and talked politics through the night with his fellow cadets and turned out fresh for duty in the morning. (Ali Fuat had introduced him to raki, the liquor that eased his racing mind.) Kemal was not a big man—though he was careful to be photographed to seem tall—but his proportions were perfect and lithesome, projecting a refined masculinity, like a male leopard, and those who noticed his hands (and his feet) remarked on their delicacy. (He liked to show off his feet, removing his shoes to bathe them.) He was fastidious in presentation—even to that which could not be seen. He favored French crepe de chine underwear with its silk nap. He loved clothes. When he was the Ottoman military attaché to Sofia in 1913 he gained the attention of the king of Bulgaria at a costume ball by wearing the elaborate and high hat and blue-and-red uniform of the Janissary Corps, the elite bodyguards of medieval sultans. Out of uniform, he liked to dress as a country gentleman: riding breeches and hacking jacket.

LIKE SO MANY OFFICERS
of his generation, Kemal had been obsessed as a young man with the decline of the empire and the backwardness of the sultan and his government. The inheritors of a fierce martial culture, the cadets who had come of age just before World War I had watched with shame and horror as their imperial inheritance slowly slipped away. They looked back longingly on the Ottoman horsemen and religious warriors who had created a vast Islamic empire in Asia, Africa, and Europe beginning in the fourteenth century. They carried within them the collective memory of a glorious past—fierce, conquering horsemen of an expanding Islamic empire that reached back to Osman, a fourteenth-century Seljuk chieftain and the empire’s founder whose son, Orhan, wrested Constantinople from the Byzantine Greeks.

The empire had reached its apex under Suleiman the Magnificent, whose armies reached but failed to conquer Vienna in 1529. The empire required expansion to maintain its wealth, and it drew energy from its religious mission, which was to bring Islam to the infidels. Without expansion, it began a slow decline. Without new lands to conquer, the empire slid into indolence, intrigue, and inefficiency. By the nineteenth century, the empire was regarded as the “sick man of Europe,” deeply in debt and backward.

The Young Turks of Salonika had cast their gaze on the proud Ottoman past; an unbroken dynasty of thirty-four sultans connected them to the tradition of Islamic conquest. In their present, they saw something quite different—a sclerotic state, territorial loss, and humiliation by their former Christian subjects—Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians.

The Greeks and Serbs had broken free of the empire in the early nineteenth century; in the late nineteenth century, at about the time of Mustapha Kemal’s birth, the British seized Cyprus and Egypt. In 1908, Bulgaria gained its independence and in 1909 Austria seized Bosnia-Herzegovina, also Ottoman territory. Soon, Albania would break away. The empire’s borders were shrinking, and the Grand Porte—the sultan’s government—appeared helpless to stop the disintegration. The anxiety was acute among Kemal’s generation of military leadership, and they sought, often in secret cells, a path toward a renewal of the Ottoman state.

AFTER SYRIA, MUSTAPHA KEMAL
had returned to Salonika, where the Young Turks were plotting against Sultan Abdul Hamid. In 1908, Kemal participated in the coup that forced the sultan to reinstate the constitution, and after the unsuccessful, conservative countercoup, the Young Turks deposed Abdul Hamid and installed his brother as a puppet. (This happened at the time of Horton’s posting in Salonika.) But the Young Turks’ revolution did not stop the empire’s decline, and their anxiety only worsened as more pieces of the empire broke off: Italy seized Libya in 1912, the same year Albania gained its independence; Crete joined Greece in 1913. Finally, like a cannon shot, Montenegro, Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria formed a military alliance and pushed the Ottomans out of Macedonia. Salonika fell to the Greeks. Three men of the Young Turks movement had emerged as the principal leaders; each was fiercely nationalistic. Their names were Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talat, and Ahmed Djemal. They held absolute power. History would remember them as architects of the Armenian genocide during World War I.

The new nationalist phrase was “Turkey for the Turks,” and the Three Pashas, as they were called, brutally executed the new ideology. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau put it this way:

Enver in particular admired the Germans and brought them to Turkey to train the army. On August 2, 1914, five days after the start of World War I in Europe, the Ottoman government signed a secret treaty of alliance with Germany. The Turks mined the Dardanelles, and its ships fired on Russian ports. The Allies responded with declarations of war,
and on November 13, Sultan Mehmet V, pressured by the governing pashas, signed a fetwah, declaring a holy war against Britain, France, and Russia.

During the war, Kemal distinguished himself at Gallipoli, then in the east against Russia, and later in Syria and Palestine against the British. He was a winning general in a losing cause. The war ended for Turkey in September 1918 when Allied forces broke through the Bulgarian front. “We’ve eaten shit,” the Bulgarians told their ally Talat in Turkey. The Bulgarian defeat convinced Ludendorff, general of the German army, that there was no prospect of a German victory.

The Turks sued for peace in October, and the sultan’s representatives signed an armistice aboard a British ship named, ironically,
Agamemnon
—for the Greek king who, legend says, had brought his army to Anatolia to defeat the Trojans three thousand years earlier. The Three Pashas fled Turkey for Germany, and Kemal’s resistance to the armistice began almost the moment it was signed. He was in Syria when the end came, and he began shipping arms to the interior of Anatolia to preserve a Turkish fighting force. The new government in Constantinople ordered him back to the capital, which was occupied by the victorious British, French, and Italians.

What happened next was astonishing: the Allies demanded demobilization of Ottoman forces and prosecution of the Young Turk leaders for their war crimes against Armenians. The Allies (the British, in particular) also insisted on an end to Turkish harassment of Christians. The Ottoman government promised to send an officer to supervise the seizure of weapons and investigate the treatment of Christians along the Black Sea. It picked Mustapha Kemal for the job. He departed Constantinople, and on May 19, 1919, he landed at Samsun—a city on Turkey’s Black Sea coast—and soon made contact with like-minded military men in the Anatolian interior who wanted to resist the armistice. The Ottoman government and the British, who had rounded up other Ottoman leaders who they suspected of trouble, almost immediately realized the giant mistake and tried in vain to recall him. It was too late. The tiger was loose.

IN THE THREE YEARS
after landing at Samsun, Kemal had done the impossible: He had taken Turkey from a defeated nation, prostrate before victors, and transformed it into an assertive power that was intent on dictating its peace terms to the Allies. He had organized an army, a government, and a set of demands—the Turkish National Pact.

Now, Kemal was on the edge of success. The mountain pass, called Nif by the Turks and Nymphaion by the Greeks, a place where the nymphs were said to inhabit mountain springs, was a notch between the peaks through which the downward running road switchbacked steeply to Smyrna. (It was this pass through which Theodora and her family had passed after Gritzalia days earlier.) Mustapha Kemal’s army was camped around him. It waited on his command.

The Allies had proposed to mediate an armistice at the Greeks’ request, but Kemal rejected the offer. He said it was pointless; the Greeks had been defeated. He had given the Greek army forty-eight hours to evacuate Anatolia, and Greek units were still hurriedly boarding ships at Chesme, a small port at the end of the long peninsula southwest of Smyrna. The deadline had already passed.

The day before, at Salihli, he had received a message from the Allied high commissioners in Constantinople, sent by way of the French ship
Edgar Quintet
at Smyrna, proposing a meeting to arrange the peaceful handover of the city. (This was the meeting that Merrill had hoped to attend with the French lieutenant Lafont.) Kemal was contemptuous of the proposal. The city was his to take; there was nothing to negotiate. Nonetheless, he agreed to meet them here, at this mountain parapet, in the headquarters abandoned days earlier by the Greek army and still displaying a portrait of Venizelos. He had sent a message to the Allies but it had been received late, and by now an advance contingent of his cavalry was already entering Smyrna.

O
n Wednesday, September 6, by which time there were at least two hundred thousand refugees in Smyrna and many tens of thousands more on the beaches along the Aegean and Marmara coasts, Admiral Bristol summoned leaders of the principal American relief and service organizations in Constantinople to the American embassy.

The American relief community in Constantinople was small and tight, and its members knew one another well. They had been meeting weekly at the embassy for almost two years to coordinate relief for the Russian refugees in Constantinople and Armenian orphans in the country’s interior. The group was bound by work, not affection. Both the Missions Board and Near East Relief had attempted to persuade the State Department to remove Bristol as high commissioner.

Among the people in the room were William W. Peet, the senior missionary administrator in Constantinople, and Harold C. Jaquith, managing director of Near East Relief in the Near East. Peet had instigated the campaign to remove Bristol, and Jaquith had banged heads with Bristol over his unsuccessful attempt to suppress reports of the Turkish slaughter of Ottoman Greeks. Jaquith, with his bland face and spectacles, was precisely the sort of “missionary type” that annoyed Bristol—earnest and dedicated to Armenians.

Bristol was openly hostile to the Missions Board for what he called its conversion mentality and the Near East Relief for what he considered its anti-Turkish attitudes and fund-raising propaganda in America.

BOTH THE MISSIONS BOARD
and Near East Relief were formidable foes, and Bristol’s ability to survive their campaign demonstrated the strength of his personal determination and Washington connections. The Missions Board had been sending missionaries to Turkey for nearly a century.

The Near East Relief organization had begun with the former American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau. A Jewish American businessman born in Germany and a big fund-raiser for Woodrow Wilson, Morgenthau had come to know the Ottoman leaders personally while serving in Constantinople and was in the country when the worst of the killing took place. His vivid testimony led to American outrage and a hugely successful fund-raising campaign to save the Armenian people. Organized in 1915 under the auspices of the American Committee for Syrian and Armenian Relief, the campaign to save the Armenians was the first broadly based public fund-raising campaign of its type, and it has never been surpassed in its outpouring of public philanthropy.

In 1916, Near East Relief, as it came to be called, raised $2.4 million in the United States through public donations; the amount doubled in 1917; and doubled again in 1918. In 1919, when America was in a postwar recession, Near East Relief raised $19,885,000—$3 million in one month. These were enormous figures for the period. By the end of 1921, it had raised about $40 million. With many businessmen and religious leaders on its board, Near East Relief was a fund-raising machine of astonishing success. In 1921, Near East Relief enlisted 48,364 churches and 7,877 fraternal organizations in its appeal. The Brotherhood of Railroad Train Men, the Masons, the Eagles, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and B’nai B’rith participated, as did many others. Twenty Masonic Lodges in Wisconsin adopted fifty orphans. In St. Claire County, Michigan, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Elks, the Ladies Library Association, the Knights of Columbus, and the Christmas Carolers Association
donated to a campaign run by the
Port Huron Times Herald
that adopted thirty-two orphans. The Central Presbyterian Church in Denver donated $5,000; North Reformed Church in Newark, $4,000; First Presbyterian Church, Evanston, Illinois, $3,500; and on and on throughout the country. Yale, Williams, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Johns Hopkins, the universities of Delaware, Wyoming, and Michigan, and many other colleges and universities organized appeals. One hundred factories in New York State donated $1,000 each. The American Federation of Labor solicited its members and sent money. Fourteen state governors were chairmen. Movie celebrities joined the effort. There was a Jackie Coogan chapter in Brooklyn. Children set up lemonade and flower stands on street corners and sent their earnings to feed Armenians. The world had never seen anything like the American response to Armenian suffering. It made America’s reputation for generosity.

THERE WERE STRONG PERSONALITIES
in Bristol’s spacious parquet-floored office on that hot and humid September morning but not a lot of trust. The talk was civil, but lines were drawn and well understood.

Nonetheless, cooperation was essential. Bristol had ships and government authority; the relief organizations had food, supplies, and manpower. Bristol knew also that the State Department and millions of Americans were watching. America was anxious about the consequences of the Turkish victories. It was no time for Bristol to make a show of his anti-Greek and -Armenian sentiments or publicly display a callous attitude toward the country’s Christians. (Former ambassador Morgenthau had been quoted in the previous day’s
New York Times
as favoring a swift Allied and American evacuation of Christian refugees from Anatolia to avoid a massacre.) Bristol would express his concern publicly but had already decided privately on a go-slow strategy—his plan was to gather information at Smyrna and decide on a response later. Only he knew how much later. His real concern was protection of Americans and American property and cultivating Turkish favor. He was not in the business of rescuing and feeding Greek and Armenian refugees.

Bristol saw responsibility for the refugee problem at Smyrna as a
problem for the British and Greek governments, and (as the coming weeks would show) he would use every opportunity to deflect the cost and blame in their direction. His plan was to take small steps and allow the situation to unfold without significant American engagement. He was reluctant to commit American resources, public or private, to the job. If the situation worsened, a disaster at Smyrna (he reasoned) would only reflect badly on Britain and Greece, not an unwelcome result from his perspective. (“The Greek is about the worst race in the Near East,” Bristol had written.)

At the meeting in his office, Bristol produced a note he had received the previous day from the British high commissioner in Constantinople, Sir Horace Rumbold. Bristol’s scorn for the note set the meeting’s tone. Marked “urgent,” it urged Bristol to use the American Relief Administration to help the refugees in Smyrna. (It was essentially the same request Horton had sent to the State Department.) The note infuriated Bristol—as almost anything would if it came from Rumbold. Bristol said he considered Rumbold’s note impertinent and he would give it the answer it deserved. (The answer would be sent the next day, and it would drip with sarcasm.) The two men despised each other. Bristol refused to allow U.S. Navy ships to acknowledge the passage of the British high commissioner’s yacht with the traditional manning of the ship’s rails and sailors’ salutes, and he would decline a dinner invitation if Rumbold was seated more prominently than he at the table. Rumbold, for his part, had written to the British foreign secretary that Bristol had “limited intelligence and outlook.” Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon concurred, “We have had abundant proof for nearly two years that he is suspicious, anti-British, stupid and at times malignant.” A British admiral would call him a “snake in the grass.”

The British ambassador in Washington, Auckland Campbell-Geddes, had taken the British complaints to Secretary of State Hughes and requested Bristol’s removal. Hughes, with some urging from Dulles, had rejected the complaints. The episode ended with a note to Bristol that made it clear that the secretary of state was aware of Bristol’s truculent nature. Hughes said it would be “a gratification” if Bristol would establish cordial relations with the British. “I desire you, there, on receipt
of my letter to make renewed effort to establish that informal contact with your Allied colleagues which may facilitate the settlement of questions which arise between you and the Allied mission without allowing them to reach an acute issue.”

Stiff by State Department standards, the note brought absolutely no change in Bristol. He knew that he had prevailed in the dustup, and the British were unlikely to appeal for his removal a second time. He continued on his unpleasant way.

Bristol’s position as chairman and titular head of the Red Cross in Constantinople strengthened his ability to ration American engagement at Smyrna. He formed the American Relief Committee for Smyrna in his office under the auspices of the Constantinople branch of the American Red Cross, and specifically the Constantinople Relief Committee, a subcommittee of the local Red Cross, which he also led. He engineered relief-effort hierarchy to give him full control at every juncture. He cabled the Red Cross in Washington for $50,000 and made it clear that he was sending the message in code so that the British (as he said) would not learn of it and conclude that they could rely on the Americans to pay the cost of the refugee relief.

He told the group in his office that he planned to send a relief team to Smyrna by destroyer the next day, Thursday, or after he had received word from Lieutenant Merrill about conditions in the city. This gave him room for further delay. He actually waited until Friday to send the ship. They discussed who should go, and the meeting broke up.

THE NEXT DAY, THURSDAY
, September 7, Bristol met with Hamid Bey, the nationalist representative in Constantinople and one of Bristol’s two key nationalist contacts since Bristol had arrived in Turkey. The other was Halide Edib, the nationalists’ chief propagandist. A corporal in the nationalist army, she was, at this moment, moving with Kemal toward Smyrna. Hamid Bey struck Ernest Hemingway, who interviewed him some weeks later for the
Toronto Star,
as a crook. He was, Hemingway wrote, “big and bulky,” with wing collars, a gray mustache, and a porcupine haircut. Hamid Bey operated as Kemal’s foreign minister in Constantinople, and
he and Bristol often met at the embassy. Always exceedingly polite to the admiral, Hamid Bey had begun the meeting with copious apologies for his tardiness. On this occasion, Bristol instructed his guest, one of the most sly and powerful men in intrigue-filled Constantinople, on the importance of Turkish good conduct. The nationalists, Bristol told him, had an opportunity “to reassure the world generally that they desired to properly protect minorities in the country.” Hamid Bey was his usual agreeable self to the admiral.

Satisfied that his advice was welcomed, Bristol had an additional suggestion for Hamid Bey. Bristol said he had learned from a nationalist leader in Ankara of the Greek army’s atrocities. Why not let a newspaper correspondent travel to those towns and villages destroyed by the Greek army in its retreat? It would be a public-relations masterstroke. Stories of Greek atrocities would improve the Turkish image and help Bristol undermine support for the Armenians and Greeks and their advocates in the United States. Hamid Bey listened carefully, obviously interested. Bristol said he just happened to have a correspondent in mind—Charles Sweeny of the
New York World
.

Sweeny was a fascinating figure, an original of the sort that eventually becomes a caricature: a journalist and soldier of fortune with a charismatic personality that appealed especially to those who liked their heroes mysterious and a little dangerous. As a young man, he had been booted from West Point and fought as a mercenary in the Mexican and Venezuelan revolutions. In 1914, to get into the big war, he had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, and he won France’s Legion of Honor for wounds received at Champagne. He had joined the American Expeditionary Force when the United States entered the war. Afterward, he worked as a reporter in the Paris bureau of the
New York World
. Tall, hawk nosed, and ruddy faced, Sweeny had traveled to Constantinople to cover the Greek-Turkish war. Young Hemingway was an admirer in Paris, and the two became lifelong friends; Sweeny served as a model and mentor for Hemingway in his life and fiction. Many years later, Sweeny, in his eighties, would walk as a pallbearer at Hemingway’s funeral. Bristol also fell under Sweeny’s spell and invited him on the outings he often arranged on weekends with navy officers and their wives.

In Constantinople, Sweeny, then forty years old, was working not only for Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the
New York World
—he was employed as a spy for the French government, and he had been busy collecting information on Basil Zaharoff, whom the French wished to disparage both for his support of the Greeks in the current war and for his connections to the Germans in the last. Sweeny probably had been the source of Bristol’s information about Zaharoff, which had found its way back to Washington as an intelligence report. The British, Turks, and French all had a good bead on Sweeny. He lived in a way that drew attention; he switched hotels several times a week, and he could be found wandering in the most dangerous sections of Constantinople, where (as the British observed) he would meet French intelligence officers. The only people who seemed unaware of the full range of Sweeny’s activities were the Americans, namely Bristol and his intelligence staff. Sweeny’s pro-Turkish reporting and his military background endeared him to Bristol, and while Bristol may have thought he was using Sweeny, it was more like the reverse. A newspaper reporter who doubles as a spy can do worse than to have an American admiral interceding on his behalf.

After proposing stories about Greek atrocities to Hamid Bey, Bristol met the same day with Sweeny and told him of the arrangements he was seeking to make for him with the nationalists, to which Sweeny gave his enthusiastic approval.

Finally on Friday, two days after the relief meeting in Bristol’s office, the people selected to travel to Smyrna assembled on the destroyer USS
Lawrence
. They were Harold Jaquith of Near East Relief; Charles Claflin Davis of the American Red Cross; and Dr. Wilfred Post and two nurses, Sara Corning and Agnes Evon. Davis, a tall, stout, and gentle man, was a prominent Bostonian who had left his law practice to drive a Red Cross ambulance in France and had remained with the Red Cross to manage relief for the Russian refugees in Constantinople. As the group was departing, Bristol told Davis not to make any commitments in Smyrna without checking with him first and to keep matters in Smyrna in perspective, warning him “that under such circumstances people were a bit hysterical and the situation always seemed worse than it would turn out to be.” Bristol recorded in his diary, “I told him that he thoroughly
understood my policy and therefore I would leave it in his hands to carry out that policy and to keep me informed in every way.”