Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (21 page)

The exact death toll remains unknown to this day, but most witnesses agree that the Turkish dead and wounded numbered between 300 and 400 while the Greeks lost about a hundred. These were just the victims of the unrest in Smyrna itself. Many more were killed in the villages that surrounded the city.

The violence had been entirely sectarian, pitting Greeks against Turks in a manner that seemed certain to preclude any peaceful coexistence in the future. Yet in all the chaos and carnage, there were a few instances of the rival nationalities helping each other. One Turkish merchant told Commander Berry of the USS
Manley
that his life had been saved by his Greek neighbours. Another Greek family, the Frangoulises, went out of their way to protect their Turkish-Albanian friends. But such acts of kindness were the exception to the rule; there were very few uplifting stories to salvage from the bloodshed and brutality.

Three days after the landing of Greek troops, Smyrna was finally at peace. The killings had stopped and the looting was at an end, but the behaviour of Venizelos’s soldiers had caused irreparable damage to the Greek cause and had poisoned for ever the relationship between Smyrna’s different nationalities.

‘I well remember the bewilderment and alarm with which I heard on a lovely afternoon in Paris of this fatal event,’ wrote Winston Churchill. ‘It was impossible to excuse the imprudence of this violent act, which opened so many new perils when our resources were shrivelling.’

The Greek occupation provided the Turkish nationalists with a powerful rallying cry: Smyrna must be liberated. ‘The result of this [violence] was like breaking open an ants’ nest,’ wrote Sir John de Robeck. ‘Temporary stupefaction, much running about and a few hardy souls spitting acid at the invaders.’

The Greeks suddenly found themselves in a race against the clock. Their most urgent task was to restore some semblance of harmony to Smyrna’s competing national groups, aware that this alone would prove them worthy custodians of the great city.

News of the occupation of Smyrna sent shock waves through the streets of Constantinople. There had already been protests about the Allied powers’ seeming intention of carving up Turkey. Now, the realisation that this had become a reality – and that Greek troops were patrolling the streets of Smyrna – was the last straw.

One of the leading activists was Halide Edib, a highly educated member of the Constantinople bourgeoisie who had connections with several of the fledgling resistance movements. These organisations were attracting a growing number of former officers from the Turkish army, officers who devoted their energies to smuggling military hardware to distant towns in Anatolia.

Yet they were acutely aware that the time was not yet right for military action. The public needed to be galvanised and the occupation of Smyrna gave the resistance the rallying cry it so desperately needed.

‘I hardly opened my mouth on any subject except when it concerned the sacred struggle which was to be,’ wrote Edib. ‘Turkey was to be cleared of murderers, the so-called civilising Greek army . . . Every detail of the coming struggle was of the utmost importance and worth any sacrifice we were willing to make.’

Edib’s greatest talent was public oratory. She knew how to inflame the passions of a crowd and cajole it into action. Shortly after the landing of the Greek army, she was provided with the opportunity to perform her first service on behalf of the resistance. A huge outdoor protest meeting was organised at the Sultan Ahmed mosque in Constantinople and she was to address the crowd.

Edib was unusually nervous on the morning of the meeting and she grew even more anxious as she made her way through the streets. ‘I could hardly stand on my feet,’ she wrote, ‘so fast and loud was my heart thumping: it was only when I entered the huge square that this violent thumping was stopped by the surprise of the spectacle.’

The minarets of the Sultan Ahmed mosque had been draped in black, as if in mourning for the Greek occupation. In front of the mosque, inscribed in huge letters, was a banner bearing the words, ‘Wilson’s Twelfth Point’ – a reference to the American president’s statement that the Turkish territories should be guaranteed their own sovereignty.

More than 200,000 people had gathered to hear Edib speak – a crowd so large that the British and French military authorities were seriously alarmed. ‘Allied aeroplanes fled in and out of the minarets, policing the crowd,’ she wrote. ‘They buzzed like mighty bees and came down as low as they could in order, I believe, to intimidate the crowds.’ Edib spoke with all the passion and force she could muster, in defiance of the Allied aircraft.

‘From the tops of the minarets nigh against the heavens,’ she began, ‘seven hundred years of glory are watching this new tragedy of Ottoman history.’ She informed the crowd that the occupation of Smyrna was nothing short of a religious war – a battle between Islam and Christianity. ‘The European powers would have found a way to send armies of conquest to the stars and the moon had they known that Moslems and Turks inhabited those heavenly bodies. At last they have found a pretext, an opportunity to break to pieces the last empire ruled by the crescent.’

She reserved her greatest contempt for the peacemakers in Paris – Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau – who had allowed the Greek army into Smyrna. ‘They were all sitting at a court whose ostensible object was the defence of human and national rights, yet all that court did was to sanctify the spoliation of the defeated peoples.’

Her words had an electrifying effect on the throng. Some cried; some broke down completely. One woman repeatedly screamed in a hysterical voice, ‘My nation, my poor nation.’ Even representatives of the Allied powers were visibly moved by her passion. One French general was spotted standing amidst a group of Turkish youth with tears streaming down his cheeks.

Edib’s speech had a particularly powerful effect on her own countrymen: it brought home to people the critical situation in which Turkey now found itself.

It also sent shock waves through the Greek districts of the city, where the occupation of Smyrna was still being celebrated with dancing and festivities. On the day of her speech, all the celebrations came to an abrupt end. ‘While we were crying and talking and behaving peacefully in Sultan Ahmed,’ she wrote, ‘a great panic was going on in Pera, the Christian quarter of the town. People were running about the streets with a cry of terror on their lips; “The Turks are coming, the Turks are coming!”’

They were not coming yet; indeed, it would be two years before the Turks felt confident enough to tackle the Greek military. But momentous events were starting to unfold in the wilds of Anatolia that were sparked – and fuelled – by the landing of the Greek army in Smyrna.

Ex Oriente Lux

I
t had been a gruelling twenty-four hours for Colonel Toby Rawlinson and his men. They had hoped to reach the eastern city of Erzurum in a matter of days, unaware that the mountain road they were following was only passable in midsummer. Long before they had crossed the first range of peaks, they were forced to bivouac on an exposed ridge in the teeth of a blizzard. ‘The winds blow with terrific force,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and a piercing cold defies all furs.’ As he shivered in his canvas tent, Rawlinson had a very real fear that they would all die of exposure.

He had been sent to Anatolia in the spring of 1919, charged with enforcing the terms of the armistice signed six months previously. He was to supervise the surrender of armaments and oversee the demobilisation of the numerous battalions and units that were still under arms in Anatolia.

‘In order to ensure these conditions [were] being carried out,’ he wrote, ‘it was, of course, necessary to inspect and, in fact, to supervise the measures taken by the Turks for the purpose, and this was the duty now officially allotted to me.’

He gathered a team of a dozen men, bought three antiquated cars in the Black Sea port of Trebizond and set out on a 200-mile journey towards Erzurum, the headquarters of the Turkish Ninth Army. After days stuck in deep snow, he and his men eventually dug themselves out and struggled towards Erzurum, where they hoped to find hot baths and comfortable beds. They were quickly disabused of this notion. Like so many of Turkey’s cities, Erzurum had suffered enormous damage during the war and was now devastated by disease and famine. Rawlinson was told that more than 90 per cent of the population had died or fled.

Rawlinson’s first task was to visit the local army commander, Kiazim Karabekir, with whom he hoped to forge a constructive working relationship. He was pleasantly surprised when he was introduced: ‘The most genuine example of a first class Turkish officer that it has ever been my good fortune to meet.’ Karabekir seemed willing to help Rawlinson collect and destroy the stockpiles of weaponry that were scattered across the countryside. He led him to a cache of 500 guns, which he immediately surrendered, and then proceeded to hand over more than 200,000 rounds of ammunition. Rawlinson was delighted to have such support from Karabekir, but when he looked more carefully at the weaponry he discovered that the guns were ‘of antiquated pattern’ and that the ammunition was ‘in an absolutely dangerous condition’.

He soon began to suspect that the Turks – who seemed so accommodating and helpful – were surrendering only old and broken weaponry. These suspicions were confirmed when he chanced upon forty big field guns in perfect working order. ‘These, the Turks assured me, had been “overlooked” by them.’ He added sardonically: ‘but thanks to our enterprise, they had not been overlooked by us’.

Kiazim Karabekir and his men were indeed concealing weaponry, reasoning that events in Smyrna left them with no option but to break the terms of the armistice. ‘The landing of the Greeks in Smyrna, and the disastrous events which resulted thereupon, entirely changed the situation,’ wrote Clifford Heathcote-Smith, who was working for the British High Commission in Constantinople. ‘The country was flooded with accounts of what had occurred. These accounts, which naturally were exaggerated, came as a great shock to the Turks, and had an unifying effect on the various factions into which the country was at that time split.’

George Horton explained the situation succinctly for his American audience. He said that the Turks were more insulted by the landing of the Greek army in Smyrna ‘than the white citizens of Mobil would be if it were given over to a mandate of negro troops’.

The behaviour of officers such as Kiazim Karabekir was one cause for alarm; that of Mustafa Kemal was another. Kemal had landed in the Black Sea port of Samsun just four days after the Greek occupation of Smyrna. He had ostensibly come to commence his work as army inspector, charged with bringing order to the war-ravaged countryside, but the news from Smyrna galvanised him into action. He now saw his task as twofold: to awaken the Muslim population to the threat posed by Greece; and to unite the dispirited army officers into a cohesive fighting force.

Kemal travelled first to the town of Havza, where his visit coincided with a public demonstration about the events in Smyrna. At Kemal’s instigation, a local notable delivered a rousing speech in which the town’s inhabitants were told that their destiny was hanging in the balance. They were to ‘hold themselves ready to sacrifice their lives and property if necessary to recover Smyrna’.

A British intelligence officer named Captain Hurst was in Havza at the time and described the mood of the people as extremely volatile. ‘The air was heavy with rumours and menaces, the population was being deliberately excited and a spark would have sufficed to bring an outbreak [of violence].’

Hurst attributed the sudden change of mood to the arrival of Kemal, who spent his waking hours energising the local population and contacting army commanders. ‘He had been carrying on a large telegraphic correspondence with the surrounding towns and beyond,’ wrote Hurst, ‘so much as to have practically monopolised the telegraph, and his officers have been seen in several, or most, of the villages of the neighbourhood, where their influence had certainly not made for conciliation.’

Captain Hurst’s anxieties were reflected by the British High Commissioner in Constantinople, who informed the Foreign Office that dozens of Turkish officers had headed to eastern Turkey in order to organise resistance to the Greeks. ‘The movement is so natural, and I feel it is so universal, that it seems to me hopeless to endeavour to stop it.’

There was still much uncertainty as to the strategy of Mustafa Kemal, who remained an unknown quantity to the British military. Many character assessments were written about him by Whitehall civil servants but they read more like wishful thinking than actual fact. According to one intelligence dossier, he was said to have indulged in ‘dissipation’ in his early years and contracted venereal disease. This had given him a ‘contempt and disgust for life’ and driven him to ‘homosexual vice’. He was charged with having disobeyed Liman von Sanders during his spirited defence of Gallipoli. Strangest of all, he was reported to have lost an eye in the fighting against the British. Although Sir John de Robeck studied all the available information on Kemal, he failed to get any measure of the man. ‘He is,’ he wrote despairingly, ‘a good deal of an enigma.’ Lloyd George was more dismissive: ‘a carpet seller in a bazaar’ was his opinion of Mustafa Kemal.