Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (27 page)

The situation on the ground inspired rather less romantic sentiments. A thick pall of smoke hung over the summit and its uppermost edges were tinged golden yellow by the light reflecting off the fires burning in the valley below. The heights were littered with the corpses of Greek soldiers who had been slaughtered by bullets and bayonets. Many of their Turkish opponents had been shredded by shellfire and shrapnel. The spring sunshine provided a little warmth in the daytime, but as soon as dusk fell a frosty chill enveloped the heights. The wounded faced an agonising stretcher ride down from the escarpment, jolted over the rocks, paths and river beds.

‘I wondered how anyone could think the military possession of those summits worth the price,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘and then I looked down the plain of Eski Shehir and thought of the historical consequences which the capture of those summits might involve.’

The Greek victory was a stunning achievement that looked set to guarantee the future of Smyrna. In just six days – and against all the odds – they had managed to wrest control of the entire western escarpment of the Anatolian plateau.

They did not have long to celebrate. The Turks, smarting from their defeat, were preparing to launch a lightning counter-attack before the Greeks had a chance to consolidate their positions. On 31 March, less than forty-eight hours after being evicted from the escarpment, Colonel Ismet led a daring assault against the Greek positions. His timing was brilliant. The inaccessibility of the escarpment had delayed Greek reinforcements and the soldiers holding the ridge were still exhausted after the tough battle. They were in no position to withstand a fresh onslaught.

The 10th Division was the first to crack. After a tremendous firefight, they were pushed back over the escarpment. The 7th Division, too, found itself in extreme difficulty. The men fought like tigers throughout the night before realising the hopelessness of their situation. As dawn broke on 2 April they abandoned their hard-won positions and fled down the mountainside. They tried to salvage as much weaponry as possible but this proved difficult under stiff Turkish gunfire.

‘It was a weird march,’ wrote Toynbee, who was fleeing with the retreating division, ‘. . . in choking dust transfused with moonlight, and reeking with the odour of animals and men.’ As the defeated troops passed through the defile, confusion reigned. It quickly became apparent that this was no localised defeat; the entire Greek army was pouring off the escarpment.

‘The men were angry,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘angry at spending so much blood and labour in vain, but even more humiliated at a defeat which broke a long record of victory of which they had been intensely proud.’

The courage and hardiness of these defeated comrades left a deep impression on him. Toughened by years of warfare, they helped each other off the slopes of the ridge.

The descent was not much easier than the terrible ascent.

After twenty-three hours on the march – and a hitched lift in a motor vehicle – Toynbee finally made it back to Bursa in order to file his despatches.

Colonel Ismet was jubilant when he was brought news that his forces, newly trained and fresh to battle, had evicted the Greeks from their forward positions. He immediately sent a telegram to Kemal, informing him that ‘the enemy has abandoned the battlefield to our arms, leaving thousands of dead behind.’

Kemal’s response was extravagant in style and lavish in praise. ‘Few commanders in the whole history of the world have faced a task as difficult as that which you undertook . . . The independent life of our nation was entrusted to the heart-felt care of your commanders and comrades-in-arms, who have honourably discharged their duty under your brilliant direction.’

Colonel Ismet almost trumped his battlefield victory by cutting off the retreat of the army. Only after a desperate fight did the southern group manage to reach its base at Ushak. Although they eventually got back safely to their barracks, they were left in no doubt that they were no longer battling it out against a ragtag army of bandits and irregulars. Kemal’s forces had been transformed into an efficient fighting machine that was led by men experienced in modern warfare.

In Smyrna, far from the battlefront, life continued as normal, but for the soldiers on the front line, everything had changed. They had suffered their first major reverse and it put into question the entire strategy of the Greek army. The Megali Idea was suddenly in peril.

The Greeks were in control of a vast area of Anatolia, yet the population of this zone, with the notable exception of Smyrna, was principally Turkish. There were some in the army who began arguing, with chilling clarity, that it was time to alter the demographics in the Greek-administered area.

Into the Desert

O
n a blustery day in May 1921, a lightly armed British warship named
Bryony
steered into the little port of Kapakli on the southern shores of the Sea of Marmara. Kapakli lay almost 200 miles from Smyrna, yet it fell well within the Greek-controlled zone of Anatolia. It was an area of startling natural beauty – a rolling landscape of olive groves, orchards and villages inhabited by both Christians and Muslims. But all was not well in this once-peaceful peninsula. It was rumoured that Greece’s self-declared mission to bring civilisation to Turks – Venizelos’s long-cherished aspiration – had gone desperately awry.

The British immediately despatched an inter-allied commission to find out whether there was any truth to the tales of looting and massacres. The commission consisted of three senior officers, their Greek and Turkish interpreters and Maurice Gehri, a trusted senior delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Also present was Arnold Toynbee, just back from the front line and anxious to witness how the Greek army was behaving in the wake of its first defeat.

No sooner had the
Bryony
docked at Kapakli than the investigating commission realised that something was wrong. A thick pall of smoke hung over the village and many of the buildings were still smouldering. As Gehri picked his way over the deserted ruins, his fears of a massacre were soon enough confirmed. He found eight bodies of people who had clearly been killed just a few hours earlier. ‘In the case of one woman, the blood was still flowing,’ he wrote. ‘Another woman had been killed on a mattress.’ The few survivors found cowering among the ruins declared that Greek soldiers had descended on their village and slaughtered everyone they could find.

It was a similar story at nearby Kutchuk Kumlar, where hundreds of terror-stricken inhabitants emerged from hiding places when they saw the commissioners arrive. ‘It was difficult to obtain exact information, so great was the panic among the population,’ reads the official report that the international observers later compiled, ‘but it was gathered that a detachment of Greek soldiers and brigands had gone through the village a few days before.’ When the commissioners turned to leave, the surviving villagers declared their intention of leaving with them. They followed them back to the
Bryony
‘[and] refused to leave the beach, imploring us to take them to quiet and safety’. The commissioners felt it was their duty to offer some sort of protection until such time as the local Greek commander could be confronted. ‘The Bryony remained at anchor beyond the landing-place, throwing her searchlights over the beach and the adjoining hills all night long, in order to reassure the refugees.’

On the following morning, Toynbee decided to ride inland and visit some of the villages not accessible by ship. At Samanly, he was met by terrified Turkish inhabitants and ‘several ruffianly-looking fellows, armed to the teeth but not in uniform, standing guard over them. These, we were told, were Greek “rural guards”.’ Toynbee managed to speak to a few of the Turks out of earshot of the Greeks. ‘We want to go!’ they told him. ‘Take us with you; take us! We are afraid.’ Toynbee said that ‘they loved the homes they would be leaving, but they would abandon everything if they could save their wives and children’s lives and their own’.

He rode on towards Akkeui, where he was greeted by an even more lamentable tale. The village
hodja
told him that, just a week before, Greek brigands had passed through and slaughtered sixty people in cold blood. ‘Some are buried in the open square through which you have just come,’ he told Toynbee, ‘others on a little hill between the two mahallas [quarters] of the village.’

While Toynbee collected information about the killings, Maurice Gehri took practical steps to contact the local Greek commander. He wished to request that the Red Cross be allowed to evacuate the growing number of refugees who had flocked to the harbour where the
Bryony
lay at anchor.

The local Greek captain, Dimitri Papagrigoriu, reluctantly signalled his consent to the embarkation of the refugees, but then did everything in his power to obstruct the process, fearful that the villagers would denounce him and his men to the authorities in Constantinople.

‘We had to wrestle for their lives,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘not only family by family but person by person.’ The Greek captain argued over each refugee. ‘He struggled to retain in his power every individual, however feeble or defenceless or old. He separated (I have instances vividly in my mind) wives from husbands and mothers from children.’

The final embarkation was chaotic and there was absolute terror among the Turkish refugees. Their anxieties were not eased by the Greek onlookers who told them that they would all be thrown into the sea once the ship had weighed anchor. ‘The Christian women looked on and gloated,’ recorded Toynbee. ‘We took a photograph of them laughing at the scene.’

The
Bryony
finally set sail with more than 1,000 men, women and children; a further 333 were rescued in a second mission spearheaded by the Red Crescent.

The commissioners soon discovered that excesses committed by the Greek military – in tandem with irregulars – were not confined to this peninsula. When the army had withdrawn from Ismid in the wake of its defeat, it left behind a scene of carnage. Toynbee arrived some thirty-five hours after the departure of the troops and was appalled by what he saw. ‘The streets leading to the jetties were heaped with the wrecks of these carts and the water littered with the offal of the oxen which had been slaughtered on the quay . . . Corpses of Turkish carters – murdered in return for their services – were floating among the offal, and one or two corpses of Turkish women.’

Toynbee looked over the bodies before heading into the town centre, where the scene was one of desolation. ‘The Turkish shops had been systematically looted – the Christian shops being protected against the destroying angel by the sign of the cross, chalked up on their shutters with the owner’s name.’

The report compiled by the inter-allied commission was damning in its conclusion. The massacres committed by the Greek army and irregulars were not isolated incidents but had been orchestrated by the military with the aim of changing the demographics in the Greek-administered zone. It concluded that the Greek army was engaged ‘in a systematic plan of destruction of Turkish villages and extinction of the Muslim population’. Although many of the atrocities had been carried out by irregulars – both Greek and Armenian – these forces had every appearance of operating ‘under Greek instructions and sometimes even with the assistance of detachments of regular troops’.

Maurice Gehri wrote a separate report for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which drew a very similar conclusion. He had been particularly shocked by the callousness of many in the Greek military. When he asked one local lieutenant, John Costas, why he had allowed his men to kill Turks, the officer had shrugged his shoulders and replied, ‘Because it gave me pleasure.’

The two reports did not mince their words when criticising the Greek military. Neither did they make comfortable reading for the Turks. Areas outside Greek control were entirely at the mercy of Turkish irregulars, who were attacking, looting and burning Greek villages with just as much enthusiasm. The Greek administration compiled its own report on these Turkish atrocities, claiming that dozens of villages had been torched in the preceding weeks and 12,000 Greeks massacred. The inter-allied commission made its own investigation and declared that the Greek report ‘should be accepted as fundamentally true, notwithstanding a certain amount of exaggeration in the figures’.