Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (42 page)

Horton was desperately trying to finish the mountain of paperwork demanded by the Turks before they would allow any American nationals to leave the city. By late afternoon, he realised that time was fast running out. ‘Great clouds of smoke were by this time beginning to pour down upon the consulate. The crowd in the street before this building, as well as that upon the quay, was now so dense that the commanding naval officer told me that in ten minutes more I should not be able to get through.’

There was indeed a real urgency to getting the American nationals onto the waiting vessels. Edward Fisher, director of the YMCA, burst into Horton’s office and warned him ‘that he had seen with his own eyes wide streams of kerosene running through the street on which the American Consulate was located’.

Fisher was not mistaken. When Claflin Davis scraped up some mud in the street, ‘it smelled like petroleum and gasoline mixed.’ He was sure that the Turks were preparing to fire all the buildings close to the waterfront.

American lighters and landing craft had by this time been drawn up alongside the quay. Without a moment to lose, the assembled Americans were led out through the crowd and down to the waterfront. This was not easy, for the streets were blocked by thousands of refugees who were also trying to jostle their way towards the American landing craft. One of those who was helping his fellow nationals aboard – and fighting off the other refugees – was Melvin Johnson. ‘As we were pulling out I’ll never forget the screams,’ he later recalled. ‘As far as we could go, you could hear ’em screaming and hollering, and the fire was going on . . . [the] most pitiable thing you ever saw in your life . . . the only way the people could go [was] toward the waterfront. A lot of ’em were jumping in, committing suicide.’

The Americans were not alone in evacuating their nationals. The French, Italians and British were all engaged in a desperate attempt to rescue the last of their people before it was too late. Earlier that afternoon, Sir Harry Lamb had wired the warships in the bay, asking for lighters to be sent with immediate effect. As soon as they were docked at the quayside, the remaining British nationals were led through the crowds of refugees by their indefatigable vicar, Charles Dobson. ‘Nothing – no words – can describe the awful effect of the city,’ he later wrote. ‘One appalling mass of flames, the water front covered with dark masses of despairing humanity.’

Not everyone accepted the offer of a place on the British vessels. The Giraud family had discovered to their amazement that the
Helen May
– Edmund’s beloved motor cruiser – was still tied up in the harbour. They forced their way through the masses and eventually reached the boat. For young Mary Giraud it was a most terrifying experience. ‘A flaming town in the background, a port full of English warships . . . and ourselves, far enough away from it all not to have to witness more than an overall picture of the chaotic horror of war.’

Yet she saw enough harrowing scenes to haunt her for a long time to come. ‘This picture remained with me for many years and my sleep was inevitably broken by nightmares of war. This lasted well into my teens, till finally the horror faded.’

For the British mariners involved in the rescue mission, it was a most testing afternoon’s work. ‘We had some dreadful moments,’ recalled Duncan Wallace, ‘especially when we wondered if we could save the inmates of the Maternity Home, whose gallant head, Miss Williamson, when we arrived with stretchers, simply said, “Thank God you came in time. I could not have left my post.”’

Grace Williamson later wrote her own account of the rescue. She recalled fifty British troops arriving at the nursing home and forming a human square reinforced with oars. When all the staff and patients had assembled inside this square, the sailors forced a passage through the crowds. Grace finally made it to the
Iron Duke
, where she was received by the ship’s admiral. ‘From the deck of the
Iron Duke
, we watched Smyrna burn, [and] the fire seemed to reach very near our home.’

For many, the experience of finally reaching the safety of a British warship was too much to bear. One of the Whittall children recalled how her mother broke down in tears. ‘[She] sat quietly weeping, hardly trying to check her tears with her handkerchief. I had never seen her in tears before and it seemed to me, as I went to her side, that something unbearable had happened.’

Fernand de Cramer had not managed to make the rendezvous for British nationals. He now found himself struggling through the crowds, trying to work out how to get his invalid mother, Lucy, to one of the waiting lighters. ‘Picture to yourself a crowd so dense that you could scarcely touch the ground with your feet and you turned upon yourself like grains of sand in a whirlwind. Amid piercing shrieks and blows, people falling into the sea, a smoke so hot that upon my word I thought my entrails were on fire.’

Fernand was at a loss as to know what to do. He knew that, given his mother’s weak heart, she was unlikely to survive in a crowd ‘so horrible, atrocious, compact and panic-stricken’. Yet the house where she was currently lodged lay directly in the path of the flames and would soon be consumed by fire.

In the end, he bundled her outside, physically manhandled her through the crowds and finally handed her over to a British officer standing by a lighter. ‘I told him that she was a born English woman and that her life was entirely in his hands.’ The officer promised to do his best, but Fernand had his doubts as to whether she would live. ‘She left in an absolute fainting condition,’ he wrote.

Lucy de Cramer did indeed survive and would later write her own recollection of the events of that Wednesday afternoon. ‘The fright of the population in the streets and on the quays was indescribable!’ she wrote. ‘Bombs and petroleum were thrown. The flames finished by licking the quays [which] were crowded with the poor people waiting their turn to be saved. Everything that one can say of the horror of that night is not exaggerated!’

Just a few hours earlier, Lucy had deposited the family fortune in the safe belonging to the Paterson family. Now, from the safety of a British warship, she watched the Patersons’ property explode in a fireball. ‘We are all ruined!’ she wrote. ‘Complete disaster and ruin.’

Ernest Paterson – Lucy’s brother-in-law – also realised that it was the end of an era. ‘[He] is beside himself,’ wrote Lucy. ‘His bank, stores and other property reduced to ashes.’

He was not alone in having lost everything. The assets of almost all of the Levantine dynasties were tied up in property and their money was held in local banks. Now, those banks were all in flames. The Levantines watched from afar as all their businesses, possessions and fortunes went up in smoke. Two centuries of inherited wealth, paintings and priceless objets d’art were lost in the great fire of Smyrna.

One of the last British nationals to board the waiting lighters was Percy Hadkinson. He would later write to the British High Commissioner in Constantinople, chronicling everything he saw that night. ‘If Your Excellency could only have heard the cries for help and seen defenceless women and children unmercifully shot down or rushed into the sea to be drowned like rats, or back into the flames to be burned to death, you would fully have realised the horror and extreme gravity of the situation.’

The Smyrna quayside had indeed become a scene of abject human misery. Almost two miles long – and wider than a football pitch – it was large enough to accommodate hundreds of thousands of homeless people. The transformation into a makeshift refugee camp had been rapid and dramatic. Just a few days earlier, the waterfront had been alive to the sound of gypsy orchestras and brass bands. Now, the gaiety had been replaced by rank squalor. The same people who had only recently spent their evenings sauntering up and down in their evening finery were now camped out in the open air with neither privacy nor provisions.

By the time dusk fell on that terrible Wednesday, the quayside was crowded with almost half a million refugees. They stood in real danger of being burned alive for the fire had by now reached the waterfront – a scalding, pulsating heat that was transmitted from building to building by the liberal use of benzine. The Théâtre de Smyrne had erupted into flames shortly after the American nationals had been evacuated. Just minutes later, the American consulate had burst into a wall of fire. George Horton had left in the nick of time. He managed to save the consulate archives but his cherished library was devoured by the flames. The heat was soon so intense that the mooring lines of the ships closest to the waterfront began to burn. All the vessels moved 250 yards out from the quayside, yet the heat was still overwhelming.

‘The flames leaped higher and higher,’ wrote Oran Raber, a tourist who had arrived in Smyrna just a few days earlier. ‘The screams of the frantic mob on the quay could easily be heard a mile distant. There was a choice of three kinds of death: the fire behind, the Turks waiting at the side streets and the ocean in front . . . in modern chronicles, there has probably been nothing to compare with the night of September 13 in Smyrna.’

On board the
Iron Duke
, Admiral Sir Osmond de Beauvoir Brock insisted that the daily routine continue as normal. George Ward Price recalled how the officers dressed for dinner in their white mess jackets that evening, despite the unfolding vision of hell. When the screams from the distant quayside grew too loud to be ignored, the captain ordered the ship’s band to strike up tunes. Other ships followed suit and the shrill cries of the desperate refugees were soon overlaid with a medley of sea shanties.

‘One of the strangest experiences that night was to hear the band playing while the town was burning and cries and the roar of the fire filled the air,’ wrote Duncan Wallace. Another observer recalled the ship’s phonographs blasting out ‘the sweet strains of familiar records, including “Humoresque” and the swelling tones of Caruso in Pagliacci floating over the waters’. It was almost possible to lose oneself in the music, were it not for the fact that the quieter arias ‘were suddenly drowned in that frightful chorus of shrieks from the Smyrna quay’.

Many of the sailors involved in the evacuation of British nationals had returned to their vessels with tales of horror and cruelty. As their stories spread through the lower decks, there was a growing feeling that something should be done – and done immediately – to help those on the quayside.

Charles Howes was one of those who had taken part in the evacuation; he would remember for the rest of his life the scenes he witnessed. ‘Shrieking women calling to unresponsive children who were beyond answering. Children of tender age calling for parents . . . now and again, a cavalry man would take a fancy to a young girl of fifteen or sixteen and drag her away and then a ghostly scream would tell its own story.’

One of Howes’ colleagues, a seaman named Bunter, saw hundreds of Greeks clinging to the quayside in an effort to escape the heat of the fire. He then watched Turkish soldiers arriving ‘and deliberately severing the victims’ arms, resulting in hundreds of bodies falling to their deaths in the sea’.

Once dinner aboard the
Iron Duke
was finished, the officers went on deck to survey the scenes through their binoculars. One of them, Major Arthur Maxwell, watched Turkish soldiers pouring buckets of liquid over the refugees. He thought they were attempting to douse the flames, until he saw a sheet of fire flare up at exactly that point on the quay.

‘My God,’ he cried to his colleagues, ‘they’re trying to burn the refugees.’

George Ward Price joined the officers on deck in order to watch the conflagration.

The unease felt by many British mariners at their lack of action was mirrored by the crews on board the American warships. On the
Litchfield
, Claflin Davis of the Red Cross approached Captain Hepburn and pleaded for two large lighters, which were moored to the farthest end of the harbour, to be towed to the quayside. In that way, several thousand people could be saved from the worst heat of the flames. Hepburn was unable to oblige. The water was choppy, even in the harbour, and the lighters could be moved only with power launches. However, he had none at his disposal: only the British and French were equipped with such vessels.

Davis persuaded Hepburn to allow him to row over to the Allied vessels and ask for their help, but none was forthcoming. The French admiral was still ashore and out of contact, and the British were less than helpful. Admiral Brock informed Davis that he had repeatedly assured General Noureddin of Britain’s absolute neutrality. He could not – and would not – allow his men to take part in the rescue of Greek and Armenian civilians.

Nonetheless, at around midnight, the British admiral had a dramatic change of heart. The cause of his volte-face is unknown; it may be that his conscience was pricked by the attitude of the men under his command. Whatever the reason, his decision to help rescue the refugees led to a sudden flurry of action. Ward Price was on deck when the order was given for all the available picket boats, cutters and whalers to be lowered into the water and despatched to the quayside.

‘The scene changed in an instant,’ he wrote. ‘A shrill piping; a shouting of orders; a trampling of feet. Half the mess-jacketed officers disappear. In three minutes they are on deck again in blue uniforms, with mufflers around their necks and truncheons in their hands to beat back rushes for the boats.’ Within minutes, the first of the boats was rowing towards the quayside.

The sight that greeted the British seamen when they arrived at the quayside was worse than anyone expected. More than half a million people were crammed onto the waterfront and they had no possibility of escape. Machine-gun posts at the northern and southern ends of the waterfront prevented them from fleeing, while the fire formed an impenetrable barrier on the land side.