Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (13 page)

As Geddes made his way back to Smyrna, he passed thousands more people being forcibly marched towards the desert. ‘[They] walk throughout the whole day at a shuffling gait and for hours do not speak to one another.’ The children were treated no better than the adults.

Horton listened to Geddes’ stories with a sense of revulsion and alarm. So, too, did Henry Morgenthau, who was still serving as American ambassador in Constantinople. He interviewed many of the American missionaries and physicians working in eastern Anatolia and was disgusted by what they told him. ‘For hours they would sit in my office,’ he wrote, ‘and with tears streaming down their faces, they would tell me of the horrors through which they had passed.’

The deportations followed a depressingly familiar pattern. Placards were posted in towns and villages, ordering the Armenian population to assemble at a given time. The Turkish gendarmes would then steal anything of value before sending them on their long march towards the desert. ‘Before the caravans were started,’ wrote Morgenthau, ‘it became the regular practice to separate the young men from their families, tie them together in groups of four, lead them to the outskirts and shoot them.’

On at least three occasions, Morgenthau went to visit Mehmet Talaat Pasha, the Minister of the Interior, and demanded an explanation for what was taking place. Talaat did not mince his words. After denouncing the Armenians as traitors intent on undermining the Turkish state, he told Morgenthau that the government had no intention of changing its policy. ‘I must not get the idea that the deportations had been decided upon hastily,’ he said. ‘In reality, they were the result of prolonged and careful deliberation.’

The American ambassador warned Talaat that he was making a terrible mistake, but the minister was unmoved. ‘“Yes, we may make mistakes”, he replied, “but” – and he firmly closed his lips and shook his head – “we never regret.”’ He also told Morgenthau to keep his nose out of Turkish affairs. ‘“It is no use for you to argue . . .” he said. “We have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians; there are none at all left in Bitlis, Van and Erzeroum.”’

The deportations of hundreds of thousands of people continued throughout the spring and summer of 1915. News about their scale and brutality quickly spread through Constantinople, whose Armenian population had hitherto been spared. But now they, too, found themselves targeted. ‘How many countless times,’ wrote Harry Stuermer, correspondent for the
Kolnische Zeitung
, ‘did I have to look on at that typical spectacle of little bands of Armenians belonging to the capital being escorted through the streets of Pera by two gendarmes . . . marching them off to the “Karakol” of Galata-Serai, the chief police station in Pera, where he delivered up his daily bag of Armenians.’

Smyrna alone remained untouched by Talaat’s policy. He did not dare – yet – to meddle with Rahmi Bey’s fiefdom, although George Horton feared that it would only be a matter of time before the deportations would be extended to Smyrna’s prosperous Armenian community.

By the summer of 1915, the leaders of this community were feeling so jittery that they held a public religious ceremony to pray for the success of the Turkish army. One of Smyrna’s leading Armenian lawyers, Nazareth Hilmi, gave a rousing speech in which he declared the absolute fidelity to Turkey of the city’s Armenian population. According to the Austrian consul – one of the dignitaries invited to the service – it was ‘a patriotic speech that stressed the complete loyalty and submission to the Ottoman empire of the Smyrniot Armenians’.

Such demonstrations had little effect on the ministers in Constantinople, who had every intention of extending their purge to Smyrna. They did their utmost to provoke Rahmi Bey into action, informing him that a court in Constantinople had ordered the death penalty for seven Armenian prisoners being held in Smyrna. The offence committed by these men was unclear and Rahmi Bey was dismayed by such a travesty of justice. Believing the men to be innocent, he wired Constantinople with the message that under Ottoman law the accused had the right to appeal for clemency. Soon afterwards, he received his answer: ‘Technically, you are right. Hang them first, and send the petition for pardon afterward.’

The seven Armenians were eventually saved from the gallows by the intervention of Henry Morgenthau, who directly petitioned government ministers. This went some way to reassuring Smyrna’s Armenian community. So long as Rahmi Bey remained in charge of the city, they knew that they would not be molested. However, if he was to be removed from office, they felt certain to meet the same fate as their fellow Armenians elsewhere in Turkey.

George Horton and Henry Morgenthau remained in regular contact with Turkish ministers throughout the autumn of 1915; they were never in any doubt that the Armenian deportations had been planned and orchestrated by senior figures in the government. But it was hard to find written proof of this in the years that followed the end of the First World War when there was talk of charging those responsible with crimes against humanity. Most of the Ottoman archives were shredded, burned or dispersed in an effort to efface all record of what had taken place. Nevertheless, a handful of documents escaped the destruction and one of these was brought to the attention of Clifford Heathcote-Smith, Smyrna’s former consul.

‘I was approached confidentially by someone who stated that there was still, in the Director of Public Security, Constantinople, an official who had been in the Minister of the Interior’s Department during the whole of the war.’ This individual had been in charge of all the material relating to the Armenians and the measures ordered by the government. ‘He said that just before the Armistice, officials had been going to the archives’ department at night and making a clean sweep of most of the documents, but that the original draft of the orders relating to the Armenian massacres had been saved.’

It was this draft document that Heathcote-Smith managed to acquire. It was entitled ‘The Ten Commandments of the Comite Union and Progress [sic]’ and was the minutes of a secret conference attended by the Minister of the Interior, Talaat Bey, and four of his senior officials in the winter of 1914.

Commandment One set the tone for the entire document. It called for the arrest of all Armenians who were working against the government and their ostensible deportation to Baghdad or Mosul. Once they were on the march, their Turkish guards were to ‘wipe them out either on the road or there’. Commandment Three called on officials to excite Muslim opinion in Van, Erzeroum and Adana ‘[and] provoke organised massacres’. Commandment Five was to ‘exterminate all males under 50, priests and teachers, [and] leave girls and children to be Islamised’. Commandment Eight called for the murder of any Armenians still serving in the army, while Commandment Nine ordered that ‘all action . . . begin simultaneously, and thus leave no time for preparation of defensive measures’.

The document might have provided enough evidence to convict Talaat Bey of crimes against humanity, but by the time Clifford Heathcote-Smith handed it over to British ministers, events had moved on. The war was over and Talaat Bey had been killed by an Armenian assassin. Heathcote-Smith’s document was quietly filed away in the Public Record Office, bound together with a sheaf of miscellaneous papers in box FO371/4172. It remains there to this day.

Saving the Enemy

G
eorge Horton and his wife had long been accustomed to spend the hour before dusk relaxing on the terrace of their apartment on Frank Street. From here, they had an alluring view of the bay of Smyrna, especially in the evening when the westerly sun dipped below the Aegean.

The Hortons were admiring this very scene on the evening of 23 May 1916 when they noticed two black specks in the sky, far out to sea. As they grew larger, Horton realised that two planes were speeding towards the city, ‘low down and very near, glittering in the sun’. They dipped even lower as they approached the shoreline, then veered away from the European quarter, heading towards Mount Pagus and the Turkish part of town. As they flew over the souks, they dropped shells onto the buildings below.

Horton watched in a mixture of awe and fascination. ‘They tipped slightly every time a bomb was dropped,’ he wrote, ‘as though to let it slide off.’ The planes also dropped hundreds of printed proclamations, all bearing Britain’s royal coat of arms. These declared that such bombing raids would continue for as long as German Coastal guns fired on the British vessel at anchor in the bay of Smyrna.

The damage caused by the raid provoked a serious escalation in tensions inside the city. Four Muslims were killed and part of the Turkish quarter was destroyed. The bombardment also created a crisis for Rahmi Bey. He was under mounting pressure to obey directives issued in Constantinople. Now, the British action had further inflamed Turkish indignation at the leniency he showed towards the Allied nationals still living in the city.

Horton sympathised with Rahmi Bey. He sent an urgent despatch to Constantinople, and thence to London, warning that families like the Whittalls and the Girauds – and therefore Smyrna itself – would face disastrous consequences if there was another raid. He pointed out that the bombardment had caused considerable destruction of life and property but had failed to hit a single military target.

Horton’s undiplomatic language irked British Admiralty officials. They were especially riled by the consul’s remarks on the inaccuracy of the targeting and responded by releasing a statement defending their actions. ‘All reasonable efforts were made to confine the bombardment of Smyrna to railway stations, fortresses, harbours and other places of military importance.’ Horton would later remark wryly that ‘in those days, if an aeroplane bomb dropped within a mile of its objective, the pilot was commended for good marksmanship.’

The next few days passed peacefully, giving Horton confidence that his strongly worded telegram had been heeded by London. He was therefore astonished when he saw the same planes racing towards the city less than a week after the first raid. Thirty bombs were dropped on residential districts, killing fifteen people and wounding twice as many. Eleven houses were pulverised in the bombardment and many other buildings were seriously damaged. When Horton walked through the city once the raid was over, he was confronted by scenes of such horror that he was to remember them for years to come. ‘A Greek mother . . . ran about the streets, screaming and stark mad, carrying in her arms the body of her headless babe.’ All the victims were innocent civilians who had played no role in the war. Among the dead were an Armenian couple who had been married just hours earlier and had been killed in their nuptial bed. ‘The whole front of their house had been torn off,’ wrote Horton, ‘so that they could be plainly seen.’

As this new raid looked certain to spark civil unrest, Rahmi Bey took the highly unusual step of addressing in person the city’s inhabitants. ‘The
vali
himself, splendidly mounted, rode through the city with a staff of aides and announced to various groups of people that they should be calm and have implicit confidence in the government.’ He was helped in his task of assuaging Muslim passions by the fact that all of the dead were Christian. ‘If those bombs had dropped also in the Turkish quarter,’ wrote Horton, ‘there would have been a massacre of Englishmen, Italian and French at Smyrna of which the world would have been talking yet.’

Yet this second raid left Rahmi Bey with little room for manoeuvre. Government ministers in Constantinople were threatening ‘severe measures’ unless he punished everyone of English, French and Italian origin. Rahmi had no option but to intern all the adult male nationals of the Allied powers.

It is strange that few of the surviving Levantine memoirs make any mention of an episode that must have been stressful, upsetting and undignified. Herbert Octavius, Edward Whittall and many of their neighbours must surely have been interned in the spring of 1916. But only Mary Giraud, Edmund’s daughter, made anything more than a passing reference to the events that followed the second bombing raid. She recalled how the Turkish military arrived at their Bournabat mansion one evening and arrested her father. ‘[He] was put into [a] concentration [camp],’ she wrote, ‘and I remember visiting him at a hospital without exactly understanding the reason for his incarceration except that it had something to do with the war.’

Frightened by this rude intrusion into her idyllic childhood, Mary asked her family why her father had been taken away against his will. This, however, was still a time when the youngsters were excluded from the affairs of the adult world. ‘No one saw fit to explain things to children,’ she wrote, ‘and obviously didn’t understand their sense of fear.’