XXIII
It was a British ship which took me from Constantinople to Smyrna, and it gave me a thrill of patriotic pleasure to get porridge for breakfast, and ham and eggs with buttered toast.
Apart from the officers and crew, there were few English folk aboard. I can only remember one—a good-looking and good-humored major, who was bound for Alexandria in company with a pretty Greek woman who seemed to be under his chivalrous protection. The other first-class passengers were Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. On the lower deck were groups of Italian soldiers who sang and danced continuously, a few Turks, an old Arab woman in a dirty white robe, who gazed all day long over the side of the ship as though reading some spell of fate in the lace work patterns of froth woven by our passage through the dead calm sea, and families of Israelites lying among their bundles.
It was good to lie on the boat deck in the direct glare of the sun, pouring its warmth down from a cloudless sky, and to watch with half-shut eyes the golden glitter of the sea and its change of color and light from deepest blue to palest green, as the currents crossed our track and white clouds passed overhead and the sun sank low, as evening came. Fairy islands, dreamlike and unsubstantial, appeared on the far horizon, and then seemed to sink below its golden bar. At night the sky was crowded with stars, shining with a piercing brightness, and it seemed no wonder then that to each of them the Greeks had given a name and godlike attributes. They seemed closer to the world than in an English sky, heaven’s brilliant train, and on this ship in a lonely sea—no other boat passed us—the company of the stars was friendly and benign.
From the lower deck came the singing of the Italian soldiers, with their liquid words and open notes, in which I heard something very old in the melody of life. The Greeks were singing, too, in a separate group, softly, to themselves, and with a melancholy cadence. Tiny sparks of fire, like glow-worms, flitted to and fro on the lower deck. It was the glow of cigarette ends, as the Italian soldiers danced the fox trot and the one step. Now and then a match was lighted, and one saw it held in the hollow of brown hands, illumining a dark Italian face.
My son and I sat on coils of rope, up on the boat deck, with a Greek girl with whom we had made friends. She talked and talked, and held us spellbound by her philosophy of life, her gayety, her bitter wisdom, her fearlessness and wit. It was a short voyage, and we have never seen her again, but we shall not forget that laughing Greek girl who spoke half the languages of Europe, and English perfectly, and American with such intimate acquaintance that she could sing little old nigger songs with perfect accent, as it seemed to us. Yet she had never been in England or America, and had spent nearly all her life in Constantinople, with brief visits to Greece, and two frightful years in Russia. She had learnt English, and her negro songs, in the American College at Constantinople, to which she looked back with adoration, though she had been a naughty rebel against all its discipline.
As a governess to a German family in Russia, she had learnt another language—besides Russian, Greek, French, Turkish and English—and had been thoroughly amused with life, until the Red Revolution broke in Moscow. Her Germans fled, leaving her alone in their empty flat, and then she learnt more than ever she had guessed about the cruelties of life. Her life was saved by her gayety and “cheek,” as she called it. When a crowd of Red soldiers threatened to slit her throat, she jeered at them, and then made them roar with laughter by playing comic songs on the piano and singing them with merry pantomime. That was all right, but she starved and went in expectation of death month after month. Her Russian friends, students and intellectuals, were mostly shot or hanged. She recognized some of them as they hung from lamp-posts in the streets, and gave us a vivid imitation of how they looked, with their necks cricked and their tongues hanging out. She became used to that sort of thing.... After wandering adventures, abominable hardships, in dirt and rags, she got through at last to Constantinople, and lived for a time on a Greek gunboat, as one of the crew, wearing one of their caps and a sailor’s jersey. They saved her from starving to death, until she was able to get in touch with her family. Now she was going to Alexandria, as a typist in an English office.
She was tremendously amused with all this experience. She wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It was the adventure of life, and the great game. There was nothing in life but that—and what did death matter after this adventure whenever it came! We spoke of war, and the chance of world peace, and she scoffed at the chance. War was inevitable—the greatest adventure of all. Cruelty?—Yes, that was part of the adventure. Men were heartless, but amusing, even in their cruelties. It was no good looking at life seriously, breaking one’s heart over impossible ideals. It was best to laugh and take things as they came, and shrug one’s shoulders, whatever happened. It was Life!... So we talked under the stars.
There was another girl on board who talked to us. She belonged to a different type and race—a tragic type, and Armenian. She had some frightful photographs in a satchel which she wore always round her waist. They were photographs of Turkish atrocities in Asia Minor. There was one of a Turkish officer sitting on a pile of skulls and smoking a cigarette. Those skulls had once held the living brains of this girl’s family and townsfolk at Samsun. She told me of the death march of the Armenians when the Turks drove them from the coast into the interior. The women and children had been separated from their men folk, who were then massacred. Her father and brother had been killed like that. They passed their bodies on the roadsides. The women and children had been driven forward until many dropped and died, until all were barefoot and exhausted to the point of death. Kurdish brigands had robbed them of the little money they had, and their rings. Some of the younger girls were carried off. Their screams were heard for a long way. There were not many who reached the journey’s end.... A terrible tale, told with a white passion of hate against the Turk, but without tears, and coldly, so that it made me shiver.
In that ship, sailing under the stars in the Ægean Sea, I learnt more than I had known about the infernal history of mankind during war and revolution. I had seen it in the West. These were stories of the East, unknown and unrecorded, as primitive in their horror as when Assyrians fought Egyptians, or the Israelites were put to the sword in the time of Judas Maccabæus.
Our ship put in at Mitylene, and with the Greek girl we explored the port and walked up the hillside to an old fort built by the Venetians in the great days when Venice was the strongest sea power in that part of the world. On the way, the Greek girl chatted to shopkeepers and peasants in their own tongue, and hers, and then climbed to the top of the fort, sitting fearlessly on the edge of the wall and looking back to the sea over which we had traveled, and down to our ship, so small as we saw it from this height.
In the valley, Greek peasants of better type and stock than those at Athens, and true descendants of the people whose tools and gods and jewels they turn up sometimes with their spades, were leading their sheep and goats. Some of them were singing and the sound rose clear up the hillside with a tinkling of goat bells and the baaing of the sheep. Wild flowers were growing in the old walls of the fort, and the hillside was silvered with daisies. We seemed very close to the blue canopy of the sky above us, as we sat on the edge of the wall, and in the warm sunshine, and above that calm, crystal-clear sea, mirroring our ship, we seemed to be touched by the immortality of the gods, and to be invested with the beauty of the springtime of the world.
“It would be good to stay here,” said the Greek girl. “We could keep goats and sing old Greek songs.”
However, presently she was hungry, and scrambled off the wall and said, “The ship—and supper!”
So we went down to the little port again and rowed away from Mitylene to the ship which was sounding its siren for our return.
We reached Smyrna next morning, and I, for one, was astonished by the modern aspect of its sea frontage, upon which the sun poured down. Beyond the broad quays it swept round the gulf in a wide curve of white houses, faced with marble and very handsome along the side inhabited, I was told, by rich Armenian merchants.
“The Turks will never rest till they get Smyrna back,” said the English major by my side, and his words came as a sharp reminder of the lines away beyond the hills, where a Greek army lay entrenched against the Turkish nationalists and Mustapha Kemal. But no shadow of doom crept through the sunlight that lay glittering upon those white-fronted houses, nor did I guess that one day, not far ahead, Englishmen, like myself, looking over the side of this ship, would see the beauty of that city devoured by an infernal fury of flame, and listen to the screams of panic-stricken crowds on those broad quaysides, hidden behind rolling clouds of smoke....
When we landed, in the harbor-master’s pinnace, we found that we had come on a day of festival among the Greek army of occupation and the Greek inhabitants of Smyrna. All the ships in the harbor—among them the very gunboat in which our Greek lady had lived as one of the crew—were dressed in bunting, and flags were flying from many buildings. Greek officers, very dandified, in much decorated uniforms, with highly polished boots, drove along the esplanade in open carriages, carrying great bouquets, on their way to a review by the Commander-in-Chief outside the city. Smyrniote girls, Greek and Armenian, were in fancy frocks and high-heeled shoes tripping gayly along with young Greek soldiers. Bands were playing as they marched, and all the air thrilled with the music of trumpets and military pomp. Few Turks were visible among those Christian inhabitants. They were mostly dockside laborers and porters, wearing the red fez of Islam.
It was the English major who told me of the horror that had happened here when the Greeks first landed. They had rowed off from their transports in boats, and a crowd of these Turkish porters had helped to draw the boats up to the quayside. All the Christian population was on the front, waving handkerchiefs from windows and balconies. Ladies of the American Red Cross were looking at the scene from the balcony of the Grand Hotel Splendid Palace—what a name! There was no sign of hostility from the Turks, but suddenly the Greek soldiers seemed to go mad, and started bayoneting the Turks who had helped them to land. In view of all the women and children who had assembled to greet them with delirious joy, they murdered those defenseless men and flung their bodies into the sea. It was a crime for which many poor innocents were to pay when the Turkish irregulars came into Smyrna with the madness of victory after the destruction of the Greek army by Mustapha Kemal and his Nationalist troops. Well, that grim secret of fate lay hidden in the future when Tony and I booked rooms at the Grand Hotel Splendid Palace and entertained our little Greek lady to breakfast, and then at midday waved towels out of the bedroom window in answer to her signals from the ship which took her on her way to Alexandria and another adventure of life. The English major brought a bucket to the upper deck, as we could see distinctly and wrung a towel over it as a sign of tears. We made the countersign....
The sea front of Smyrna, with its modern marble-fronted houses, masked an older and more romantic city, as we found in many walks in all its quarters. It masked the Turkish squalor of little streets of wooden shops and booths where crowds of Turkish women, more closely veiled than those in Constantinople, bargained for silks and slippers and household goods. In the old markets at the end of Frank Street, now a heap of cindered ruins, we sauntered through the narrow passages with vaulted roofs where old Turks sat cross-legged in their alcoves, selling carpets from Ouchak and Angora, dried raisins and vegetables, strips of colored silk for Turkish dresses, Sofrali linen, Manissa cotton, German-made hardware, and all manner of rubbish from the East and West, drenched in the aroma of spices, moist sugar, oil, and camels.
I was anxious, as a journalist, to get the latest information about the military situation away to the back of Smyrna, and for that purpose called upon the British Military Mission, represented by a General Hamilton and his staff. A charming and courteous man, he was obviously embarrassed by my visit, not knowing how much to tell me of a situation which was extremely delicate in a political as well as a military way. He decided to tell me nothing, and I did not press him, seeing his trouble.
I obtained all the information I wanted, and even more than I bargained for, from the Greek authorities. The fact that I represented The Daily Chronicle, known for its pro-Greek sympathies and for its official connection with Lloyd George’s Government, gave me an almost embarrassing importance. No sooner had I revealed my journalistic mission than I received a visit from a Greek staff officer—Lieutenant Casimatis—who put the entire city of Smyrna at my feet, as it were, and as one small token of my right to fulfill the slightest wish, sent round a powerful military car with two tall soldiers, under orders to obey my commands. Tony was pleased with this attention and other courtesies that were showered upon us. It was he, rather than myself, who interviewed the Commander-in-Chief of the Greek army, and received the salutes of its soldiers as we drove up magnificently to General Headquarters.
A military band was playing outside—selections from “Patience,” by some strange chance—and in the antechamber of the General’s room Greek staff officers, waisted, highly polished, scented, swaggered in and out. The Commander-in-Chief was a very fat old gentleman, uncomfortable in his tight belt, and perspiring freely on that hot day. The windows of his room were open, and the merry music floated in, and the scent of flowers, and of the warm sea. “He received us most politely,” as poor Fragson used to sing in one of my brother’s plays, and with his fat fingers moving about a big map, explained the military situation. It was excellent, he said. The Greek army was splendid, in training and morale, and longing to advance against the Turk, who was utterly demoralized. Those poor Turkish peasants, forcibly enlisted by Mustapha Kemal, wanted nothing but leave to go home. The Greek advance would be a parade—the Commander-in-Chief, speaking in French, repeated his words with relish and pride—“a parade, sir!” Unfortunately, he said, Greece was hampered by differences among the Allies. The French were certainly intriguing with the Turkish Nationalists of Angora—supplying them with arms and ammunition! The Italians were no better, and very jealous of Greek claims in Asia Minor. Greece had trust, however, in the noble friendship of England, in the sympathy and aid of that great statesman, Mr. Lloyd George.... The Greek army would astonish the world.
So the old gentleman talked, and I listened politely, and asked questions, and kept my doubts to myself. There was not a British officer I had met anywhere, except General Hamilton in Smyrna, who had a good word to say for the fighting qualities of Greek soldiers. There was not one I had met who believed that they could hold Smyrna for more than a year or two, until the Turks reorganized.
It was Lieutenant Casimatis who introduced us to the Commander-in-Chief, and he devoted himself to the task of presenting us to all the people of importance in Smyrna, and taking us to schools, hospitals, museums, and other institutions which would prove to us the benevolence and high culture of Greek rulers in Asia Minor. He was a cheery, stout little man, speaking English, which he had learnt in India, and almost bursting with good nature and the desire to pump us with Greek propaganda.
He took us to the Greek Metropolitan at Smyrna, a black-bearded, broad-shouldered, loud-laughing, excitable Bishop of the Orthodox Church, wearing the high black hat and long black robe of his priestly office, but reminding us of one of those Princes of the Church in the Middle Ages who led their armies to battle and sometimes wielded a battleax in the name of the Lord. “An old ruffian,” I heard him called by an English merchant of Bournabat, whose sympathies, however, were decidedly pro-Turk. A picture representing the martyrdom of St. Polycarp at Smyrna, in the early days of the Christian era, adorned the wall opposite his desk, and he waved his hand toward it and spoke of the martyrdom of the Christian people, not so long ago as that, but only a year or two ago, when they were driven from the coast, as that Armenian girl had told me. “The spirit of St. Polycarp,” he said, in barbarous French, “animates the Greek Christians to-day, and nothing would give me greater joy than to die for the faith as he did.” I have never heard whether this pious wish was fulfilled. It seems to me probable.
For a long time he talked of the sufferings of the Greeks and Armenians, calling upon various men in the room—his secretaries and priests—to bear witness to the truth of his tales. Presently, with some ceremony, servants came round with silver trays laden with glasses of iced water and some little plates containing a white glutinous substance. As the guest of ceremony, it was my privilege to be served first, which did not give me the chance of watching what others might do. I took a spoonful of the white substance, and swallowed it, hoping for the best. But it was the worst that I had done. I discovered afterward that it was a resinous stuff called mastica, something in the nature of chewing gum. The mouthful I had swallowed had a most disturbing effect upon my system, and even the Metropolitan was alarmed. My son Tony, served second, was in the same trouble.
In the Greek schools of Smyrna all the scholars were kept in during the luncheon hour, while we went from class to class inspecting their work and making polite bows and speeches to the teachers. The scholars, ranging from all ages of childhood, did not seem to bear us any grudge for their long wait for lunch, and we were much impressed by their discipline, their pretty manners, their beautiful eyes. Tony felt like the Prince of Wales, and was conscious of the “glad eyes” of the older girls.... When Smyrna was reported to be a city of fire and massacre, I thought with dreadful pity of those little ones.
We touched with our very hands the spirit of this ancient race in the time of its glory, when we went into the museum and handled the pottery, the gods, the household ornaments, the memorials—found by peasants with their picks not far below the soil—of that time when Homer was born (it is claimed) in this city of the Ægean, when the Ionians held it, when Lysimachus made it great and beautiful, until it was one of the most prosperous ports in the world, crowded with Greek and Roman and Syrian ships trading between the West and East.
Lieutenant Casimatis took us to his little home away on a lonely road beyond the Turkish quarter, and we spent an evening with his family, a handsome wife and three beautiful children who sang little songs to us in French and Greek. The poor lady was nervous. Some shadow of fear was upon her because of that Turkish army beyond the Greek trenches. I hope with all my heart she escaped from Smyrna with her babes before the horror happened.... I drank to the welfare of Greece in the sweet resinous wine which Lieutenant Casimatis poured out for us. It was a sincere wish, but at the back of my mind was some foreboding.
We drove out one day to Boudja and Bournabat, past the slopes of Mount Pagus and away in the hills. Turkish peasants riding on donkeys or in ox wagons jogged along the dusty tracks. We passed Turkish cemeteries with tombstones leaning at every angle below tall, black cypress trees, and looking back, saw the brown roofs of Smyrna below, as in a panorama under the hot sun which made the gulf like molten metal.
In the country we lost touch with the Western world. It was Asia, with the smell and color and silence of the East. A camel caravan moved slowly in the valley, like a picture in “The Arabian Nights.” But at Boudja, and later at Bournabat, we were astonished to see English-looking girls in English summer frocks, carrying tennis racquets, and appearing as though they had just left Surbiton. These two villages were inhabited by British merchants who had been long settled there as traders in Oriental carpets, spices, raisins, dates, and the merchandise of the East. We called on one of them at Bournabat, and I rubbed my eyes when, with Asia Minor at the gate, we drove up to a house that might have been transplanted from Clapham Park in the early Victorian period, when Cubitt was building for a rich middle class.
The house was furnished like that, except for some bearskins and hunting trophies, and the two old ladies and one old gentleman who gave us tea might have been transported on a magic carpet from a tea party in the time of the Newcomes. We had toasted muffins, and the stouter of the two old ladies (who wore a little lace cap and sat stiffly against an antimacassar, in a chintz-covered chair) asked whether we would take one or two lumps of sugar with our tea. Tony, who was beginning to feel an exile from civilization, beamed with happiness at this English life again.
The old gentleman had been the greatest trader in Asia Minor, and in his younger days had hunted with Turkish peasants in the mountains. He loved the Turk still, though he deplored the cruelties they had done to the Christian populations in the war. For the Greeks he had pity, and dreadful forebodings. He knew something of what was happening behind the Turkish lines, with Mustapha Kemal. There would be no peace until they had Smyrna back again. The Greeks had claimed too much. Venizelos had lost his head. Lloyd George—The old man sighed, and fell into a gloomy silence. “I’m afraid of the future,” he said, presently. “Nobody will listen to my advice. The Greeks think I am pro-Turk. What I want is a just peace, and above all peace. This is only an armed truce.” He told me many things about the situation which filled me with uneasiness. I promised to see him again, but after a few days we left Smyrna for Athens.
We traveled in a little steam yacht which had once been Vanderbilt’s and now was a Greek passenger ship, called Polikos. It was crowded with Greek officers, in elegant uniforms, and very martial-looking until a certain hour of the evening. The passage began in a wonderful calm, and after darkness there were groups of singing folk of different nationalities, as on that other ship, but presently a terrific storm broke upon us, and the singing ceased, and the Polikos was a ship of sick and sorry people.
Tony and I crept to our bunks in a big crowded cabin, and the Greek officers in the other bunks were frightfully and outrageously ill. Early next morning their martial appearance had gone and they were the disheveled wrecks of men. Tony, with extreme heroism, staggered to the saloon and ordered ham and eggs, but thought better of it before they came, and took to his bunk again, below mine which I, less brave, had never left. We were glad to reach Athens without shipwreck.
We had a week of joy there, in dazzling sunshine, and wandered about the ruins of the Acropolis and touched old stones with reverence, and sipped rose-tinted ices in the King’s Gardens, and saw Greek boys throwing the discus in the very arena where the games were played in the Golden Age, and tried to remember odd scraps of classical knowledge, to recall the beauty of the Gods and the wisdom of the poets. All that need not be told, but it was as pro-Greeks that we returned to England, and with memories which made us understand more sharply the tragedy of that defeat when the Cross went down before the Crescent, and the horror happened in Smyrna, and all the world held its breath when Constantinople was threatened with the same fate.