It was all a pleasant business: the historical context of "On the Quai at Smyrna".

Stewart, Matthew

"On the Quai at Smyrna" exemplifies Hemingway's skill in fictionalizing events he did not witness. The magnitude and particularities of the Smyrna catastrophe are now largely forgotten. Using his iceberg principle, Hemingway creates a remarkable but ultimately puzzling narrative voice.. Laying open the story's diplomatic and military context and revealing the horrific events that the speaker witnessed helps to elucidate the speaker's frame of mind, his manner of speaking and the story's tone. The speaker's self-protective irony is generated by self-disgust resulting from an enforced and prolonged powerlessness in the face of inhumane behavior, itself the byproduct of duplicitous politics.

**********

One of the keenest impressions which I brought away with me from Smyrna was a feeling of shame that I belonged to the human race.

George Horton, U.S. Consul at Smyrna

If these very simple things were to be made permanent, as, say, Goya tried to make them in Los Desastros de la Guerra, it could not be done with any shutting of the eyes. Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

"ON THE QUAI AT SMYRNA" is one of four fictions of In Our Time whose topical context is the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22. Originally published under the title "Introduction by the Author" in the 1930 Scribner's edition, the story stands as a vivid counter-example to the old canard about Hemingway's supposed incapacity for fictionalizing anything that he had not seen first-hand. Smyrna (present-clay Izmir) burned to the ground in a fire started on 13 September 1922. Only the Muslim and Jewish quarters of this cosmopolitan center of Anatolia were spared. Eventually 250,000 refugees--non-Turks all--crammed the waterfront and were forced to remain there under barbaric conditions for nearly two weeks, an event we shall shortly examine in more detail. Undertaking a difficult and potentially dangerous assignment, Hemingway arrived in Constantinople to cover the still unfolding story on 30 September, more than two weeks after the conflagration that gave rise to the refugee scene depicted in the story. (1) While he did make his way to Thrace--the dreary scene of the Greek retreat fictionalized in "Chapter Two" of In Our Time--he never set foot in Smyrna itself (Meyers 97, Reynolds 71-72).

The story-telling strategy chosen by Hemingway is neither straightforward nor pat. "On the Quai" begins in medias res with the reader seemingly eavesdropping on one snippet from a war-story session, and thus having no larger context in which to frame the events. At the outset, the reader is confronted with a welter of antecedentless pronouns to sort out gradually. The story is shot through with various ironies and delivered by a storyteller who was a British officer at Smyrna. The narrator who frames the story ("The strange thing was, he said ...") remains anonymous, as does the "he" whose voice then proceeds to relate the events of the story (IOT 11). This speaker (the British "he") implies that the framing narrator has shared some facets of his experience ("You remember the harbor"), reinforcing the impression of a conversation between two old war chums (IOT 12, Stewart 37).

The sheer strangeness and the awful qualities of the events depicted command attention; nonetheless the storyteller himself remains of particular fascination. Missing in the criticism of the story is a full elaboration of the historical context the speaker has lived through--and the effects of his experiences on the formulation of his narrative voice. Jeffrey Meyers's useful summary of Hemingway's experiences in Constantinople and Thrace stops short of explaining the particular historical aspects of the Smyrna affair that would have affected Hemingway's storyteller. According to Hemingway's well-known formulation of his iceberg technique, these elided aspects correspond to the "things" the author knew but omitted, for the story does not develop the historical background to the events narrated (or only alluded to) therein. (2) Meyers concludes that Hemingway's omissions are consistent with his interest in developing a "spotlight rather than a stage" in his Greco-Turkish fictions (98). This is true insofar as it describes the author's aesthetic intent, but Meyers' account does not reveal the full story of diplomatic deceitfulness, nor the magnitude of the horrors involved in the Smyrna debacle, nor does he state that Hemingway's speaker would have been privy to this background as well as to the immediate events. This fuller history amounts to the dark backdrop without which the spotlight would not function as a spotlight. The speaker is speaking out of a deeper history than has been heretofore acknowledged.

The story's intriguing narrative voice is evidently British, laden with irony and sang-froid, which seem to be the key elements in a self-produced protective shell. (3) The speaker gives the impression of having seen too much, of having experienced more than he can handle. And he has found himself powerless to mitigate a terrible situation even in the slightest. He needs to tell this story, but will not allow himself straightforwardly to confess the degree of horror he felt, nor to elaborate the particulars of his experience. Thus the horrible becomes "nice" in his recounting.

That the historical events relating to "On the Quai at Smyrna" have grown dim after eight decades is inevitable. Although Hemingway was not present to see the Greek army's retreat and evacuation from Smyrna, nor the massacre of Armenians and the razing of the city which followed hard on its re-occupation by the Turks, he was undoubtedly familiar with the outlines of the story before arriving in Constantinople, and had ample opportunity to hear particulars since he stayed for over three weeks to cover the denouement to the catastrophe (Reynolds 73, 78). He spoke to journalists and as many other people in-the-know as he could find, including British liaison officers. As James R. Mellow has stated, it took only a few days for Hemingway to "pick up a knowledgeable vocabulary and widening background in Middle Eastern politics" that would allow him "to assume the voice of authority" often present in his journalism (196). With experience of the Italian front in the First World War and of post-war Europe, he already had direct knowledge of modern warfare's inhumane aspects. By 1922, the displacement of mass populations, the display of brutality towards civilian and military populations alike, and the extreme situations forced upon people by war (here, for example, the need to give birth in the dark hold of a ship), had become a familiar result of modern political-military conduct. Even though man's industrialized inhumanity had-already demonstrated itself in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Smyrna disaster was nonetheless shocking, and remains so to this day.

The events that transpired in Anatolia between the years 1919-1922 were momentous in the formation of modern Turkey and modern Greece alike. The destruction by fire of the lovely and cosmopolitan seaside city can be seen as a climax to a series of political and military misadventures begotten by the Great Powers upon a too-willing Greece. Catastrophic defeats (Gallipoli, the Alamo, Little Big Horn) can produce a special resonance in the public imagination, and Smyrna has achieved a quasi-mythic potency for Greeks. The Greco-Turkish war in general and the Smyrna debacle in particular are events of such complexity that no article can articulate, let alone evaluate, every detail. (4) However, several aspects of the affair hold a particular relevance for Hemingway's story. Greece had reason to expect British support in the autumn of 1922 when Mustafa Kemal launched a counter-offensive westward through Asia Minor towards Smyrna. Under the leadership of Eleutherios Venizelos, whom British Prime Minister David Lloyd George called (in an unfortunately worded but well-intended phrase) "the greatest statesman Greece had thrown up since the days of Pericles," the Greeks had lent support to the Entente powers during the latter stages of the First World War (qtd. in Swallow 111). Thus the Greeks anticipated Allied support after the war. In light of Lloyd George's openly expressed pro-Greek sentiments, his warm feelings for Venizelos, and his periodic official and quasi-official encouragement of Hellenic aspirations, these expectations were not unreasonable. Foremost among the anticipated rewards was the return (as the Greeks saw the matter) to Greece of Anatolia and its gem city Smyrna after long years of Ottoman control; this restoration of Greek dominion in Asia Minor was of particular importance in the Venizelist political agenda, a key feature of the so-called "Great Idea" propounded by his government. While there was a good-deal of territorial self-aggrandizement and even outright grasping inherent in the "Great Idea," Smyrna could fairly be described as more Greek than Turkish in 1919.

After long deliberation that did not produce a document abundant in foresight, the Treaty of Sevres was signed on 10 August 1920 (but never implemented). This document outlined the Great Powers' peace terms with Turkey (not covered by Versailles). It was produced in the wake of mutually exclusive Allied wartime promises--the same territories being pledged to both Italy and Greece--and fabricated in the mold of nationalistic self-seeking and diplomatic intrigue that characterized such a large part of the victors' agenda. The treaty left Anatolia nominally under Turkish sovereignty, but to be administered by Greece for a minimum of five years, after which a plebiscite would be held. This diplomatic prescription for confusion and resentment had been preceded by Greek military occupation of the area (begun 15 May 1919, and initially entailing 20,000 troops) achieved "under the protection of allied warships" and with the special approval of Lloyd George's government (Clogg 113). Perhaps the harshest interpretation of Sevres was voiced, not surprisingly, by the ardent patriot and inveterate French power broker Raymond Poincare:

 Mr. Lloyd George, in particular, and M. Venizelos, made up
 their minds to throw Greece into an adventure which had no
 other object than to serve the interests of British Imperialism in
 Asia Minor, and which was doomed from the outset to certain
 failure. (qtd. in Cosmetatos 301)

This interpretation of events would have it that instead of committing its own army during a period when it was steadily demobilizing, Britain maneuvered Greece into committing its army as a proxy to keep the Turks at bay in a potentially oil-rich area. Thus Britain could guard against an overextension of those forces that remained mobilized, and simultaneously maintain a lower profile. This interpretation has been offered not just by Marxists, realpolitik cynics, and anti-British statesman, but was also voiced by Winston Churchill: "At last peace with Turkey: and to ratify it, War with Turkey! However, so far as the Great Allies were concerned the war was to be fought by proxy. Wars when fought thus by great nations are often very dangerous for the proxy" (399). From the Turkish point of view, the terms indeed represented a spur to the new Nationalists (the party of Kemal Pasha) who were not content to suffer indignities passively, least of all the insertion of Greece into the heart of the Turkish homeland. (5) In the words of Charles Swallow, "[While] the Allies ponderously went about their business of drawing up the Sevres peace terms, they were for the most part happily unaware of the flames that had been kindled in [Turkish] Nationalist hearts by this final affront to their self-esteem. By encouraging the Greeks to invade Smyrna, Lloyd George had made a most disastrous mistake" (111-112).

In the end, although Lloyd George was at bottom pro-Greek, a number of other powerful British figures were not, and the Prime Minister himself most surely held Britain's self-interests closer to heart than the goals of Venizelos, no matter how sincerely he wished for Greek success in meeting those goals. At the very least, one can see the justice in Michael Llewellyn Smith's description of British policy as "encouraging Greece without committing Britain" (283). Hemingway undoubtedly became familiar with this background during his time in Constantinople and later had yet more time, to consider it while covering the Lausanne Conference convened to set forth the peace terms at the end of the Greco-Turkish War. His views on the proceedings at Lausanne reveal a great deal of skepticism if not outright jaundice regarding diplomats and their machinations. (6) The attitudes he developed at this conference are consistent with the submerged iceberg of "On the Quai." No matter that the events depicted in the story pre-date Lausanne, the attitude of the author reflects a post-Sevres, post-Lausanne frame of mind.

While Great Power political stratagems hold a fascination in their own right, what have they to do with Hemingway's story, and most particularly with the speaker? In brief, he and the men whom he commands will be forced to witness the consequences of British political miscalculation. As a senior officer assigned to the region, the speaker may have been present when his government's warships sponsored the Greek military control of Smyrna some three years prior to the events he describes. At the very least, he would have been aware of the supportive public proclamations made by the Lloyd George government on behalf of the Greeks. And he is present to see the end result of what Poincare termed the British and Greek "adventure." In other words, it would be easy for him to see Greece as the victim of political blundering, vacillation, and even intentional manipulation by the British. Even if one assigns no malicious intention to British behavior, the end result for Greece can hardly seem other than a betrayal. (7) It is fair to infer that the speaker was cognizant of his government's conduct, and that he finds it far from "a most pleasant business."

Those with a conscience in Whitehall were no doubt troubled by the unpleasant outcome of Greece's entry into Anatolia. Those actually present at Smyrna would be left to witness the effects of that conduct, not on the political abstraction and diplomotic playing piece called Greece, but on actual Greeks--tens of thousands of them, and thousands of Armenians and other Levantine populations as well. As the war wound down in the late summer of 1922, the Greeks were routed and rapidly driven back through Smyrna, which the Turks promptly razed (all but the Turkish and Jewish quarters). (8) Even in Greece's utter defeat, no British help was forthcoming, no military support, no diplomatic pressure, not even humanitarian aid. "A quarter of a million people fled to the [Smyrna] waterfront to escape the inferno, but the allied troops and ships stationed in the port for the most part maintained an attitude of studied neutrality" (Clogg 118). Most studiously neutral of all were the British, a cruel irony given that they had formerly presented themselves as the staunchest Allied supporter of Greek claims in Asia Minor. (9) Survivors speak of the British refusal to come to the aid of refugees on the waterfront:

 "It's dark.... And these people are swimming out to the boats
 and they're turning the floodlights on them and pushing them
 back. From the English boats they're pouring water on them....
 They didn't pick up the swimmers. They took moving pictures."
 (Survivor Charles Kassabian qtd. in Housepian's Smyrna Affair
 149; cf. similar testimony also in Housepian, esp. Chap. 14; cf.
 Horton passim on Allied non-intervention, including testimony
 of eye witnesses.)

"On the Quai at Smyrna" does not indicate just how long the waterfront horrors lasted, but the fact is that they stretched on for days. The speaker was not simply sent in to clean up the mess after the fact, bad as that in itself would be; rather, he would have been present during the entire disaster. The fire raged from 13-15 September, and, while a relative handful of refugees made their way onto the Allied ships which remained in the harbor the entire time, no systematic rescue effort began until 24 September when the first Greek ships entered the harbor to take passengers on board. Tens of thousands of victims lived for nearly two weeks not only under inhumane conditions, but under the constant threat of deliberate brutality. For those such as Hemingway's British officer, this meant nearly two weeks o f standing by and witnessing the horrors, all the while "anchored but a few hundred yards away" (Horton 125).

What exactly transpired in those long days and nights? The Turks robbed, assaulted, brutalized, and murdered men, women, and children alike. Women were raped and abducted as the spoils of war. "How they screamed every night at midnight," says Hemingway's speaker, "I do not know why they screamed at that time." But of course he does know. (10) And, interested as he seems to be in observing obstetrical matters, he likewise would have learned at first hand that terror and even prolonged states of intense anxiety can induce premature labor, a contributing factor, undoubtedly, in the improvised births that stand out in his memory, along with the dead babies being carried around by their mothers.

For several days before the fire, the Turks had systematically hunted down and murdered Armenians in their enclave; Armenian men, if captured, were often sent on death marches into the vast interior of Asia Minor. Those who somehow managed to make it to the quai often found that they had only postponed the inevitable: "British marines stood by, deliberately idle, while Turkish troops goaded and chased their Armenian victims into the sea, then coolly shot them as they swam for safety" (M. L. Smith 307). On 16 September, Mustafa Kemal issued a proclamation (the Turks dropped leaflets onto the waterfront from airplanes) declaring all Greek and Armenian men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to be prisoners of war, thus paving the way for further roundups and death marches. (11)

As a witness to these events, Hemingway's narrator feels extreme guilt born of frustration and moral confusion. The government that he serves has decided to let Greece and her people hang out to dry. A self-described "senior officer" the speaker finds himself under orders to do nothing. "You remember when they ordered Us not to come in and take off any more?" he asks. The question reveals that he had initially been engaged in rescue, but was subsequently restrained from continuing, a turn of events likely to induce the utmost sense of frustration (12). (12) The political-military stakes are too high, the outcome of any particular action, uncertain and therefore diplomatically too risky. Commanded to sit tight, the speaker saves no one, helps no one, but must remain passively to witness everything.

Once the situation is off the boil, his superiors apparently think it safe to order burial details: "We were clearing them off the pier, had to clear off the dead ones ..." (11). Corpses will receive attention; the still-living will not. While the calamity is at its peak, the speaker shines the ship's searchlights on the trapped victims "every night at midnight" in order, he says, "to quiet them" (11). This is a strange and guilt-induced manner of describing the use of the searchlights, centered on the victims ("to stop their screaming"), rather than on the perpetrators, whom the searchlights were actually intended to expose. Unable or unwilling to go dockside and put a stop to the violence, the men in harbor instead resort to the feeble measure Of searchlight sweeps in an effort to discourage Turkish predation. Esther Pohl Lovejoy, a highly experienced international relief physician, has given this description:

 Night after night blood-curdling shrieks, such as Dante never
 imagined in Hell, swept along that ghastly waterfront.... When
 Turkish regulars or irregulars, under cover of darkness, came
 through the ruins to the quai for the purpose of robbing the
 refugees or abducting their girls, the women and children, a hundred
 thousand or more in concert, shrieked for light, until the warships
 in the harbor would throw their searchlights to and fro along
 the quai, and the robbers would slink back into the ruins. (156)

The British action intended to suppress violence simultaneously illuminates its victims, reinforcing the ineffectualness of the sailor spectators--one more cruel irony in a story full of such.

Though the stench of burned flesh that hovered over the harbor must have been impossible to ignore, the international spectators proved adept at turning a blind eye and a deaf ear. When the nocturnal moaning and screaming began at harborside, aboard ships the sailors would begin to play records at full volume. Survivors report hearing Caruso singing Pagliacci. Likewise, onboard the British flagship the navy band played nightlong concerts (Lovejoy 15, Housepian 171). (13) Perhaps this scene could be turned into the darkest of dark comedies, but it seems to transcend any claims that could be made for it by the Theater of the Absurd and comes directly to reside in the Theater of Cruelty. That which quiets or drowns out the clamor of the huddled masses--an expedient on behalf of psychic survival--provides the grist for the speaker's future bad dreams. Suppression becomes the stuff of repression.

What were the speaker's alternatives? The story provides an example of what happens to those who "g[e]t a bit above themselves." A local Turkish commander fired blank artillery shells at the speaker's ship as it approached the shore. The speaker acknowledges that his intention had indeed been to shell the Turkish quarter Of Smyrna, so the local Turkish commander's judgment was actually correct. Nonetheless, that man was "sacked" by Mustafa Kemal, who has every intention of letting sleeping dogs lie. With the Greeks defeated, only "outside" intervention can hamper the Turks, and Kemal apparently wishes to keep the British quiescent in their ships. What happened to the speaker's plans to "blow the town simply to hell"? The artillery blanks seem to have warned him off, prompting him to decide against taking action. Subsequently, he will not put himself in the position to be sacked for exceeding his authority, that is, for starting an incident with the now-victorious Turks. He scraps the plan, and retreats into inaction, setting up future self-recrimination and guilt over his timidity, perhaps even self-perceived cowardice, for he also offers his opinion that the Turks "could have blown us clean out of the water." (14)

He opts to play the game of fending off the sort of military/diplomatic non-incidents with which the story opens, wherein he feels obliged to make a public display of acquiescence to a Turkish officer's bullying demand that someone under the speaker's command be punished for having insulted him. This incident of the vindictive Turkish officer takes on the qualities of an absurdist tale. Victorious and in the midst of wholesale suffering and destruction, he insists that a British sailor be punished for a trumped up insult. Happy to see his false sense of honor repaired at anyone's expense, the Turk feels "topping" about the severe punishment that he believes will be meted out to the "inoffensive chap" he has targeted as a scapegoat (11). The speaker undoubtedly finds the incident insanely petty given the larger context of tragic events being played out on the quai, but his orders are to keep peace with the Turks. While recounting this cynical incident, the speaker deploys his well-developed ironic rhetorical devices in an apparent effort to recount simultaneously the brutality he has witnessed and to keep it at a psychically safe distance.

The historian Marjorie Housepian registers that a few days before this incident would have transpired, aboard their command ship the Iron Duke, British officials looked on through binoculars as Turks threw pails of kerosene onto crowded rafts then set them ablaze. "On rowboats, barges, and improvised rafts of all sizes and descriptions human cargo floated from ship to ship, faces raised, arms outstretched in speechless supplication" (158). The Raft of the Medusa had entered the 20th century. Once the Turks had established themselves as victors, commanding British Admiral Sir Osmond de Beauvoir Brock turned aside the repeated appeals of his subordinate officers to send out lifeboats. He insisted on the paramount importance of Britain demonstrating to the Turks that England was not their enemy and had no wish to engage them. Saving helpless Greeks and Armenians, he apparently determined, would be detrimental to the Turkish perception of British neutrality, so burn and drown they must. (15)

In the days succeeding Smyrna a Turco-British war did loom as a palpable threat. Charles Swallow has stated that "the danger of an incident sparking off a major battle ... was very real" (120). Exactly what sort of actions may have ignited a conflict and how much suffering such a conflict would have exacted had it been ignited, must be left for counterfactual historians to estimate. It might seem that the British in 1922 could not have been truly anxious about the prospect of defeat at the hands of the already beaten Turks; however, Britain was war-weary, not in a mood for re-deploying troops against the tough and distant enemy who had recently defeated them in the debacle of the Dardanelles. Popular considerations aside, official Britain did not wish to lose its political and economic foothold in the "new" Turkey to France or to other Western powers. (16)

But politics take on a different cast to those directly affected. In one of Harry Walden's masterfully drawn flashbacks in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936), he recalls the neutral (and therefore powerless) British observer who watched "the newly arrived Constantine officers, that did not know a goddamned thing, and the artillery had fired into [their own] troops and [he] had cried like a baby" (CSS 48). For the speaker of "On the Quai at Smyrna," to ignore the humanitarian prerogatives of the moment must likewise have seemed the moral equivalent of standing by idly to watch the commission of murder. Those days and nights at Smyrna are the only thing in his life that has plagued him with nightmares, he says, trying to defend himself from the psychically untenable with a stiff-upper-lip and sarcasm: "It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business" (12).

The Smyrna catastrophe ended in a holocaust that caused thousands of deaths, the conflagration of the Christian enclaves of the city. The refugees' consequent flight to the waterfront and extensive evacuation of Greeks from Anatolia and other Turkish regions and would come shortly after the razing of the city (this calamity is treated by Hemingway in "Chapter Two" of In Our Time). The speaker of "On the Quai at Smyrna," undoubtedly narrating his story after all these events have transpired, is burdened with a nearly unspeakable sense of guilt and dereliction of humanitarian duty. Operating by means of his iceberg principle, Hemingway creates in the story a remarkable but ultimately puzzling narrative voice. Untangling the diplomatic and military background to the story and putting on stage a fuller sampling of those horrific events to which the speaker was witness helps to clarify the tone of the story and the reasons behind the speaker's particular manner of speaking. His mind has been working overtime to overcome the self-disgust engendered by an enforced and prolonged powerlessness. Knowing something of the magnitude and barbaric nature of the suffering that form the backdrop to this story ought to enable the reader, to borrow a phrase from Hemingway, to form a better "picture of the whole."

NOTES

(1.) Hemingway's journalistic work produced nineteen articles for the Toronto Star, more if one counts the articles submitted in coverage of the Lausanne convention that set the peace terms ending the conflict--not the fourteen reported in some scholarly accounts.

(2.) Peter Lecouras condemns Hemingway for "dehistoriciz[ing] the Greek culture and its people" (29). While granting that the iceberg technique can achieve emotional resonance at the cost of historical fullness, I do not share Lecouras's assumption that a fiction writer has the same obligations to historical subject matter as does an historian. Nor do I find the author or his narrator to be chauvinistic and anti-Greek, as charged in this recent article.

(3.) As a model for the voice, biographers have noted the influence of Hemingway's good friend and military idol the British officer E. E. "Chink" Dorman-Smith, whom Hemingway met in Italy while they were recuperating respectively from illness and wounding. While this may be true in regard to verbal mannerisms, this identification sheds little light on the speaker's circumstances and frame of mind.

(4.) The matter of apportioning blame is fraught with contentions and counter-contentions that cannot be fully described, let alone judged, in this article. For more information, see relevant entries in the works cited.

(5.) The Turks were not synonymous with the ruling Ottomans, nor Turkey with the Ottoman Empire. Indeed the ruling Ottoman class tended to look down on the Turks as an under-bred and inferior race.

(6.) The most revealing example might be the poem "They All Made Peace--What is, Peace?" wherein Hemingway scathingly reveals the peccadillos and implies the moral shortcomings of the great men sitting round the tables (88 Poems 63-64).

(7.) Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to elaborate the historical particulars, other Allied powers also manipulated and betrayed the Greeks. Likewise Greek miscalculations, political infighting, and internecine maneuvering played heavily in setting the stage for the catastrophe.

(8.) There is not absolute consensus on the Turkish culpability for setting and sustaining the fire. In works oriented to the study of Turkey or important Turkish figures, descriptions of the event may be brief, bland, passively voiced, sometimes described in fatalistic terms, and sometimes distinctly evasive. "A fire raged through the city" would serve as a typical example. But who set it? What did the Turks do in response to the fire? In the end, so many eyewitness testimonials exist (many by victims, but also many by other European nationals and North Americans) that it would seem impossible to deny that the Turks deliberately staged the fire. There are also Turkish historians who, with great bravery, have concluded that the fire was a product of Turkish design (for examples see Housepian, "Introduction" 13).

(9.) Survivors' stories and relevant memoirs make clear that French and Italian authorities were much more active in aiding survivors, an irony since both of these countries had taken an anti-Greek, pro-Turk diplomatic position early in the conflict. American, warships were also present in the harbor, and, while some refugees were eventually allowed on board, U.S. policy under the intensely pro-Turkish Admiral Mark Bristol, was, like that of Britain, simply to stay out of the business of hauling refugees out of the water and off the docks.

(10.) Many witnesses speak of the nighttime screaming. The recollections of Melvin Johnson are of particular interest to Hemingway readers. Johnson was an American seaman stationed as a guard at the YMCA, where five hundred refugee women and children were jammed inside, hiding out. Contrary to the speaker's memory of the matter, Johnson recalls that the screaming started at nightfall and continued without cease all night long. Johnson's memories interestingly coincide with the speaker's on another matter: "And all the time those women, some of 'em giving birth from fright--you know, ahead of time" (qtd. in Housepian 123).

(11.) Turkish genocide against the Armenians, undertaken on a massive scale in 1915, was accomplished in great measure by forced marches and "deportation to the interior." This phrase, writes the humanitarian relief worker and witness Esther Pohl Lovejoy, "was regarded as a short life sentence to slavery under brutal masters, ended by mysterious death" (150). While the present article plainly raises the issue of Turkish atrocities, which were indeed of an inhuman scope, it should also be stated that Greek forces had engaged in unnecessary brutality during the Greek occupation of the Anatolian regions in question, first, upon their entry into Smyrna, and more particularly during their hasty retreat towards Smyrna in the final, losing stages of the war some three and a half years later. Arnold Toynbee, serving on the ground in an official oversight capacity, provides a noteworthy voice of contemporary protest against Greek misconduct (by present standards quite possibly amounting to war crimes). Indeed, the cycle of outrage and reprisal had unfortunately been woven into the history of the area long before the conflicts of 1919-22. In his fiction and reportage, Hemingway notes instances of cruelty originated by both sides, and perhaps, on the whole, comes down harder on the Greeks than the Turks. This note does not seek to draw a moral equivalence between the Greek and Turkish atrocities. An examination of this issue would require a detailed consideration of context and scale quite beyond the scope of this essay.

(12.) This reference to removing people may refer only to corpses. The sentence is ambiguous, partly because the previous and only other reference to "clearing them off the pier," is itself slightly ambiguous but seems to indicate exclusively evacuating corpses: "We were clearing them off the pier, had to clear off the dead ones" (11). However, the total sense of the second reference seems to suggest the rescue of still-living victims: "They were all out there on the pier and it wasn't at all like an earthquake or that sort of thing because they [British commanders and politicians, himself included[ never knew ... what the old Turk would do" (12).

(13.) Ataturk's biographer Lord Kinross assures his reader that these military strains were merely the result of the band's compliance with "service routine at this hour" (371), which only reinforces the question already begged: under such dire circumstances, why was the British navy merely following routine?

(14.) Noting the presence of numerous Allied warships in the Smyrna harbor, American Consul George Horton, a man with thirty years of service in the Near East, has written that "a united order from the commanders or from any two of them--one harmless shell thrown across the Turkish quarter--would have brought the Turks to their senses" (53). A major theme in Horton's fervid book is that the atrocities committed at Smyrna could have been prevented if only the Allies had asserted themselves. He attributes the catastrophe to a combination of Allied economic self-interest, political maneuvering, and indifference to the plight of the refugees. See also Housepian for a blistering indictment of Great Power conduct at Smyrna.

(15.) Housepian records testimony from official archival sources stating that during the course of several hours' argument Brock's officers attempted to persuade him to launch rescue boats (159).

(16.) Nonetheless, the so-called Chanak Crisis that followed hard on the successful Turkish offensive did bring down the Lloyd George government.

WORKS CITED;

Churchill, Sir Winston. The World Crisis. Vol. 5. Originally published as The Aftermath. New York: Scribner's, 1929.

Clogg, Richard. A Short History of Modern Greece. New York: Cambridge UP, 1979.

Cosmetatos, S. P. P. The Tragedy of Greece. Trans. E. W. and A. Dickes. New York: Brentano's, 1928.

Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner's, 1967.

--. The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

--. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner's, 1932.

--. 88 Poems. 1979. Ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis. Lincoln, NE: U Nebraska P, 1992.

--. In Our Time. 1925, 1930. New York: Scribner's, 1970.

Horton, George. The Blight of Asia. 1926. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953.

Housepian, Marjorie. The Smyrna Affair. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971.

Kinross, Lord. Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey. New York: William Morrow-Quill, 1964.

Lecouras, Peter. "Hemingway in Constantinople." The Midwest Quarterly 43.1 (Autumn 2001): 29-42.

Lovejoy, Esther Pohl. Certain Samaritans. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

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MATTHEW STEWART

Boston University