Though the release of The Great Fire was probably timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide, this scholarly yet engaging account is concerned with the September 1922 burning of Smyrna, following its occupation by the Turkish nationalist army, and the mass slaughter of between 10,000 and 100,000 Christian Greeks and Armenians.
Lou Ureneck, who teaches journalism at Boston University, laments that “the story of Smyrna . . . seems to have left no strong impression on the world’s collective memory,” arguing that it “contains lessons about current-day conflicts between the West and Islam; about oil diplomacy; about the uneasy balance between national strategic interests and advocacy of human rights,” while also being “a surprising tale of individual men and women—of ambition and brutality, bumbling statecraft, extraordinary military and political leadership, and unlikely heroism.”
His thesis sets our expectations high, and to his credit, Ureneck largely manages to give each of these features of the Smyrna atrocity its due. One of his strengths as a storyteller is the skill to provide detailed portraits of Smyrna’s numerous victims, perpetrators, bureaucratic abettors, and ordinary saviors in a manner that elicits our sympathies—or antipathies. His divergent descriptions of George Horton, the American consul in Smyrna, and of Mark Bristol, the U.S. high commissioner to the Ottoman Empire, leave us in no doubt about what to think when the two come into conflict over American intervention. Horton is described as making “a formal first impression, but . . . actually a sociable old gentleman, a little florid in his language”—a vestige of his past as a scholar of classical poetry—who sagely predicts “a disaster [in Smyrna] from the start.” Bristol, by contrast, is described as someone who “liked to think of himself [as] firm, but fair . . . as [a] man who dealt in facts.” The focus on Bristol’s opinion of his own character prepares us for the revelation that he is actually a “blustering” bully who lacks professional objectivity—a fault that stems from his prejudice against Greeks and Armenians and affinity with the Turkish nationalist movement.
But Ureneck is also committed to understanding figures involved in the crisis and its aftermath who cannot be so easily categorized. Captain Arthur J. Hepburn, the naval chief of staff at Constantinople, who is tasked by Bristol with the purposefully restrictive mission of protecting American lives and property in Smyrna, finds himself “strugg[ling] with his conscience” when given the opportunity to support “a combined American-Allied rescue effort” for thousands of imperiled Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna “in defiance of the Turkish authorities.” Captain Hepburn is pragmatic insofar as he “had no intention of destroying his career to take a chance on saving refugees,” but altruistic enough to direct a subordinate to attempt to persuade a French general to support a British plan of evacuation of the persecuted minorities.
Where Ureneck demonstrates how Hepburn’s careful professionalism constricts his ability to act, he speculates that the professional shortcomings of Lieutenant Commander J.B. Rhodes might have indirectly abetted humanitarian efforts. The “laxity and sometimes drunkenness” that had blighted Rhodes’s naval career prior to Smyrna, he writes, may have made him more willing than Hepburn to exceed the narrow scope of Bristol’s directive. Meanwhile, another naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Halsey Powell, is shown in direct contrast to Hepburn. Powell is a figure whose status as “a genuine war hero . . . [gave him] the confidence to operate from a sense of right and wrong without the blurring considerations of rank or career,” using his position in the naval hierarchy to abet the humanitarian and evacuation efforts of Reverend Asa K. Jennings.
Jennings, a Methodist missionary who worked at the YMCA in Smyrna during the crisis, is the main protagonist here: He sets up and oversees a series of safe houses for Armenian and Greek refugees, mostly women and children, in abandoned mansions along the waterfront. Later, he travels to Mytilene and persuades high-ranking Greek naval officers and the Greek prime minister to help him enlist merchant ships to travel to Smyrna in flotillas, under Jennings’s command. Jennings is simultaneously “reassuring and endearing” in his diminutive stature and superhumanly heroic in his perseverance.
One of the benefits of the author’s focus on Jennings is the central thread he provides to follow a narrative that encompasses myriad major players. Structurally, The Great Fire can be confusing, spreading its discussion of personal backgrounds over multiple chapters. A discussion of the oil industry’s possible influence on the Harding administration is also bifurcated across two chapters placed more than a hundred pages apart. But given the scope of the atrocity that was Smyrna, these minor defects are more than forgivable. This is a comprehensive yet intimate work of scholarship, reminding readers of a horrific moment in modern history now largely forgotten.
Thomas Johnson is a writer in Hyattsville, Maryland.
