Ernest Hemingway 1923 Passport Photograph. Source: U.S National Archives.
Ernest Hemingway arrived in Constantinople on the 29th of September 1922 as a war correspondent for the Toronto Star to cover the final phase of the Greco-Turkish war. For much of his time in Constantinople, Hemingway struggled with malaria and relied on information from secondary sources for his dispatches. By the time he arrived in Ottoman Turkey, the Smyrna fire had just been extinguished.
In 1930, he was asked to write an introduction to a publication containing some of his short stories titled In Our Time. Hemingway decided to send his editor a piece in which he describes the horrors at Smyrna in 1922. Although Hemingway didn't visit Smyrna during his time in Turkey, he was a war correspondent and was well connected with people who were at Smyrna during the fire. The cryptic piece, which was later renamed On the Quai at Smyrna in the 1938 edition of the book, recreates the horrors at Smyrna during the fateful month of September 1922. Although Hemingway wrote the piece, it's delivered by a storyteller who is probably a senior British officer.
The storyteller describes people screaming on the harbor until searchlights were pointed at them. Most of the refugees on the harbor were women and children who were left to the mercy of Turkish guards who stole girls from their mothers and took them away, never to be seen again: He also describes women having babies all night and women with dead babies. He speaks of clearing the dead bodies off the pier and an old woman who died in front of him and went rigid. He also mentions plenty of "nice things" floating around the harbor, the unpredictability of the Turk and how the Turks prevented relief crews from coming in and taking more refugees away. He said he was so upset by this, that he considered bombing the Turkish quarter. As he stated: "...we would have blown the town simply to hell." He wrote:
The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick. We'd run the searchlight up and down over them two or three times and they stopped it[...]
The worst, he said, were the women with dead babies. You couldn't get the women to give up their dead babies. They'd have babies dead for six days.
On the 17th of October, Hemingway found himself on a train to Adrianople [Tr: Edirne] to witness the exodus of Christians (predominantly Greeks) to Karaağaç. Hemingway walked for 5 miles with them as they abandoned their homes, their fields and virtually everything they owned. They were fleeing to escape persecution from the Kemalists who had been gifted Eastern Thrace after the signing of an Armistice at Mudanya in October 1922. In a dispatch to the Toronto Star, Hemingway wrote:
In a never-ending, staggering march the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards Macedonia. The main column crossing the Maritza River at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo, with exhausted, staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their worldly goods.
He continued:
It is a silent procession. Nobody even grunts. It is all they can do to keep moving. Their brilliant peasant costumes are soaked and draggled. Chickens dangle by their feet from the carts. Calves nuzzle at the draught cattle wherever a jam halts the stream. An old man marches bent under a young pig, a scythe and a gun, with a chicken tied to his scythe. A husband spreads a blanket over a woman in labor in one of the carts to keep off the driving rain. She is the only person making a sound. Her little daughter looks at her in horror and begins to cry. And the procession keeps moving.
He concludes:
There are 250,000 Christian refugees to be evacuated from Eastern Thrace alone. The Bulgarian frontier is shut against them. There is only Macedonia and Western Thrace to receive the fruit of the Turk's return to Europe. Nearly half a million refugees are in Macedonia now. How they are to be fed nobody knows, but in the next month all the Christian world will hear the cry: "Come over into Macedonia and help us!
Of all the things Hemingway witnessed on that road to Karaağaç, there was one that affected him most. It was of a man holding up a blanket to keep the rain off a woman who was in labor. She was the only woman in the entire procession making noise. Until her daughter began to cry. He mentioned the scene in his later writings with slight variations. Somehow, he couldn't stop thinking about it. In one of his later references to it, he described it as follows; a woman in agony, someone trying to help, and a third person (himself) transfixed by helpless horror.
