The Great Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

had lived mostly free of intimidation and death.
    The Greek army and civil administration were firmly in control; Allied warships were present in the harbor. There were also Americans in Smyrna—an American consulate, missionary schools and an orphanage, the staffs of the YMCA and the YWCA, and American businessmen, buying tobacco leaf and selling kerosene, sewing machines, farm tractors, cars, and even ice from a factory owned by an Armenian American. Ice was in big demand in Smyrna during this torrid summer.
    Jennings seemed not at all worried about what lay ahead. He was eager to encounter it, and he enjoyed the cucumber smell of the sea. Like his Protestant countrymen back home, he was obsessed with the geography of the Bible, and now, as the tawny hills of Anatolia slipped by the left side of the ship, he was entering that holy land as if in a Sunday-school storybook.
    Jennings had grown up in a family of ministers and faithful Methodist churchgoers. The family farm was in New York’s “burned-over district,” so-called because it had been so Bible thumped and evangelized decades earlier that there was no more fuel for human conversion.
    In his late teens as a student at Syracuse University, Jennings had been swept up in the Protestant enthusiasm that was running strong on American college campuses in the late 1800s. Already a devout Methodist, Jennings was further inflamed by the religious fervor at Syracuse that was stirred and channeled into missionary service by the YMCA’s Student Volunteer Movement. Forced to drop out of college by lack of money, Jennings went to nearby Utica, where he got a job as an assistant secretary for boys’ athletics at the local YMCA. The following year, he married Amy, also a devout upstate Methodist. Jennings moved to a better job with the YMCA in Carthage, New York, and that same year Amy had a child, a girl named Ortha, who died in infancy.
    Jennings, then twenty-seven years old, contracted typhoid fever, recovered, then relapsed, and, in poor health, returned to Utica. He suffered through a long and difficult period of convalescence. At about the time he turned thirty years old, he had tried and failed to make a living as a minister. He had served as the traveling pastor at Methodist churches in the small farm hamlets of Barneveld, Cleveland, Trenton, Forestport, Panama, and Chateauguay. Asa and Amy’s next three children were born in the years that Jennings was moving from one white wood-framed church to the next, never quite making a living, and in 1911 he returned to the steady pay of the YMCA in Utica, which always seemed to take him back, then he went to another pastorate in Richfield Springs, New York. It was an itinerant and insecure life, and it further preyed on Amy’s nerves, but she accepted that Asa was cut out for a life of religious service.
    In each of his assignments, Jennings had applied the earnest manner and simple Christianity that were the products of his upbringing, and while he remained a confirmed Methodist, he was irreverent enough, by Utica (and current Prohibitionist) standards, to risk Amy’s ire by drinking the occasional glass of sherry. Hadn’t Christ (he reminded her mischievously) taken wine at dinner? America in 1920 was still very much arural Protestant nation, and Jennings reflected the American Protestantism of the day—a practical religion drained of mystery, animated by a spirit of social reform, and defined by a personal relationship with God, good works, and a clean white shirt.
    SMYRNA WAS ONE OF THE SEVEN churches of the Book of Revelation, and the thought of its past thrilled Jennings. Smyrna had been home to St. Polycarp, who had preached with St. John, the last of Jesus’s twelve apostles. Jennings could recite the words John had written from the nearby island of Patmos about Smyrna. “Be thou faithful until death and I will give thee a crown of life.” Not far to the south of Smyrna was Ephesus, another one of the seven