Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction Of Islam's City Of Tolerance - Plot & Excerpts
From the window of her drawing room, she noticed a great column of soldiers shuffling through the village square. Intrigued by the spectacle, and curious to know where they were going, she made her way down the long drive towards the main gate of her property. It did not take her long to realise that something catastrophic had happened to the Greek army in central Anatolia. ‘[I saw] endless streams of disbanded Greek soldiers,’ she wrote in a letter to her niece. ‘A miserable rabble, ragged, weary and wan; and with them were hundreds of refugees, both Greek and Turkish, plodding their way under a burning sun, through clouds of hot dust swirling in the air.’ Just a few moments earlier, Hortense had checked the thermometer hanging on the balcony outside her house. It was already thirty degrees in the shade and uncomfortably humid. She felt desperately sorry for these downtrodden and exhausted refugees. ‘It was a most pitiable sight,’ she wrote. ‘They looked like so many hopeless mendicants, not knowing whither they were going or what was to become of them: poor women dragging along small children – strangers with none to help or guide them.
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