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Jacob to Smyrna to inject energy into the three-year-old chapter and get it moving, and it was Jacob who had opposed Jennings’s appointment to Smyrna. Jacob was very much a YMCA type of the period—well educated, committed to reform through Christian values, modern in his outlook, and full of aspiration and vigor. There’s no record of the expression Jacob wore when the little man with the hunched back came ashore as the new boys’ work secretary. Jennings twisted his neck sideways to look up through his thick glasses at the much taller Jacob. He shook his hand and smiled.
    The YMCA had arranged for Jennings and his family to stay at a home near the campus of International College, a preparatory school for boys in the nearby suburb of Paradise, a name chosen because of the town’s profusion of flowers. The family’s belongings, contained mostly in one big trunk, were loaded for the five-mile trip, which would take thefamily along the Quay and then (with a right turn, heading east) through the Greek and Armenian neighborhoods of Smyrna before turning south through the dry hills, spiked with cypress trees, to the American enclave at Paradise. Looking around at his new surroundings, Jennings was eager to get his family settled and begin his work. Wilted in the heat but wide-eyed about the exotic scene around them, Jennings and his family rode off to Paradise.

CHAPTER 3
The Great Offensive
    O n the morning of August 26, 1922, two hundred miles east of Smyrna, Mustapha Kemal, supreme commander of the Turkish nationalist army, put field glasses to his eyes and scanned the hills to the north and west of the stone bunker in which he was crouched.
    He was at the summit of Kocatepe, a 6,100-foot peak overlooking the ancient Hittite town of Afyon Karahisar, the junction point of two major rail lines and the forward salient of the Greek army. The day’s first light was only beginning to seep from the eastern horizon, making visible the bare hills and valleys of Anatolia’s western plateau, which rolled like yellow-brown combers to the west. It remained mostly dark, but the field glasses gathered the scarce predawn light and Kemal could make out the slopes, rocks, and dug-in Greek positions. Everything was still except for the slow push and scratch of a tortoise somewhere on the mountain, the song of a bird at the approach of the day. The Greek soldiers were mostly asleep in their tents and redoubts, though a few were returning from a dance in Afyon, which was inside their line.
    With Kemal were the pashas Fevzi, Ismet, and Noureddin, the core command of his army. Fevzi, the nationalist minister of defense, was the army’s steady keel: senior, conservative, broad chested with a thick mustache, and a devout Moslem. He recited the Koran to his soldiers on the battlefield. Ismet was chief of the general staff and closest to Kemal, aboyish-looking tactician and latecomer to the nationalist cause, always worried but well prepared; and Noureddin, commander of the First Army, the bearded and bloody scourge of Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds.
    In the half-light, spread below Kemal on the downward slopes to the right and left, was the Turkish First Army, coiled for an attack. Secretly, Kemal had left his headquarters in Ankara nine days earlier and, traveling at night, made his way to Kocatepe. Kemal was forty-one years old and already he had been given the exalted title “Ghazi,” Moslem warrior. He wore a miniature Koran around his neck even though he was not in the least religious. He thought religion was for old women, mere superstition. He had assembled his idiosyncratic worldview from the ideals of the French Revolution, the militarism of Prussia, the poetry of Turkey, and the cafés and brothels of Salonika.
    Among the poets he had absorbed as a young man was Namik Kemal, the Ottoman patriot.
                We are Ottomans,
                Noble lineage,
                Noble race.