Last Letter from Istanbul. Lucy Foley

He thought of Babek’s family dwarfed by the huge war train, the boys dressed up like little men, waiting for their father to return to them: a hero.

      They were to take the Armenians further east, to the very edges of the Ottoman Empire, toward the border with Persia. These were their orders; from the highest echelons of the War Office in Constantinople. A ‘rehoming’: this was the term used, apparently. But the area to which they would be moved was known only for its hostility to life: a desert place, a no-place. No one could be expected to make a life there. Yet he could not summon the indignation that he expected to feel, that he might once have felt. It was as though the cold had got deep inside him and frozen any repository of emotion. There was a barrier beyond which he could not go; a numbness.

      Besides, Babek had not been given the chance to live. And his old life had been taken from him. He had witnessed events that had changed him, irrevocably. So perhaps it was no unexpected thing that he could not find the empathy he might once have felt. At least these people would be given an opportunity to make a new life, slim though it was. Wasn’t that more than he and Babek and all those other frozen corpses had been allotted?

      So he no longer complained, no longer questioned, when they marched into the desert with the elderly and very young, the sick, the unfit, the pregnant mothers and newborn babies.