n the opening stages of the First World War, the Imperial Russian Army Command, anticipating the entry of the Ottoman Empire on the side of the Central Powers, authorized the formation of several volunteer infantry battalions (known as druzhiny) composed entirely of Armenians that would fight alongside the regular Russian army in the Caucasus and Anatolia. That these units drew their strength not only from Armenians living in Russia, but significantly among Ottoman-subject Armenians as well has long roiled the scholarship on the Russo-Ottoman clash during the Great War and, more urgently, the sequence of events leading to the Ottoman state’s decision in the spring of 1915 to order the systematic destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community. Yet for all the attention the establishment of the druzhiny has garnered, our understanding of why Ottoman Armenians like Soghomon Tehlirian flocked to the Russian colors remains rather rudimentary and weighed down by narrow definitions of nationalism and loyalty. This paper situates the formation of the Armenian druzhiny within the complex socio-political environment of the Russo-Ottoman borderlands in the prewar years and the novel and extraordinarily unique dimensions of the First World War. It uses letters, reports, petitions, and memoranda in the Russian and Armenian archives, drawn up by both Ottoman and Russian Armenian community leaders, Russian statesmen and military commanders, as well as memoirs and newspapers, to, first, examine the multivalent factors that compelled many Ottoman Armenians to enlist in the ranks of the volunteer battalions. It argues that ethnic and religious identities did not always necessarily reflect soldiers’ political dispositions and that those notions, together with loyalty, treason, and nationalism, be reconsidered in light of other exigent circumstances. Their decisions provide the context to the paper’s second aim to trace the passage of these men through the crucible of total war in the Russo-Ottoman bloodlands. The culture of violence born amidst prolonged fighting, occupation, and ethnic cleansing altered and shaped anew the men of the druzhiny and would color the political disorder the peoples of the Ottoman Empire would bear witness to well after war’s end.