This paper aims to examine the cultural and social dimensions of the devastating experience of the First World War for Ottoman peasantry. War brought enormous physical and psychological burdens to ordinary people living in the Ottoman countryside in the form of death, disease, shortages, hunger, violence, crime, and state oppression. In order to fight the war effectively, governmental and military policies extended the state's capacity of intervention into the distant corners of the empire to extract people and resources to a degree not seen before. Ottoman countryside was the main theater of this process. The wartime dynamics of rural society and the experiences of the rural population were largely shaped by three distinct phenomena: the impact of large-scale conscription and wartime casualty rates on peasant households, the destruction wrought in major regions by combat, deportation, and refugee movements, and, finally, the hardships created by state intervention in the agrarian economy. In the countryside, the government resorted to harsh impositions ranging from special wartime taxes (tekalif-i harbiye) to grain requisitioning and forced agricultural employment (m(kellefiyet-i ziraiyye) in order to maintain the agricultural production levels necessary to sustain the military and urban population. Weary of these increasingly gruesome policies, people began to question the government's war effort, especially towards the end of the war. Rural producers tried to challenge state policies through developing several creative strategies. By drawing on examples from across the Ottoman Empire and utilizing several archival and non-archival sources, I will examine this complex and dynamic wartime relationship between the state and peasants in the Ottoman countryside. This discussion on war's impact on ordinary peasant families' lives, I believe, will enhance our understanding of the very late Ottoman period.