This paper examines the gender politics of disability during the First World War in the Ottoman Empire. Able-bodiedness was a basic requirement for both military service and breadwinning, two core aspects of normative masculinity in Ottoman society. Military legislation and recruitment policies paid meticulous attention to the details of the male body, its suitability for combat, and its eligibility for disability compensation, elaborating a detailed picture of the relationship between masculinity able-bodiedness, and citizenship in the Late Ottoman Empire. During and after World War I thousands of men became disabled and were unable to fulfill this vision of masculine normativity in practice. Yet this reality did not lead to women taking on these roles, or indeed to any significant alteration in the structure of the male breadwinner-led nuclear family and its attendant gender roles. Instead, Ottoman-era disability policies merged with new approaches to gendered bodies in post-Ottoman Turkey, producing a new national masculinity that incorporated the disabled veteran into the ranks of full-fledged men through social welfare policies and gendered discourses that institutionalized and valorized disabled veterans as normative men. Based on archival documents from the Ottoman civil and military administrations, legislation and parliamentary discussions, and social sources including marriage advertisements and life writings, this paper shows that the provision of disabled men with generous pensions that made them desirable marriage partners for widowed women during and after the war was an important way in which the state sought to forge a new national body politic through attention to the interplay of masculinity, able-bodiedness, breadwinning, and the family as a core institution of society. Adding analysis of the role of masculinity and the male body to the robust work on women and the female body in nationalism, this research provides a way of rethinking the role of gender and conflict in shaping the social and political dynamics of the First World War and the forging of institutions and everyday practices in the post-Ottoman Middle East.