It is quite well known that France’s North African dependencies provided large numbers of troops, great quantities of provisions, and critical manpower to the Metropole during the Great War, 1914-1918. Even Morocco, which was by no means fully under French control at the war’s outbreak, contributed 45,000 troops, all technically volunteers, to the Western Front. Many perished there in the service of France, even as France was pressing forward with the conquest of Morocco, also with the help of Moroccan troops and, as in the case of the European war, in the name of the Moroccan sultan and his government. Most of the works that treat with this apparently ironic situation have based their descriptions and assessments on French sources. These sources see Moroccan service and resistance only in terms of loyalty and disloyalty to France; as evidence of the acceptance or rejection of France’s version of what was then modern and civilized. Recent scholarship on Morocco by Driss Maghraoui and Mohamed Bekraoui has brought new information and a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to the discussion of military service, and issues of loyalty, collaboration, and resistance. Also, though still rare, more local voices have been brought into recent discussions about how the Great War was experienced by both soldiers and civilians in the Middle East and North Africa (e.g. Salim Tamari, Leila Fawaz). These have greatly assisted the critical reassessment of both colonial and nationalist discourses on the meaning and consequences of the war for the people living there as well as the regimes that emerged afterwards. Using biographical/autobiographical material drawn from Muhammad al-Mukhtar al-Susi’s twenty-volume work al-Ma`sul, as well as published and archival materials from Moroccan, French and Spanish sources, this paper seeks to contribute to both of these discussions. It brings in voices of Moroccan resistance fighters, local and regional tribal leaders, proponents of jihad, and those who saw it as a noble duty impossible to realize, and people simply struggling to survive within whatever political order might be imposed. The paper demonstrates the complexity and contingency of their decisions, the shifting relationship between ideology and practical action, and the calculations that went into reaching a modus vivendi with more centralized government and foreign rule.