As part of the broader consideration of soldiers’ loyalties, my paper examines the work of the Ottoman Jewish soldier, Yehuda Burla. He left behind one novel (Beli Kokhav/Without a Star) and numerous short stories, all written in Hebrew, based on his service in the Ottoman army as an interpreter for a German commander. Burla’s stories both confirm what is known of the Ottoman soldier’s struggle with disease, hunger and insufficient supplies and contribute to a greater understanding of the interpersonal relations and even acts of kindness that made the war experience whole. Thus the reader encounters the squalor and filth of the Amaliya labor camp in “The Soldier and the Ass,” and the young solider who shoots his own hand to escape being sent to the front in “Rescue.” Yet his stories also reflect a shared sense of camaraderie with the Arab, Turkish, and Armenian soldiers—and even an occasional kind word about their commanding officers—based less on allegiance to the distant Ottoman state than to local affinities and common devotion to the land of Palestine. The horrors of the war certainly exist in Burla’s works—the apex of which is the chilling duty to kill one’s fellow man—but they are the general lot of all soldiers rather than the distinct misfortune of the Jew. In this, Burla’s stories provide an important counterweight to Jewish war writings that emerged from within Europe and which have long served as the dominant narrative of the Jewish soldier’s experience, such as Avigdor Hameiri’s The Great Madness. The latter text, based on the author's service in the Hapsburg army and also written in Hebrew, tells the story of arbitrary cruelty of commanding officers and the oppressive anti-Semitism of the rank and file. The trauma of army service is sufficient to force the author to abandon his Austrian patriotism and swear his allegiance to the Zionist project underway in distant Palestine. As a Sephardi Jew who wrote in Hebrew but displayed none of the ideological fervor associated with Zionist writers of the period, Burla has often fallen between the cracks of Hebrew literary criticism. However as historical sources, these stories take on a whole new life and demonstrate the impossibility of collapsing minority experiences of the war into a singular narrative.