The conclusion of the First World War in Ottoman Arab lands is often relegated to epilogues or prologues of late Ottoman Empire or Arab state narratives, precluding examination of lived experience through this traditional divide of historical periodization. Michael Provence, Mesut Uyar, and James Gelvin recount broader phenomena of this era, yet contemporary individual accounts are limited. Laila Parsons addresses this period, but with sources published later. Benjamin Fortna examines this period, but focused on Anatolia after the war, while Salim Tamari, Glenda Abramson, and the Lone Pine (Bloody Ridge) Diary concentrate on the war. With its early sections long overlooked or mischaracterized, Ottoman army officer Taha al-H?shim?’s Arabic-language, journal-like memoirs, the Mudhakkirat Taha al-H?shim?, written at the time of the events recorded, provide a first-hand account of this post-war period. My research, combining social, military, and intellectual history, centers on the 1919-1920s sections of this work, which recounts his navigation of post-war Yemen, Damascus, Istanbul, and Baghdad. Through al-H?shim?’s periodic, sometimes daily entries, it is possible to glimpse a contemporary perspective of a larger group of Ottoman officers from Arab lands who remained in service immediately following the war. His entries demonstrate pervasive fears of British and French colonialism and imperialism, evident in comparisons of anticipated post-war Ottoman territories to contemporary colonies across North Africa, East Africa, and South Asia. His entries also demonstrate manifestations of both Ottoman and Arab identification, reflecting the power of continuity, his long military training, and the multiplicity of identification that defies later historical projections. Finally, al-H?shim?’s observations reveal a multitude of nationalist activist organizations in Damascus during Faysal’s brief reign and on the eve of French occupation. These arguments and analyses engage with several key works in particular, especially Michael Provence’s The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East, James Gelvin’s Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire, and Benjamin Fortna’s Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire. This analysis reveals a contemporary account and glimpses of the lived experience from a perspective long marginalized by later Turkish or Arab Revolt nationalist narratives. It offers examples of anticolonial Ottoman Arab officer subjectivities, continuity, and manifestations of multilayered identification, as well as an individual’s attempt to re-legitimate the self after the experiences of war and imperial occupation and fragmentation.