In the course of WWI, the French recruited over 300,000 soldiers from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco for service on the Western Front. North African soldiers took part in some of the worst fighting of the war, suffering high casualty rates on behalf of their colonial occupier. Thousands more were taken prisoner, where they were interned in a special German POW camp for Muslim prisoners. In the Zossen Camp, Muslim prisoners were subjected to intense Jihad propaganda and encouraged to volunteer for the Ottoman Army. At least 3000 North Africans chose to join the Ottoman army and were posted to Mesopotamia. When the British occupied Baghdad in 1917, the North Africans found themselves prisoners of war for the second time. This paper follows the experiences of these North African soldiers, to examine the effectiveness of wartime religious propaganda, North African loyalties to such alien masters as the French Republic and the Ottoman Empire, and the massive dislocations in the Middle East and North Africa that resulted from the Great War. It draws on British, French and American archival sources, the Arabic war poetry of North African soldiers, and references to Maghribi soldiers in contemporary memoirs and diaries.

During the Great War, the Ottoman armies suffered from very high rates of desertion as one out of every six soldiers mobilized deserted. Additionally, Ottoman military doctors charged that “tens of thousands” of conscripted soldiers feigned numerous illnesses, or malingered, to evade service. While we have asked why men deserted or simulated illness to escape war, we have not investigated what motivated those who remained as active and consenting participants and carried on with their fighting. What made them endure and go on even as they witnessed both the deaths of comrades, and the efforts of those who attempted to save themselves? This question is just as important as those about desertion, malingering, and evasion. After all, the majority of the men continued to fight even as they knew their chances of survival in the face of the enemy, disease, and hunger was very small. This paper investigates questions of motivation and morale among Ottoman soldiers to understand how they endured four years of brutal and relentless warfare that was the Great War. Out of necessity, the paper will mainly focus on the literate junior officers who left behind significant amount of unique sources, but the largely illiterate peasant soldiers will not be ignored. Some sergeants kept detailed diaries or wrote their war memoirs, where they wrote not only about themselves but also about the illiterate conscripts they led. Looking at both better educated officers and the barely educated soldiers will lend a comparative lens to this examination of motivation and morale. There is no denying that some men probably fought on because they could not do anything else short of desertion, but many others found motivation in religious or national sacrificial ideology of martyrdom. Why was the ideology of sacrifice for a greater cause appealing to some but not to others? It may be suggested that “secular” and religious notions of sacrifice survived through the conflict, but disillusionment in the war, its aims, and war-time leaders certainly gained enough ground to make some men question the worthiness of their sacrifice. This paper utilizes war diaries, memoirs, and hand-written troop “newspapers” left behind by Ottoman soldiers. The latter source is especially unique not only because they have hitherto been utilized only by the current presenter, but also because they provide direct access to the thoughts of officers and soldiers they deemed worthy of sharing with their comrades in arms.

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.