The question I should like to ask is this: in which respects did the Ottoman war experience differ substantially from the experience of the other belligerent states in Europe and their societies? My argument will be that indeed the way the people of the Ottoman Empire experienced World War I and its immediate aftermath differs considerably from the way the war was experienced in Europe. In terms of logistics, equipment, intensity, food and health the Mesopotamian front was vastly different from that in Gallipoli.īetween the global and the regional is the level of the single state.
On the other extreme, the war also had a very strong local or regional character: the war in Flanders’ fields was very similar for soldiers on either side of the front line, be they German, British or Belgian, but very different from the fighting between Austrians and Italians in the Alps or even from the war experienced by French and German soldiers in the Vosges. The war in the Middle East shows this very clearly, with Englishmen, Scotsmen, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, Frenchmen and French Africans, Russians, Cossacks, Arabs and Armenians fighting Prussians, Bavarians, Austrians, Turks, Kurds, Circassians and Arabs. On one level World War I, or the “Great War” as it was known until 1939, certainly was a world war in the sense of a global conflict. We can approach the immense historical phenomenon of World War I on different levels: global, national, regional and even local.
