Fingers for the Sultan

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

Ottoman Soldiers, World War I (Source: LOC)

The actual experiences of soldiers are far different from the hallowed images of valor and renown often associated with combat. Few recruiting ads or military parades, for example, echo Walt Whitman's conception of war, quoted at the beginning of John McNeill's Mosquito Empires: "The whole damn war business is about nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea to one part glory."

With that kind of ratio, some reluctance to becoming a soldier is understandable.  But reluctance to fight has often been at odds with state needs and this has led to conflict as well as strategic dismemberment in many places. As Alan Forrest has shown in Conscripts and Deserters, young men in Napoleonic France devised many legal and illegal means of avoiding service in the Europe's first mass conscript army. As the phenomenon of the conscript army travelled, so too did resistance to it. As Khaled Fahmy has shown in All the Pasha's Men, mothers in Mehmed Ali's Egypt would show tough love of the toughest kind, going so far as to maim their sons to prevent them from being taken into the military.

It should be no surprise then that this type of evasion took place amidst the traumatic Ottoman mass conscription in the first World War, a topic treated at length in an episode of the Ottoman History Podcast with Yiğit Akın. In this case from the early months of 1916, one Süleyman son of Mehmet appeared to have considered his odds in the midst of a conflict that would eventually kill over 700,000 Ottoman soldiers and leave hundreds of thousands wounded, before deciding that by cutting off his finger he might also be cutting his losses and avoid military service.    

But Ottoman military officials had seen such tricks before. Through the First World War, the Ottoman government implemented harsher punishments and longer sentences for desertion and self-mutilation to avoid service as men sought to avoid the front in large numbers. In Süleyman's case, he and his finger were found guilty of trying to escape service by digital severance. Süleyman may have given his finger to avoid fighting for the Sultan, but that wouldn't save him from doing hard time or hard work in a labor battalion of some sort.  

Source: BOA, BEO 4401/330040

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