4 ideas
Ihsan Turjman was a young Jerusalem clerk conscripted into the Ottoman army in the First World War and kept at a desk job in Jerusalem instead of sent to the front. From 1915 to 1916 he kept a private diary of the locust plague, the famine, the army's raids to round up men who had avoided service, women pushed into prostitution by hunger, and his contempt for the officers above him.
An empire that asks its subjects for their men, their grain and their obedience during total war, while giving back only famine and hangings, turns loyalty into open hostility. Turjman begins as an Ottoman subject but comes to hope his own state loses the war, and he starts to see himself as an Arab and a Jerusalemite instead. The book presents this as the war itself breaking Ottomanism, not as a nationalism that had been growing slowly for decades.
A low-ranking clerk inside a military machine sees things that neither official records nor enemy propaganda capture. He sees how orders turn into requisitions, how officers act corruptly and arbitrarily, and how ordinary people suffer. Because he serves a cause he does not believe in, he keeps a critical distance, which makes his diary a check on the histories written by states and generals.
The 1915 locust plague arrived on top of wartime requisitioning, blockade and conscription. The locusts destroyed the crops that the army's seizures of food and the loss of farm workers had already made scarce. Neither disaster alone explains the famine: the war removed every buffer a society would normally use to survive a natural shock, so a crop pest became mass hunger.