The armistice of 1918 did not bring the promised peace and demobilization that Greek and Ottoman conscripts and their families expected since the beginning of the Great War. Both Greek and Ottoman citizen soldiers found themselves still fighting for four more years. New war fronts emerged, while both home fronts had to sustain new military engagements. The devastation and the political divides of the Great War meant that the prolongation of the war should be justified and propagandized. This did not prove an easy task although the initial Greek euphoria and Ottoman numbness. As this new phase of the war deepened the political divides for both groups, official and unofficial pro-war and anti-war campaigns started. Such an unofficial anti-war campaign led to the electoral defeat of the Liberal Party by the Greek royalists. However, contrary to their promises, the latter did not terminate the Greek campaign into Asia Minor. At the same time, in the Ottoman case, the collaboration of both the monarchy and, initially, of the liberal Freedom and Accord Party, with the Entente occupying powers gradually alienated the Ottoman royalists and strengthened the parliamentarists. Using diaries, memoirs, letters, songs, newspapers and petitions the paper explores the responses of the Greek and Ottoman citizen soldiers and their families to the prolongation of their mobilization. At the end, the failed royalist policies during the new phase of the war turned vast numbers in both groups against the monarchy. The monarchical Greek and Ottoman state had intervened in such an unprecedented way in ordinary people’s life without securing their survival and well-being or any final military and political success. These people’s radicalization was formed as a denial to the monarchical past. Following the spiral of their wartime radicalization the paper reconstructs the nuances of political participation. It follows their active and passive resistance to the war and examines their mutinies, desertions, and construction of their loyalties and allegiances. It focuses on desertions from royalist regiments to side with the antimonarchists challenging the assumption that conscripts and veterans just followed orders and did not act on their own.