During the Long World War I, Pontus, or else, the South Black Sea region became a contested ground for multiple local, national and international actors, who envisioned different futures about both the region and its people. The latter were of various ethnic, linguistic and confessional backgrounds, like Greek-, Turkish-, Armenian-, Georgian- and Kurdish-speaking Orthodox, Armenian or Protestant Christians or Sunni or Alevi Muslims. During this period, Pontus witnessed Young Turks’ centralization, war and genocidal policies, the Russian occupation of Eastern Pontus, its populations’ disillusionment, mobilizations, refugeedom, ethnic cleansing, exile and grassroot resistance, several Pontic Greeks’ efforts for its liberation and unification with Greece or, at least, for the establishment of an independent Pontic Republic, the Great Powers and Athens’ designs for a Pontic-Armenian state, Soviet assistance and communist infiltration, and Muslim and Turkish nationalists’ final dominance, which allowed the region's demographic reconstruction through the annihilation or deportation of the Orthodox Christians. Drawing from grassroots sources such as diaries, memoirs, letters, songs, besides newspapers and state and military archives from Greece and Turkey this paper studies the impact of the continuous and ceaseless mobilizations in both the region of Pontus and its Christian and Muslim population from 1912 to 1923. It analyzes the transformation of this borderland into a conflict zone and the emergence of a new mobile human landscape of soldiers, deserters, exiles and paramilitaries. As the general mobilization meant an unprecedented intervention by the state, many locals responded by resisting the war, evading the draft and deserting the army. However, the state had linked active and passive resistance, or suspicion of resistance, to nationalism and loyalty, the state’s security and survival, and the idea that only the state and its agents could monopolize violence. Thus, it responded by initiating the homogenization of the region by executing minority elites and populations, exiling whole communities and allying with paramilitaries and Muslim refugees. This also signified the mobilization of local communities for the destruction or protection of their neighbors and the construction of new alliances and trust networks, either mono-religious or even cross-religious, where the remaining Ottoman pluralists could find refuge. Thus, the paper examines the trisection of Pontus into Western, Eastern and South, the different experiences of the population in each section and the various forms of intra-community solidarity, fighting and violence. At the end, the nationalist army and their paramilitary and local allies managed to secure and homogenize the region.