This article is about a loose transnational movement of army deserters and radicalized peasants known as ‘Green Cadres’ that appeared in 1918 in rural areas of the Habsburg Monarchy. Scattered and fragmented, these insurrectionary forces nonetheless undermined imperial authority in the countryside toward the end of the First World War, thereby contributing to the demise of Austria-Hungary. Supported by local people in many regions, they evoked the heroic and socially minded bandits of previous times. They also appeared to offer a new social-political order based on radical peasant democracy with nationalist accents, though such aspirations were often pursued through violence against perceived oppressors. The new armies of the successor states – especially Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland – suppressed their initiatives, or tried (with limited success) to integrate the deserters. Yet the Green Cadres continued to symbolize peasant autonomy and radicalism for decades after the war’s end. Based on untapped archival and printed sources in Czech, German, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, and Slovak, this study examines the effect of the First World War on rural population of east central Europe. It also rethinks the character of modern peasant mobilization by moving beyond dichotomies of local/national, radical/reactionary, and archaic/modern that characterize much of the literature. Ultimately, the case of the Green Cadres suggests that both the experience and the cultural script of rural insurgency are important elements of European history in the era of the two World Wars.