On the night of 17 March 1919, a train departed Luxor for Cairo with a number of British military officers on board, including four who had been overseeing laborers from the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC). When the train departed Asyut the following morning, a large crowd of rioters began to assemble, and at the next stop, demonstrators forced their way on board, eventually killing all the British officers. Competing narratives explaining this attack emerged in its aftermath. Colonial authorities blamed local police for failing to act, and even suspected some of being complicit in the act. Nationalist sources focus on the death of the son of a village notable at the hands of British soldiers suppressing demonstrations in solidarity with the nationalist movement. But there is too much evidence of widespread coordination among the different villages along the train’s route to focus on one specific local grievance. This paper shows evidence that, as early as the summer of 1918, a broad-based movement had begun to take hold in the province of Asyut to resist the wartime mobilizations of laboring bodies, animals, and natural resources. In my research, I have uncovered 35 instances of rural violence associated with resistance to ELC recruitment, ranging from individual acts to village-wide demonstrations. By analyzing this body of literature, I have discovered a unique link between ELC recruitment and violent protest in the province of Asyut. The Asayta were significantly more likely to protest ELC recruitment during the violent summer of 1918 than Egyptians in other provinces. This grievance over ELC recruitment culminated in the so-called “Dayrut Train Massacre.” I then proceed to tease out the implications of this argument. First, it provides further support for the contention that the 1919 Egyptian revolution cannot be reduced to sympathy with the nationalist movement. Correspondingly, historians must disaggregate the 1919 revolution into multiple distinct movements—with the centralized nationalist movement representing only one strand of many that animated mass protest. This helps us make sense of how the British responded to the 1919 revolution; while they crushed the rebellion in the countryside, they negotiated with the nationalists and allowed them a degree of national autonomy.