Kasey Davis gazed across the vast, flat landscape at the army of men wielding shovels and picks; hundreds of troops clearing the land, grubbing out tree stumps, levering rocks from the earth and digging up clumps of hardy scrub. Leaning his weight against the handle of his own pick, his light-khaki shirt drenched in sweat just like the shirts of all the other men, he found the sight sickening. Look at us, he thought. We might as well be working a southern plantation a hundred years ago; black slaves, that’s what we are, and that’s just how the army sees us.

All the men were angry, but none more so than Kasey, who was now doing his best to incite his fellow troops. Rebellion, that’s what Kasey wanted.

He’d always been a firebrand, always the one to agitate, right from the outset, right from the moment when he’d first recognised the immensity of his disillusionment. Perhaps his anger had been directed at himself for having been naïve enough, or even downright stupid enough, to have expected anything different.

‘You join up to fight a war and you’re not allowed to carry a gun,’ he’d regularly growled as he’d laboured beside his fellow troops with pick, axe and shovel. ‘We supposed to call these things weapons, are we? I tell you right here and now, these are the tools of slaves. Those fuckers even title us a non-combat battalion. We’re not here to fight a war, we’re just here to do the shit work so as white soldiers don’t have to soil their hands.’

And in the several days since the club had been closed he’d upped the pace, stirring ever-more strongly and along ever-more personal lines, aiming to further inflame his fellow troops.

‘Not allowed to fight and not allowed to fuck,’ he’d snarled, his handsome face twisted with bitterness. So consumed was he with his fight for justice that even Betty had become a symbol of the rights denied him. ‘Shit, not allowed to go into town and buy ourselves a beer, that’s what the army thinks of us. To those fuckers, we’re not even human.’

By this stage, all the soldiers were feeling exactly the same way. Even those accustomed to the denial of equal rights back in their home country were not prepared to have their liberty curtailed altogether. Being banned from town, and now having their own club denied them, was wrong. Men needed some form of recreation, particularly men being worked as hard as they were.