I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (8 page)

I learned that the Legio VIII Augusta's chosen period – the late first century AD – would have seen them equipped with the helmet subsequently codified by archaeologists as the Imperial Gallic G, examples of which have been retrieved from the Rhine near Mainz, and – in battered fragments – from the rubbish pits where they were hurled during the Boudican Revolt of AD 61. Inspired by a Gaulish design, the Gallic G incorporated protective plates intended to reduce the evident regularity with which legionaries found themselves being decapitated from behind or deprived of their ears. It was the dominant helmet of the Roman Empire's most dominant age.

I came to appreciate the nuances of form and function, the vocabulary of steel gauges and rivet work, the thrill of owning a precise copy of an actual helmet worn in battle by a legionary stationed in Colchester, then kicked off his severed head into a compost heap. Extracting the fruit of this research from a big square box some days later, I found I didn't care that the attached invoice featured a total precisely double that of my eBay find. No time for such concerns when there was a house to march around, and fragments of schoolboy Latin to bark out whilst doing so: 'One, two, one, two, Caecilius is a banker, three, four, three, four, Grumio is in the garden.' I was still at it when my youngest daughter returned from school, with a friend who hasn't come round since.

The helmet was the heaviest bit of kit, followed by the hobnailed sandals, or
caligae
. Despite sharing the same subcontinental origins, these proved less satisfactory reproductions. The glossy, unyielding straps were machine-stitched to soles decorated with smooth, dome-topped studs, which succeeded only in severely compromising traction. Every night for a week I skated around the patio in an attempt to weather them down to some semblance of authenticity. The look I achieved was that of a pair of cheap ankle boots that had been bunged into an office shredder full of drawing pins. A few smears of curried potato salad, applied in some waiting room or other, had proved oddly successful, but still I dreaded unveiling them.

My progress through its verdant, rolling grounds confirmed that Lejre was a rather larger operation than Cinderbury, and a vastly more successful one. Hot and happy families thronged the path as it skirted a pair of mighty Viking-model longhouses and a lake upon whose bulrushed foreshore lay a hollowed-out log canoe; others availed themselves of the wood-burning barbecue pits laid out in accordance with Lejre's oft-encountered motto – 'Let's Picnic in the Past'. The predominant flow of visitors, however, was towards the brow of a hill and through a gate in the fence that topped it. I shouldered my burdensome kitbag, laboured upwards and found myself before a multilingual notice of events. '11 a.m. and 3 p.m.,' read the English part. 'Romans fighting against Celts.' The massed, bellowing yell that now ripped up from the valley below made a glance at my watch unnecessary.

Over the transfixing half-hour that followed, I saw what I had let myself in for. Squatting on my holdall high up a hot hillside dotted with spectators and the odd ram-goat, I watched a dozen-strong phalanx of Romans file out through the gates of a stonewalled Celtic village – a clanking, shuffling, red-and-gold column of chainmail and hobnails, helmets gleaming, each member bearing a stubby wooden sword in one hand and a tall curved shield in the other. At its head, a glowering commander whose golden helmet was memorably topped with a desiccated fox skin; at its rear, half dragged, half frogmarched by a trio of grim-faced legionaries, a bound and bare-chested villager whose arrest had presumably aroused all those furious decibels.

Their goal, a couple of hundred yards beyond the straw roofs that poked above the village walls, was a small encampment confined within a pointy-sticked defensive palisade: four tents, some kind of wheeled crossbow-cum-catapult – a ballista? – and a smouldering fire. SPQR central. My home. The stubbled and muscular prisoner struggled impressively en route, at one point spitting on a proximate shield in an act of defiance that earned him a volley of ungentlemanly kicks. A few good-natured boos rang out from the crowd, but as his captors manhandled him brutally towards their camp entrance I felt my innards aglow with anticipation. I thought: I can do this. I can don the gleaming colours of a glorious empire, bringing the light of civilisation into a pagan darkness. I can take my place in this merciless snatch squad, extracting contemptible, topless Luddites out of their filthy huts for an awed glimpse at our brave new future, then torturing them to a complex death.

This reverie was interrupted when a duo of long-haired Celtic archers popped up from behind a rock on the opposite side of the valley, launching a quickfire succession of rubber-tipped arrows which, with commendable accuracy but no more, thwacked into a close-formation Roman shield barrier erected with efficient haste. Nice try, I thought, just as a swelling roar from the hillside behind alerted both audience and Romans to a rampaging mob of furious Bravehearts, staves and mighty iron swords held aloft. The spectators around me visibly recoiled as the ambushers steamed headlong into the heavily outnumbered Roman ranks; together we watched in harrowed silence as the Legio VIII Augusta was frenziedly battered, clattered, stabbed and clubbed to swift and total destruction.

At the end of a mad half-minute, the valley floor lay scattered with prone, motionless legionaries, their corpses already being looted by giggling Celtic children who had formed a redundant second line of attack. The victors untied their liberated comrade, then turned to the crowd as one, weapons and plundered helmets held high. '
Toutatis!
' they yelled in unison, and as the spectators emerged from their shock to hail the triumphant rebels, I understood what was going down here. This was to be a re-enactment of Roman history as written not by Tacitus and Livy, but by Goscinny and Uderzo.

The imperial fallen were brought to life with a dramatic cry of '
Que les morts se relèvent!
', but five minutes later they were once more face down in the Denmark daisies, annihilated in a revenge attack on the village that backfired horribly. After a second resurrection the Romans regrouped, and armed with tennis-ball-tipped javelins marched away for a set-piece coming together, and a further brutal pasting, on the far side of the valley. And that was it. The dead and living took a bow; the audience applauded and filed away. They had come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.

For some time I sat alone on the hill, brooding on the deluded, wrongheaded injustice of what I had just witnessed, and the pain and humiliation its repetition would shortly accord me, twice a day at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. prompt. The land we now called Denmark lay some way north of both the limits of Roman imperial expansion and whatever might be defined as the Celtic region of influence, yet considered as a geographically transplanted reenactment of Caesar's Gallic campaign, what had taken place here was a ludicrous travesty. A moustachioed comic-strip dwarf gulping magic potion to despatch hapless Romans by the oafish dozen helmet-first into a gorse bush was not history. History was the Battle of Bibracte, where in 58 BC Caesar and 30,000 troops had routed ten times as many Gauls. History was the decisive Battle of Alesia, six years later, where 'as in other examples of ancient warfare, the disarrayed retreating Gauls were easy prey for the disciplined Roman pursuit'. History was Gaul being entirely absorbed within the Roman Empire by 50 BC, and remaining so – without a single notable act of nationalist rebellion or resistance – for over 500 years.

Yet no such indignant concerns seemed to plague my future colleagues, whom I now watched strip down to their authentic loin-swaddlings and jump gleefully into a small, murky lake near the Gaulish village walls. Once I was sure they weren't talking in Latin I sidled up to one, a considerable young man with a reckless twinkle in his rather rheumy blue eyes, as he climbed back to shore through the reeds. He cut short my introductory mumbles with a jovial, rasping call to attention. '
Eh! Eh! L'anglais est arrivé!
'

An hour later, squatting on the straw-strewn floor of the tent I'd be sharing with five fellow legionaries, I unpacked in a mood – new to me as a living historian – of exultant anticipation. Everything was going splendidly; already, the daft false start of Cinderbury seemed a distant memory. I'd been cheerily invited to join the Legio VIII bathers, and accepted with an apparently convincing display of enthusiasm: no casual observer would have guessed that the man in the non-period pants had never before voluntarily entered a body of water he couldn't see the bottom of.

They did not speak Latin, and though none but the grizzled, Gainsbourg-eyed Jean-Luc spoke much English, the hostly willingness with which most gave it a shot was touching and entirely unexpected. ('I pree-fair le rugby,' replied Vincent, the chap I'd first approached, when I mumbled some football-related ice-breaker in my hopeless French. 'No acting, more . . .
men
.' Though I'd rather he hadn't emphasised this last word by punching himself very hard in the chest.)

Laying out my wardrobe for their inspection as we dried ourselves afterwards, I'd faced no worse than modest ribbing for my Startrite
caligae
, and only a dash more for the billowing mainsail of a tunic my wife had hand-stitched using Jean-Luc's measurements and a hemp/linen bedsheet purchased from French eBay – pre-1920, as advised, and thus woven on handlooms, which imparted the requisite rough-hewn, unbleached look. ('Be aware it was surprisingly large,' he'd advised me, though judging by the conspicuously less generous cut of his and everyone else's more dapper tunics, I alone had faithfully adhered to the authentic dimensions.)

To marshal the torso-swallowing capaciousness of this sleeveless, knee-length workwear staple, Jean-Luc had lent me a belt.

'This is really something special, the best in the legion,' he'd told me, handing it over with grave ceremony in a small tented pavilion just outside the camp walls. This accommodated both his private quarters and a craftwork stall selling ancient knickknacks, most conspicuously a fertility symbol in the form of a winged erection. The proprietor was an auburn-haired German woman, Ira, whose workshop, Aurificina Treverica, had produced the belt in question: lavishly decorated with hand-worked tinned-brass rivets and plates, and finished off with a sort of clanking sporran – a curtain of five medallion-studded leather strips that hung down before the groin. This splendid accessory elevated my appearance above that of a failed trick-or-treat ghost, and when teamed with a borrowed pair of well-seasoned, properly hobnailed old
caligae
– three sizes too large, and thus worn with a great fat pair of Hadrian's Wall-issue socks – imparted a look my new comrades seemed to find very nearly convincing. No less importantly, walking about in all this stuff felt much less blaringly daft than expected, particularly once they'd shown me how to make sense of the leather spaghetti that was my
caligae
lacing.

At this fledgling stage of my re-enactment career, I could not have wished for a more welcoming group of time travellers, nor a happier compromise between hardcore historical accuracy and contemporary reassurance. A barefoot legionary had pressed upon me a honey-smeared slab of some sort of bread-pancake hybrid he'd prepared by baking dough on a flat rock extracted from the fire, then handed over a bottle of Heineken to wash it down. Linen drawn over a convoluted framework of wooden poles, the tent was self-evidently of period design, though jumbled in the straw amongst the armour and swords and leather-sheathed drinking vessels lay the odd Nike trainer and custom-car magazine.

Squeezed together on benches in the fly-happy heat of what I'd come to know as the mess tent, we effected more detailed introductions over an incomprehensible Roman dice game. Vincent was by some distance the most flamboyant of our number, an archaeology student with an unshakeable passion for roll-ups and the bellowed lyrics of Led Zeppelin. Ex-commando Renaud, an ever-smiling prop forward with calves the size of my waist, and a waist the size of a water-butt; goateed wisecracker Jean-Charles, a younger military veteran whose evidently uncanny impersonations of absent legionaries provided much of the after-dark entertainment; gimlet-eyed Paul, a modest, thoughtful man most often to be found reading in our tent; Germain, the quiet one; Francky, a six-foot-two, seventeen-stone teenage colosseum from the badlands of Marseilles; Laurent, a teacher at a technical college who'd sneakily persuaded his students to build the legion's ballista; and two beaky, companionable brothers, Jean-Michel and Thibault, respectively a plumber and a tax inspector.

Aside from Ira and Jean-Luc's teenage niece – both quartered in the flying-penis pavilion – the female contingent I'd beheld on the legion's website were conspicuous by their absence. No place for them on this big boys' scout camp, this swig-from-the-same-jug, five-to-a-tent, superglue-grade male-bonding belch-fest.

The park closed at five, and with the sun still high and hot it was just us, the unseen Gauls, and a creeping plethora of ram-goats gathered in vast-bollocked, blank-eyed malevolence outside our palisade. (Rare breeds, of course, which after my Cinderbury alarums I dearly wished to make rarer still.) Jean-Michel sat flaking wood into a barrel for fire-lighting purposes, Thibault was off jogging in his Reeboks, Renaud emerged from the leather-covered provisions tent with a bottle of Pernod. For an idle, comradely hour we slumped on the rope-handled chests that served as mess-tent benches, sipping pastis and lethargically slapping flies off our bare legs.

Ferried from wooden bowls to sweat-rimmed mouths with wooden spoons and iron-bladed daggers, dinner was bread dipped in olive oil, sausage, walnuts and figs, copiously accompanied with red wine decanted into earthenware jugs from the plastic jerry-can stashed behind a chest in the corner. An endless flow of chatter that included the words
romanisation
, Charlemagne and Peugeot evolved into a series of emotional monologues on the ideal of a simple life, the tyranny of the alarm clock and the dehumanising nature of office work; my understanding of all this was heavily dependent on the legion's very French habit of illustrating almost everything they said with a flamboyantly expressive mime.