I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (9 page)

The sun sank lower and we wandered out of the tent. Shield bosses, the business ends of the rack-stacked javelins and ballista bolts, Renaud's zebra-plumed helmet slung jauntily atop a spear wedged in the dusty earth – the legion's many metallic possessions gleamed softly in the golden sidelight. Off past the lake, a coil of wood-smoke rose into a cloudless sky above the thatched roofs of the oak-girdled Gaulish village, along with muted strains of a jolly, pagan singsong. It was all terribly becoming.

'We fight two hour only in one day, but it's hard,' yawned Vincent, heralding a tent-bound exodus. 'You will find so tomorrow.' Before I could nod, a rock exploded in the fire, flinging shrapnel and English yelps right across the hillside.

Nine hours later, ladling porridge out of a smutted copper pot hung from a tripod over the fire, I felt I'd coped as well as could be expected with the sardined intimacy that was an almost universal human experience until perhaps a century back, and still defines military life today. In the tent it was elbow to elbow, knee to buttock, nose to ear; those who didn't snore, farted. To my right: the immovable boy-mountain Francky, his bum-fluffed, Easter Island-sized face never more than a snuffling twitch away from mine. If Francky had snored they'd have known about it in Copenhagen, but instead he talked, an urgent mutter that invariably included '
Maman
' and many instances of the word '
non
'. Here was the teenage conscript who didn't hate Gauls and just wanted to go home.

Germain, to my left, never once made a sound or even moved a muscle, yet unsettled me more than all the restless, guttural snorters combined. The legion were restricted to wooden mock-weapons in combat, but every soldier had brought along a honed and gleaming
gladius
– a stocky, fat-bladed short sword lethal in close-quarter, over-the-shield stab-work. Most came out only for the after-hours photographic posing that was to become a nightly ritual, but for Germain that wasn't quite enough. As we pulled off sandals and tunics and laid out our bedding on that first night, I watched him tenderly inveigle his
gladius
into the sleeping bag he was about to rustle into. How I wished he had not done so. At least half a dozen times, woken by some thunderous guff or Francky's plaintive mumblings, I lay for long minutes studying the somnolent Germain's blank, freckled features for any flicker of emotion that might betray an imminent rampage, any sign that he might be set to go Brutus on my ass. Every night it would be the same.

Thibault and his barefoot brother, my most forgiving soldierly mentors in those early days, came up as I was decanting espresso dregs into a wooden beaker. ('
Eh, c'est italien comme les Romains,
' apologised Renaud with a blithe shrug.) 'Alors, Teem,' breezed Thibault, clapping his tunic-clad thighs. 'It's now your special moment!'

Concern that this might be the prelude to some outlandish initiation, apt to involve oiled nudity, had receded by the time I took my place in the Legio VIII's ranks. My sense of sorethumb unreadiness had not.

Paul had insisted I don his
lorica segmentata
– a kind of half-suit of armour, with overlapping steel strips that sheathed the torso and shoulders. A magnificent piece of kit whose burnished, martial splendour had dominated the foot-end of our tent, when teamed with my voluminous shin-length tunic and the spindly limbs protruding therefrom, the effect suggested Wee Willie Winkie off to play Rollerball. Thibault, who with his brother had assumed a genuine and most touching concern for my welfare, did what he could by tightening everything – armour bindings, helmet chinstrap, belt – but his girding thumbs-up after a final appraisal failed to convince.

The park gates had opened as Germain and I washed up the porridge pot at a standpipe near the Viking longhouse, and a small crowd of camera-toting families stood in wait when we filed out of the camp entrance. '
Legio expedita!'
barked Renaud, calling us to attention in his capacity as
optio
, our sergeant-major. '
Venire
. . .
pergere!
' Delighted to have recognised the command to march, I raised my shield and turned smartly towards the Gaulish village. Francky's colossal chest blocked the way. '
Avant la bataille
,' he whispered, '
un petit promenade
.' A clumsy, clanking about-turn later and I was rattling off in pursuit of my legion.

'
Sin, sin, sin-dex-sin! Sin, sin, sin-dex-sin!
' With Renaud doing his NCO bit at the rear and Jean-Luc in that road-kill helmet raising our battle mascot – a cat-sized brass bull on a pole – at the fore, the Legio VIII paraded briskly through the park's already busy central attractions, a promotional tour that took in the barbecue lake, the Viking village and a number of forges and workshops whose presence had previously eluded me. I can't pretend not to have enjoyed the very considerable attention our progress invited, even when expressed in the form of laughter and pantomime-villain boos, issued by those who had learned their Roman history from
Asterix
and
Monty Python
.

The acclaim initially anaesthetised the physical demands of our undertaking, but by the time we tramped back to the camp entrance Renaud's
sin-dex-sins
were passing unheard beneath the laboured exhalations rasping around my helmet's interior. The shield, the armour, the helmet itself – all the state-of-the-ancient-art imperial kit that had seemed so pleasingly uncumbersome as I stood in line outside the camp now weighed me down to a bowed shuffle. My weary, hobnailed feet scrabbled noisily for purchase on the stone-paved sections, and my shield-bearing left arm was expressing its distress through a sort of spasmodic shiver over which I had no control. When the command came to stand to with shields rested on the ground, I all but threw mine down in exhausted distress. Perhaps fifteen seconds afterwards Jean-Luc raised his bull once more, and off to the village we headed, marching as to war.

Thibault had already explained that our engagements with the Gauls would always follow the four-stage routine I'd witnessed the day before, and thus forewarned I determined to savour the snatch-squad raid that would be act one. But it wasn't easy, and not just because my belt fell off as we charged through the village gates.

The first small, windowless house I ran inside to search was empty, but dashing into the second, sword drawn, imperial sneer in place, I found myself confronted by a cowering Gaulish mother, a dirty-faced infant half-hidden in the russet folds of her tunic dress. She could have been my Cinderbury wife, with our Cinderbury son. It recalled that scene near the end of
The Sound of Music
when the male half of the 'I am Sixteen Going on Seventeen' duet comes at the von Trapps with his SS-issue Luger. As I stood there in breathless confusion, a pair of fellow legionaries ducked in through the low door, paused briefly to kick over a basket of carrots, then rushed back out, trailing a yelled order – in French – to follow them at the double.

Trotting outside I spotted our quarry being dragged screaming across the threshold of the village's most prominent structure, a thatched longhouse with spears and gaily coloured oval shields propped against its outer walls. The prisoner was the same man apprehended the day before, and he resisted Paul's and Germain's attempts to bind his wrists with familiar desperation. But no more success: as they yanked him upright, I noted the many fresh and half-healed gashes and abrasions gouged into that impressive torso. By the end of the week it was as if he'd been thrown from an express train.

What had looked so grimly satisfying from the hillside was uncomfortably harrowing up close, and the keening wails of the prisoner's bereft family hardly helped. As I brought up the rear guard back through the gates, I couldn't help being aware that not one twenty-first-century spectator, not a single MOP, had been inside the village walls to witness what we'd just done. The faithful brutality was purely for our own benefit, and that of our oppressed underlings.
Pour encourager les autres
.

The crowd jeered as we hauled our spitting, flailing freedom fighter back down the path. 'This is typical for us,' Laurent told me later, explaining how an enduring national guilt complex caused many of his countrymen to regard Roman re-enactment as a treacherous collaboration with an occupying enemy.

A little light dawdling allowed the archers to take their positions, and then, with a cry of '
La tortue!
' (in the heat of battle, Latin always went out the window) the legion jostled itself into the crowd-pleasing 'tortoise shell' defence against incoming missiles: the first rank of four holding their shields before them in tight formation, the second raising theirs above their heads, and the optional third (
moronicus brittanicus
) jogging around trying to find a gap to wedge his shield in that doesn't – sorry! – include his colleagues' fingers.

The mighty thunk of arrow on shield did enough to suggest that even a rubber-tipped strike would down a better man than I, but from what I'd seen the day before it was plain that worse was soon to come. What I didn't anticipate was how soon, and how much worse. One moment I was almost enjoying the close, heavy-breathed fraternity of under-tortoise life, and the next a rearward wave of roaring pagans had crashed upon us, staves and swords swinging wildly.

Iretain only snapshots of the calamitous seconds that followed. There were beards and bad teeth; there was wood and metal and noise. The battle cries and the clatter of sword and shield, alarming even from the range I'd heard them as a spectator, were at close quarters amplified to an overwhelming, murderous cacophony. Spittled rage and full-blooded blows assailed me from all sides, blasting away Renaud's desperate rallying cries to hold my position: 'Tim!
La ligne
!
Gardez la ligne
!' Then, without even knowing how or at whose hand, I was down, winded and bewildered, hot, shallow breaths filling my helmet, blinkless gaze fixed at the blue heavens. When a grinning youth in a grubby jerkin scuttled up and wrenched the sword from my hand, I realised I hadn't even attempted to wield it.

'
Que les morts se relèvent!
'

I hauled myself groggily upright to see the Gauls acknowledging the crowd's cheers, holding aloft their pillaged booty; a stocktake of the rising dead revealed we'd taken only three of them down with us. Would my legion never be allowed to make a closer fight of it? More than an affront to history, this seemed an unnecessary humiliation to those charged with recreating it.

I tried to ask Paul as he diplomatically relieved me of his precious
lorica segmentata,
and watched that small, round, stubbled face pucker in confusion. The truth, falteringly explained as we made our way back to the village for round three, struck me almost as hard as the Gaul or Gauls unknown who had laid me out a minute earlier. For there was no preordained outcome to any of these skirmishes, no script to follow; of the four battles fought in the morning before my arrival, the Legio VIII had actually won three. Far from going through the motions, we were here to fight competitive duels with honour and glory at stake.

And how on earth were such battles won and lost? Miming energetically, Paul and Thibault laid out the rules of engagement. Any sword strike to the face, neck or unarmoured torso meant death, with limb blows obliging the sufferer to handicap himself in homage to
Monty Python
's Black Knight: take a hit to the arm and you folded it behind your back, cop one in the leg and you hopped. If I had yet to behold this memorable phenomenon, they said, it was because anyone thus disabled was almost instantly put out of their idiotic misery.

So I was here not to make up the numbers, not to lie down and die on request, but to kill or be killed, to be judged on my skill and courage as a warrior, to uphold the legion's repute and fight for the glory of Rome. This new information seemed too large for my brain, and was soon sloshing around in my queasy innards. I wondered if the enhanced responsibility might prove overwhelming, and during our subsequent attempt to storm the village gates, found that it did. Once again a rearward attack did for us: as I stuck an arm over the fence, wafting blindly away with my sword, some unseen enemy shieldcharged me from behind with the force of a runaway skip lorry. Shock, a badly dented back and whiplash were the immediate legacies of this encounter, but these were swiftly driven away by a jostling stampede of shriller discomforts: I had been propelled, face first and half naked, into a dense and extensive patch of nettles.

We lost that bout 11–1, and went only a couple better at the morning's final coming together, round the other side of the lake near the village's rear entrance. Additionally equipped this time with our Slazenger-tipped safety javelins, we stood in two lines as the enemy steamed raggedly towards us; only when Renaud saw the yellows of their eyes did he yell the command – '
Pila jacere
!' – that allowed us to release these ludicrous sticks skywards. Mine, which stalled and nosedived after a flight of perhaps seven feet, was by no means the least threatening deployment.

The Gauls paused briefly, tracking each javelin's stunted trajectory in the manner of Road Runner observing some farcical, Acme-sponsored attempt on his life. '
La ligne
!' yelled Renaud, and this time I dutifully held the authentic formation, one which allowed a large section of the enemy to outflank us at a gentle trot before slaughtering the might of Rome in the now traditional hindward manner. In a pitiable inversion of Nietzsche's adage, that which killed us did not make us stronger.

My fourth death of the day was the least painful but the most infuriating: felled by a light strike between the shoulder blades, while obediently sinking to the earth I saw the fat-faced young Gaul responsible actually skipping along behind our back line, despatching each of its members with a dainty flick of his sword and an update of his running tally of kills for the day: '. . .
douze
,
treize
,
quatorze
!'