I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

by Moore, Tim

  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!'

  We were again resurrected, and lined up to return the distant crowd's applause by banging swords against our shields. It was a hateful duty in the circumstances, like taking a loser's medal after an embarrassingly one-sided cup final. I came, I saw, I was conquered. Only as I dejectedly wedged my sword back in my belt did I spot the delta of blood rivulets coursing down my left hand and forearm, their source a trio of deep abrasions on the central knuckles. 'Oh, c'est normal,' breezed Thibault, when he saw me surveying these wounds with an expression of aggrieved disbelief. He held up his own left hand and indicated the livid scar tissue sheathing the relevant area – shield-bearer's knuckle, I came to note, was a universal legionary's complaint.

  Other complaints asserted themselves during the trudge back to camp as the adrenalined anaesthesia of combat wore off. Most severe was that pulsing crater near the base of my spine; most mysterious an angry red weal that almost encircled my upper right arm. Running like a constant prickling fizz beneath them all were the numberless nettle stings that riddled my limbs like some medieval pox-rash. With four sound thrashings still to come in the afternoon, and then another eight a day thereafter, what in the name of Caesar would I look like at the end of the week?

  Lunch was restorative, and not just because of Renaud's generous decantings from our secret plonk cache. Between battles the legion's camp was open to visitors, and in Jean-Luc's absence I found myself asked to field queries in the Scandinavian lingua franca that English has long been. This was my first taste of the strange quasi-celebrity bestowed upon the public re-enactor, and how sweetly moreish it proved.

  Wide-eyed youngsters gazed up at me in slack-jawed awe as I sated their parents' curiosity, my gigantic ignorance apparently camouflaged by the reassuring authenticity of my outfit.

  It soon became clear that to a certain junior visitor I could say no wrong, like a fireman on a school visit telling wonderstruck children that his smoke hood was a kind of space bucket, and that the helmets were that colour because arsonists were allergic to yellow. 'That? Well, it's a . . . measuring pole. Used by sanitary engineers. Precisely the length of Julius Caesar's forearm.' 'I see you're rather taken with our ballista. Bit of a mean machine, isn't she? At the Battle of Cinderbury, three of these babies accounted for 4,000 charging Waynesmen.' It was no particular surprise to find that a very vocal minority of fathers had come not to ask questions, but to give answers. The way to silence these dangerous saboteurs, I found, was to whip my helmet off and offer it to one of their children. 'But from my detailed study of such shields . . .' they'd begin, and I'd abruptly plonk that Imperial Gallic G down on another small blond head. It never failed. 'Always room for a new recruit,' was my standard accompanying drawl, delivered to the disarmed father with an infuriating wink. 'You have a name please, soldier?' croaked one enchanted mother as her little girl tottered happily about beneath two kilos of 16-gauge Indian steel. 'Caecilius,' I replied without hesitation. 'Private Caecilius Grumio of the Eighth Augustan at your service, ma'am.' The Roman salute that now shot involuntarily from my right arm would have earned me rather more than a gawp of surprise had I tried it out a couple of hours south in Hamburg.

  I'd noted Laurent hanging about with an expression of concern as I spouted disinformation all over his beloved ballista – more accurately a 'scorpion', he informed me – but I only got told off once, after Vincent overheard me being sidetracked by a garrulous Swedish visitor into a critique of Tony Blair's foreign policy. 'When you wear zis,' he said, grabbing my belt in both hands, 'you are Roman legionary, in Roman epoque, and nussing more.' Everything Vincent said and did was said and done with manic intensity. Five minutes later I saw him furiously masturbating a javelin.

  The afternoon battles followed the established pattern, though before being slaughtered in fight three, by the village gate, I did at least manage to kill someone – a tubby, walrus-tached Obelix who stumbled in mid stave-lunge and landed navel-first on my diffidently proffered sword.

  Perhaps to atone for the monstrous unrealism of the combat – as Jean-Luc truculently pointed out, our 'gardez-la-ligne' tactics made no military sense on the tiny scale we were reenacting them – when the crowds left, the legion threw itself into authentic military maintenance. Exhausted by eight deaths and a bullying sun, I slumped vacantly in the mess tent as all around armour was buffed, belts restitched, caligae re-hobnailed. Thibault had begun fashioning himself a chainmail vest, a nimble-fingered labour of unfathomable dedication requiring several thousand tiny steel hoops, three pairs of specialist pliers and the sort of personality never tempted to hurl all of these down on to a hard surface and batter them with the back of a shovel, again and again and again.

  It was always a pleasure to watch my legionaries engaged in precision period toil. Particularly as the ribald, barrack-room banter that typically accompanied it – tightly focused on bodily functions and the intimate congress of Gaul and goat – could without warning evolve into an arcane discussion of fletching techniques or Mark Antony's tactical failings. Jean-Luc held forth with some passion on the genuine academic merits of what he called experimental archaeology – only by actually making and using armour, uniforms and instruments of war could you hope to understand how the Roman Army fought, and with a success that saw it dominate the known world. 'We discover that a legionary must have many skills,' he told me. 'He is engineer, baker, metalworker, shoemaker, chef . . .' With the multi-talented evidence of this all around us, I could only think how wonderful it would be if even some of it – along with the ability to injure large
men – rubbed off on me.

  It was dark and raining when half a dozen tartan-trousered Gauls pitched up, droopy moustaches limp with drizzle. Their spokesman, the one I'd accidentally killed a few hours back, trooped into the mess tent to announce that the womenfolk had thrown them out of the village, furious that their aprèsguerre revelries had woken the junior Gauls. Vincent welcomed them into our already well-populated quarters, and as they squeezed up on the box-benches each took time to gawp in wonder at the trappings of a superior civilisation.

  Aside from our extraordinary range of foodstuffs and alcohol – one that their efforts in the hours ahead would render much less extraordinary – what seemed to astonish our visitors most was the period technology on display, and how we had mastered it. One, a goateed skinhead whose leather wristbands I'd had a very close look at while their owner pillaged my corpse, simply could not believe that the Pompeii-issue lamps illuminating the table were authentically fuelled with olive oil. I gathered that having failed to coax a reliable flame from their own close equivalents, they'd resorted to paraffin. Except that didn't work either, and each Gaulish homestead had now been forced to choose between Maglites and blackness. You could not wish for a more effectively literal demonstration of how the Dark Ages happened.

  'Attention, attention! Il arrive!'

  I never had much luck decoding the Gauls' harsh and throaty French, but there was no mistaking those words, stage whispered as I climbed back over the camp palisade after a goat-anointing comfort break. The odd half-glimpsed nudge and suspect snigger had already caused my highly tuned paranoia sensors to twitch, and now they shrieked like klaxons. I shuffled back into the suddenly silent mess tent, cheeks aglow, and wedged myself in the tiny gap between Francky and a grubby, grizzled pirate of a Gaul with a smile like a pub ceiling. He showed me this at uncomfortably close quarters, then in tones cultivated on the wrong side of Hadrian's Wall, croaked, 'All right, pal?'