I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (10 page)

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?'

The detected presence of a fellow Briton far from home is in most situations a happy one. But not this kind of Briton, in this kind of situation. It was instantly impossible not to picture the man they called Ross rubbing his grimy hands at the unanticipated bonus of some simpering Sassenach stave-fodder. His greeting was delivered like a gauntlet slap, and of the four further words of English that were all I would hear from this expatriate Scotsman over the days ahead, two were 'off'.

If there was an awkward silence to puncture, Vincent always had the pin. In a moment he'd whipped out his knackered acoustic guitar and was bellowing out a lewd folk song which brought the mess tent to its unsteady feet, thus granting me a low-profile exit. It wasn't just the Ross factor, or the winks and giggles. I simply couldn't bring myself to fraternise any further with men who'd spent all day hurting me to death.

Alone in our tent I savoured the soldierly satisfaction of unbuckling my belt at the end of a hard day's fight, its many rivets and medallions warm to the touch, hearing the darkness jingle as I tossed it into the corner and hit armour. I lay there in that darkness amid the muted wassailing, feeling myself settle into the one authentic period duty I could ever hope to master: really hating those fucking Gauls.

And so I began to adapt to the routines of military life. Those frenzied blurts of pain and fear were interspersed with long, idle hours in the mess tent, playing dice, buffing armour, eating vast slabs of very red meat and aimlessly shooting the
merde
. There were occasional unbilled excitements. A murderous cacophony from Jean-Luc's pavilion one afternoon had us all dashing out of the mess tent, unhealthily exhilarated that the curious (but very Roman)
ménage à trois
resident therein had come to a messy (but very Roman) end. In fact, they'd all gone out for the day. A ram-goat had somehow slipped through a gap in the canvas and laid expensive waste to Ira's jewellery cases.

One hot
après-midi
was devoted to Renaud's paratrooping tales from Africa and Croatia; another to Vincent's hoarse and lusty singalongs ('Tim, you help wiz ze lyric to "Johnny B. Goode"? No, no – "Go" we know already.') And then there were the moments of quiet self-doubt, when a legionary would sidle up and discreetly enquire how I really felt about what was going on here. Except their unease was focused not on the moral validity of war, but the lingering fear – common, I would find, to even the most hard-bitten re-enactor – that everyone watching them recreate it thought they were total idiots.

The worst part of every day was the village raid: with homes to defend and no MOP witnesses about to curb their enthusiasm, the enemy would set about us with furious abandon. As I crouched into the longhouse on the second morning, shaking sword at the ready, a junior Gaul dropped down on my back from the gloomy rafters. I tottered blindly around for a while as he clung on and pummelled me with feet, fists, knees and elbows, then bit cinders and goat crap when some heftier tribesman whipped my ankles away with a stave. An attempt to surprise them that afternoon with an attack through their rear gate introduced a new nemesis: a wiry old berserker with flowing white hair and a Bismarck 'tache, who looked like Getafix but fought like a thousand cornered polecats. He approached me at a bellowing gallop, kicked my shield aside without breaking stride and unleashed a frenzied volley of sword blows, the majority of them post-mortem, accom panying each with a horrid Jimmy Connors grunt.

If that appointment with Great Uncle Punishment was my daily low, the highlight was scorpion drill. The public demonstrations Laurent organised every afternoon were safety-first affairs, with the machine we called Charybdis aimed at a patch of bare hillside and fired well below full velocity. How much more exhilarating were the freelance trials we held before the park opened, winding the tensioning gear as far as it would go and strafing the distant countryside with fat-shafted, iron-tipped bolts. One thunked so deeply into a tree trunk half a kilometre away that Germain and I had to use axes to hack it free. 'With Charybdis,' smiled Laurent when we returned, patting one of her solid wooden wheels, 'an accident is a death.'

A couple of days later, Laurent went off in the legion's minibus to visit a nearby Viking museum (along with Vincent, who had insisted on doing so in full Roman kit), leaving me alone to present Charybdis – and more challengingly the mysterious tangle of plumb-lines that was the legion's surveying equipment – to the gathered visitors. They were a predominantly teenage intake; all morning their unusually partisan jeering had irked me, and now, in camp, they swiftly took unkind advantage of my flustered naivety.

'Hey, dude, why don't you just use a laser?'

'Wit dis measure stick – how many metres from my ass to your face?'

Worse was to come when I raised my shield and thoughtlessly trotted out the standard lecture-ending challenge: 'So, if anyone wants to try their luck against the Roman defences . . .' That this would be the prelude to something other than the usual drumming of infant fists was apparent when the first kick landed. I hunkered down behind my shield as the Nike-powered impacts intensified into a fearsome tattoo, and the warm Nordic air was soon alive with my curse-studded cries for a ceasefire.

A pair of the most vicious assailants – one I recognised as having thrown an apple at us during the pre-battle walkabout – ambled up as I laid my shield to rest against our weapon rack, shaken and breathing heavily. 'You are many times defeated today,' began the smiling elder, tracing a finger along the point of an authentic display
pila
. 'It's maybe because of a tactic problem?'

His accomplice weighed in before I could reply. 'Or because you are wearing a dress?'

'Careful with that javelin, sonny,' I hissed. 'That's how I got
these
.' And I pressed my weeping, purulent knuckles right up to his freckled nose. Later we learned that Lejre had been host that day to a visiting party from a residential school specialising in the treatment of serious emotional disorders.

Debilitating as the many physical strains of pretending to be a Roman soldier surely were, I came to realise that my almost constant state of exhaustion was due in no small part to the brain-hungry efforts involved in making sense of what Frenchmen were saying to me. One night, having been introduced to a pastis and mint-syrup combination and made very good friends with it, I stumbled through some portal of alcoholic omniscience and heard myself debating speed-camera technology with Laurent. The linguistic fallout was dreadful. Thereafter, whenever I tried to convey a lack of comprehension – typically through the catch-all shrug/wrinkled nose/headshake combo – Laurent would be on hand with a dismissive gesture and some wink-accompanied comment about continuous-wave radar.