I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (11 page)

Yet all the while, I was slowly progressing. By day three I'd discovered an unexpected aptitude for certain period talents, prominently splitting logs and not washing. Dropping an axe on my foot while engaged in the former, I heard myself swear in French. I began to develop a genuine appreciation for the prêt-a-porter, pee-on-the-go convenience of the Roman tunic. And I had not died – twelve times – in vain. Blow by blow, parry by parry, I was getting up to fighting speed, able to at least see who was killing me and how they were doing it.

It was during the third round of the second day's ruck, my already prominent hackles raised after Ross spat on my shield as I lay dead, that I noticed thoughts more focused than the white noise of panic and terror running through my head in battle. 'I'll fucking have you, you fuck-faced fuck-sucker,' was one such example. The discovery in that same encounter of a Gaulish reluctance to go down when killed translated these thoughts into loud words.

We still lost, of course, but fuelled by fury I rose from the dead in a state of let-me-at-'em euphoria. I slapped backs. I clenched my fists and yelled incoherent, steroid-faced encouragements, so pumped up that my tunic seemed a snug fit. I found my sympathy for the villagers replaced by a powerful desire to burn their filthy houses to the ground, to heave a dead goat down their well, to hurl their mewling, smut-faced young into the nettles.

If the Gaul's superior aggression in combat was authentic – when push came to shove, and then to stab and slash, you would after all expect a freedom-fighting warrior to out-brawl some tired mercenary a million cubits from home – then so too was my ugly lust for extracurricular vengeance. The morning after I made sure to get a couple of kicks in at our prisoner. And that sunset, assessing the benign arcadia beyond the lake, with its gentle smoke plumes, its comely thatched structures, its ambling, shirtless men ferrying water about in twin-bucket shoulder-yokes, I gazed at the shields stacked up against the longhouse and thought: One night, maybe not tonight, but one night, I'm going to get in there and piss all over those.

Dressing up in full regalia was a regularly indulged afterhours pastime, and, from that evening on, one chronicled with almost pornographic relish. Set-piece tableaux were painstakingly set up and photographed: Germain about to be ambushed by a pair of piratical pagans; a line of Gaulish warriors spread out across a hilltop, silhouetted dramatically in the gloaming; Vincent in Caesar-era kit staring flintily into a setting sun. As the primary instigators of these nightly pose-fests, the Gauls became an after-dark fixture in our camp. This proved useful in terms of keeping my hatred levels topped up. When the conversation strayed beyond social and military history in the first millennium, our guests seemed incapable of offering anything beyond belches and boorish unpleasantry; in war as in peace, the Gauls were always too near the knuckle. Ribald and cutting as my legionaries could certainly be, their banter was always underscored with a basic human decency, and offset by moments of pensive philosophy. It was the Roman way.

By the same token, when it was done belittling Hollywood depictions of ancient combat, and had run out of insulting adjectives to describe the plastic-helmeted centurions who badgered tourists outside the Colosseum, the legion would revitalise itself with a little experimental archaeology. One afternoon we cleared our tent of all rucksacks, sleeping bags and mobile phones – '
les affaires civiles
', as they were tactfully dubbed – and set about establishing whether such a structure could indeed accommodate the ten men that comprised each
contubernium
: eight legionaries, plus the two support servants who carried water and looked after the mules. We just about managed it with Francky decimated from the equation, and the servants doubling up as footrests, but the principal lesson for me was just how far the European definition of miserable discomfort has evolved over the last 2,000 years. In the ancient world, a good night's sleep meant one uninterrupted by violent assault: being babysat by nine strong men was one reason why the average Roman legionary looked forward to a life 15 per cent longer than his civilian counterpart's.

Regular meals contributed to this statistic. It was Napoleon who said that an army marched on its stomach, a logistical maxim that his countrymen in the Legio VIII had taken very closely to heart. My first encounter with the catering corps – Jean-Michel squatting barefoot by the fire, mopping up cauldron dregs of lentil stew with a crumbling fistful of leftover dough – was to prove misleading in the extreme. The dark and ever-sweltering interior of the legion's well-stocked leather provisions tent was alive with the muscular aromas of ripe cheese and conserved meats; from tinned peaches to pastis, their definition of admissible foodstuffs seemed to encompass anything whose ingredients had been cultivated within the Empire's generous confines at any point in history. However awkwardly this sat with Jean-Luc's revelation that a legionary was in effect paid largely in wheat and for long periods ate little else, it was somehow wonderfully faithful to the epicurean spirit of both ancient Rome and modern France. It was just not possible to imagine sweaty, ostentatiously flatulent men of any other nationality rounding off every meal as the Legio VIII did, with a heartfelt round of toasts to the
cuisinier
.

Raising a wooden beaker to Renaud as he doled out seconds of chicken cassoulet, I looked around the table, from face to grazed and stubbled face, and wondered if wine and Stockholm syndrome alone could account for the warm fellowship I now felt for these men. We were a band of brothers, who ate as one, slept as one, fought as one. When, playing dice on an idle mess-tent afternoon, Vincent soporifically wondered aloud if soldiers eventually thought as one, we all smiled and nodded. Even the one who'd spent much of the day thinking about the three earwigs he'd found in his sleeping bag that morning.

So intimate was our bond that I soon found it disturbingly hard to sense where the nothing-to-hide, close-knit comradeship ended, and the Romoerotic coquetry might begin. Mini-length tunics and the almost universal eschewal of underwear meant that a flash of
saucisson de Toulouse
was never more than a crossed leg away: Laurent's after-lunch routine included a splayed catnap on the camp's straw-heap that sent many younger visitors reeling away in distress.

If this was a hint that the decadence which destroyed Rome might be corroding the legion's self-control, many others revealed themselves in the ignominious events of day four. 'Discipline is our god,' went a favoured Jean-Michel catchphrase. How shameful to find myself – first through incompetence, then blind hate and rage – desecrating the relevant altar.

That morning, addled with the toxic aftermath of their mint and pastis abomination, I shuffled out of a village house and pronounced it clear with a bleary call of '
Vide
!' The great many insurgents who followed me out a moment later made short and brutal work of our entire search party; as we lay dead together, sharing another moment of esprit de corpse, Thibault berated me in an unusually tetchy whisper.

Desperate to atone for what was the most humiliating defeat yet, Jean-Charles and Vincent enlivened the ensuing battle with a commando flank attack, stripping down to their loincloths, slapping on mud camouflage and wading out through the lakeside reeds in the hope of reaching the village walls by stealth. With gesticulations and warning cries, the crowd betrayed them to the defenders; vengeance was swift and terrible.

Before he was even out of the water, Jean-Charles copped an awful blow which seemed to burst his face, spraying that muddy torso crimson and – in conjunction with a simultaneously cracked rib – putting this sizeable ex-paratrooper
hors de combat
for the rest of the week. As we watched him struggle back to camp, black of eye and flat of nose, I was consumed with powerful emotions: a piquant dash of vengeful fury in the nauseous gloop of there-but-for-the-grace-of-Jove-go-I terror.

In the same engagement we came under aerial log bombardment; in the close-quarters thick of the one after, I hazarded a tentative peek above my shield and had its top edge driven straight back into my lower face. That meant a lip split three ways, and a spectacular recurrence of shield-bearer's knuckle. Thereafter the wounds were reopened eight times a day; the scabs didn't have a chance to form until I got home.

Unhinged by these relentless calamities to a state of shellshock, in the morning's final engagement I took leave of my senses. When a volley of Gaulish spears fell some way short, I dropped my shield, dashed unthinkingly from our line, snatched one up in either hand and, with a lunatic, throatstripping roar, hurled both back at the enemy.

'In battle, anger is as good as courage.' So goes the old Welsh proverb I've grown so grimly familiar with as it scrolls across the intro screen in Medieval II: Total War, never imagining that I would one day assess this aphorism at first hand, and discover it to be bollocks.

The javelins plopped harmlessly to earth at the feet of a quizzical enemy; my bestial howl faded into a sudden and profound silence. The audience laughter that presently filled it suggested parallels with a notorious incident in the 1974 World Cup, when a Zaire player ran out of his defensive wall as Brazil lined up a free kick, and joyfully hoofed the ball into the crowd.

The immediate consequence of this moment of madness was another as-we-lay-dying admonishment from Thibault; in the longer term I earned myself a permanent demotion to the '
légères
' – the unarmoured, ultra-expendable first line of attack. When that evening Jean-Michel led me up the hill for the first of many patient tutorials in
pila
hurling and the shoulder-bruising art of shield defence, I had to conclude he was following orders from the top.

By then, however, the Legio VIII already found itself under new management. Infuriated – or, who knows, inspired – by my deranged indiscipline, Jean-Luc had apparently conducted himself with excess vigour in its aftermath. The precise details of his rush of blood were regrettably never discussed, but Gallic petulance would seem to have taken hold of the internal inquiry that ensued; our commander surveyed all future battles from the comfort of his pavilion.

If the red headbands wrapped around our skulls to limit helmet-chafe aptly imparted a kamikaze bearing, the dispirited lethargy with which we donned them after lunch did not. Our morale was shot. When Laurent asked me to shoo a goat off the scorpio firing range, I complied with a furious gusto unknown to the quivering mute hunched pitifully behind his shield in human combat. It was my only honest victory of the week.

Embittered by invalidity, Jean-Charles wearied of impersonating the legionaries who weren't there, and over lunch started on those who were; focusing on Francky's occasional stutter was a mock too far. Most particularly as throughout that inglorious afternoon our young giant alone stood firm in battle. Francky's extreme youth had been underlined when I came out of the shower – hidden away in some distant admin block it had taken me three days to locate – to find him doodling tanks and fighter jets on the whiteboard outside. In combat, though, he was more of a man than the rest of us combined, and nearly always the final Roman down. The consolation of premature death was a worm's eye view of Francky's last stand, watching through the dandelions as his ponderous but titanic blows hewed gaps in the closing circle of opponents, until at last they overwhelmed him.

So closely did we adhere to the unflattering
Asterix
stereotype that afternoon – the crowd-pleasing low point was a demonstration of artillery-camouflaging techniques which ended with the vegetation we'd draped across Charybdis being eaten by goats – that even the enemy felt sorry for us. Ludo, their lead archer and good-natured chieftain, and one of the very few Gauls I didn't mind being killed by, came over that evening to organise a keep-fit session; he tried very hard to hide his incredulity at the number of Romans who couldn't touch their sandals. Watching us pant and redden and sweat, he quietly asked if we'd prefer to make it four fights a day instead of eight. Everyone but me seemed to think he was joking.

It had become plain that we were all entitled to a day off, what in military circles is known as a little R & R, and the following morning I came back from the showers to find Thibault, Jean-Michel and Germain scuffling about through our tent-straw in casual sportswear. '
Vite
, Tim –
nous allons en ville
!'

Ville
was Køge, a trim medieval port twenty minutes drive away. The way things had gone the day before I should have been glad of a break, but I clunked the car door shut without enthusiasm. A short while earlier, striding towards the ablution facility in my tunic and hobnailed sandals, I'd felt the heady stirrings of that period rush alluded to by Celtic Will. Emerging from our tent thus clad on previous mornings was an act accompanied by a twinge of looming ignominy, as if that linen flap was a stage curtain, with an audience of my unkinder friends and associates waiting in malicious expectation. But this time there was nothing but a bland and soothing, what's-for-breakfast sense of routine: just the start of another day in the Eighth Augustus. Despite the best Gaulish efforts to batter him back inside, the Roman within me had begun to emerge. And now here he was in a Citroën Berlingo, wearing Gap shorts and a Duke Nukem T-shirt. Back to square 2005.

In blustery sun the four of us trailed dutifully through Køge's squares and churchyards, nibbling very expensive seafood sandwiches and photographing statues. After the intensities of combat, it seemed to me so inane, so pointless. Sneering at Denmark's third-oldest house I began to wonder if I could ever again function as a normal tourist. In their trainers and polo shirts, my comrades were diminished in my eyes. By the same token, the colossal hatred I'd built up for the Silver Psycho was inevitably eroded when we encountered him wandering about in civvies with a wife and two kids, his deranged hair tamed into a wanky ad-man's pony-tail. How oddly glad I was when we met him again back at the Lejre car park, and he returned our nods and waves with a snarl that was the final whistle for our ceasefire kickabout in no man's land: '
Et maintenant, la guerre
.'