I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (12 page)

The day after was 14 July, Bastille Day, and despite the inevitable banter about foreign royalists I kept my head, rather than having it wind up in a basket. Someone had taken the trouble to bring along an enormous French flag, and when the public had departed we all – Gaul and Roman alike – piled into the large chalet that served as Lejre's function hall, and serenaded it with an iron-throated rendition of 'The Marseillaise'. After a traditional Gallic feast of plonk and spag bol, Ludo stood to deliver an announcement that my recent experiences had rendered almost humdrum: in half an hour, for those who were interested, a dead chieftain would be cremated on a funeral pyre by the tumulus.

As someone who likes a good fire, and loves a bad one, I counted myself very highly placed amongst the interested. Jean-Luc, quite vocally, did not. The tumulus was a slab-sided mound on the hillside just behind our camp, and as the rest of us rushed about with the pyromaniac enthusiasm of the fairly drunk he stood at a haughty distance, red cloak draped impressively about his shoulders, condemning the staged stupidity of what we were up to in a multi-lingual mutter.

A substantial pity, as constructing the funeral pyre represented the Eighth Augustus' finest hour. Working with a controlled and wordless intensity that was exhilarating to spectator and participant alike, half the legion dragged Gaulish cartloads of wood up from both camps to the hilltop, whilst the rest surgically removed a precise eight-foot-square patch of grass and topsoil, neatly stacking the green turfs for later replacement in accordance with Lejre's environmental code of conduct – twenty-four hours later, you would have spent a long day searching for any evidence of pagan conflagration. When the camp wood stores were exhausted, three of us marched off to an adjacent forest and stumbled back ten minutes later, each shouldering a gigantic dead bough in convincing homage to the Romans' most famous victim. In half a breathless hour we assembled a mighty and geometrically faultless pyre, fit for a dead king. Even the Gauls, surveying our imperial hyperactivity in a state of gormless inaction, had to concede that co-ordinating such a multi-tasked synthesis of labour and materials would have been beyond them. It was only right that when the last log was laid, and we stood back to appraise our work, spent but content, their appointed spokesman should come over to shoo us all brusquely away.

The entire edifice, as became clear from our permitted viewpoint outside the exclusion zone, had been erected for the benefit of a slapheaded little Gaul, here on a two-tiered mission to assemble a photographic impression of life in pre-Roman France, whilst hurting me. We watched as he dressed his set, laying sheepskins and shields atop the wood, all the while fussing about with a light meter. These were but the early stages of an excruciatingly pseudo-portentous pose-athon, one that filled the twilit horizon with shaggy silhouettes and the muted glint of ancient weaponry. If they'd let us light the fire I'd have at least considered surveying the scene with the flinty stare of appreciation befitting a fallen warrior. As it was, watching Ludo clamber on to his combustible deathbed, then half-tumble off it with a cry of '
Putain de merde!
', I could think only of a Spinal Tap cover shoot. It would take them at least a dozen attempts to get the thing ablaze, and when they did the 'ghost of Ludo', asked by the photographer to hover mysteriously in the smoke, scorched himself on a sword left too close to the fire. As his shrieks rang out we were already down by our own campfire, toasting their uselessness. And in that moment, the Legio VIII was reborn as a fighting force.

Our failure to win a single battle since I'd joined the legion's ranks had become a source of profound embarrassment, and when the duck was broken on my penultimate day, I cared not that it was more down to enemy ennui than to all those sinew-yanking training sessions with Jean-Michel. A certain flexibility with the rules of engagement also played a part: taking my lead from the many Gauls I'd seen fighting on in defiance of a mortal blow, when a sword tapped me lethargically from behind during the morning war, I wheeled about and knocked its adolescent wielder to the floor with a vicious shield-shove. All around, listless Gauls were being hacked down, and suddenly Francky, Thibault and I found ourselves standing alone in the valley of death. For a moment the three of us stared at each other in bemusement, then we turned as one to the Saturday-swollen crowd, raised our swords and let forth the cry I had been waiting to deliver in earnest all week: '
Victrix
!'

Legio expedita . . . sin, dex, sin . . . legio consistere . . . legio in aciem . . .
The sunbaked earthen paths of Lejre were by now liberally stippled with our hobnailed imprints. I'm not sure when I decided that the afternoon battles would be my last. It might have been the moment a ten-year-old son of Gaul stood over my body, squeaking at his dad to come and look at the Roman he'd just killed. It might have been five hours later, when Vincent cut short his fireside folk bellowing to scold himself for excluding the legion's guest, and then for my benefit struck up 'O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da', causing me to regret more deeply than ever my intrusion into a Roman holiday – half lads' outing, half family reunion – that was for most their only annual break. Or it might have been the hour after that, when half a dozen Gauls stumbled into our camp in a state of moonshine-powered disarray, and began chuntering on about '
les blacks
'.

My withdrawal from combat, announced over porridge on what I had just realised was my final morning, meant the legion would be fighting its last battles in a much depleted state. A twisted knee and a brick-sized bruise on the thigh had accounted for Jean-Michel and Laurent, with Jean-Charles and Jean-Luc still in their tents nursing face and pride respectively. So feeble was the rollcall turnout that Ludo and the scarred hulk of our oft-abused prisoner came over to offer their fighting services as '
Romains auxiliaires
'. That evened things up until Vincent saw what was going on and promptly defected: all week he'd nurtured a typically masochistic desire to play the prisoner, and this was his chance.

Taking my place amongst the hillside spectators was an unsettling experience, and not just because I had done so still wearing my
caligae
and that Demis Roussos kaftan of a tunic. Watching Paul and Germain mete out the beating Vincent so dearly craved, it seemed absurd to think that only seven days had passed since I'd witnessed this scene first played out. A week might be a long time in politics, but how much longer it was in war. Especially one you've travelled 800 miles and 2,000 years to fight in.

I learned over lunch that the afternoon battles, Lejre's last, were giving way to a farewell skirmish at a pagan ceremonial site somewhere behind the village. This was an area I hadn't previously explored, and when at last I found it, sliding through the nettles down a forest-girdled hollow, how glad of that I was. The 'sacrificial bog', as an information board undersold it, was a nightmare made flesh – rotting flesh, indeed, for before me lay a stagnant, stinking lake of black water girdled with flyblown animal parts. Most compelling were the two wizened horse corpses slung over makeshift gibbets above the waters' edge; most malodorous the oozing pig's head that looked up at them through carrion-clustered eyes of grey jelly. It was Picasso's
Guernica
reimagined first by Salvador Dali, then Damien Hirst. Why had I come here early? It was certainly the most appalling place I had ever willingly visited, and I had it all to my quivering self. When pus-hungry greenbottles began to take an interest in my seeping knuckles, I was enduring an ordeal that would have scared the prehistoric piss out of better men than I. And it would be fifteen long minutes before two armed columns of those marched down into the swamp of death from either side.

A generous crowd followed them in, but dwindled rapidly once the stench and the first wave of mosquitoes hit them. By the finish, as for one last time Francky fell loudly to earth to join his long-dead comrades, there were no more than two dozen witnesses to hear that stirring, godlike cry ring out through this most grimly appropriate arena: '
Que les morts se relèvent
!'

I was packing in the tent when the legion marched back into camp. With the passing of days, our belongings had overlapped into a communal straw-bedded heap of sandals, helmets, washbags and paperbacks. In the most profound expression of our comradeship, I noted how we'd even begun sleeping closer together: all through that final night, with my arms flat by my sides, one elbow lay in permanent contact with Germain's
gladius
, and the other with two or more of Francky's considerable limbs. I barely seemed to notice the snoring any more, though when I crept out for a nocturnal pee it was stridently audible from a great distance. The hills were alive with the sound of mucus.

They wouldn't let me leave without a final dressing-up parade. It was all terribly affecting. Renaud held out his zebra-plumed
optio
's helmet, and Thibault his chainmail vest; thus clad I was handed Germain's hallowed
gladius
. How good it felt, striding about camp dressed like a million denarii, at least until the hottest day of my visit began to interact with 15 kilos of chainmail (as I'd discover, precisely double the weight I'd shed over the week). We stood in line for a final photograph, then one by one they came across to brush their stubble against mine in the Gallic manner. Paul was last. 'Teem,' he announced, placing a hand on my hot and sagging shoulder, '
tu es un bon legionnaire
.' Despite the welter of evidence that this was not the case, it would do for me. A moment later I was walking out through Lejre's giftshop in tourist civvies, abruptly demobbed from both the army and the ancient world.

The park was closing, and as I picked through my week-old travel rations at the bus stop, two stick-wielding boys ran out through the park gates in noisy but jocular pursuit of a third. It wasn't difficult to deduce what had inspired them. Almost all the re-enactors I had thus far encountered were in revolt against today's not-my-fault, who-can-I-sue compensation-culture, passionately convinced that a society that failed to teach its citizens to take responsibility for their own actions could not survive for long. Watching Vincent relocate logs from wood pile to crowded fireside by hurling them over his shoulder, I'd been reminded of blacksmith Dai's cheery eschewal of goggles and gauntlets: 'I'm made of asbestos, me,' he'd chuckle, brushing another super-heated ember from a lavishly scarred forearm. 'Bottom line: it's my lookout.' At moments like those, I was invariably possessed of an evangelical enthusiasm for living history. If we could all go back to our roots for even one week a year, I'd find myself thinking, how much more competent, more grown-up our society might be. Look at me, one of the modern world's feeblest whiners, sitting here now on the bare gravel with great big wounds all over one hand and a mouthful of rancid banana.

Yet as the two boys caught their quarry on the far side of the car park, and the noises evolved to a rather less jocular blend of clatters and yelps of distress, I began to wonder if the skills we'd been displaying for their benefit were not just irrelevant to the modern European lifestyle, but dangerously malignant. Could I really be proud that the helmet glinting from my unzipped holdall was no longer a shiny dressing-up accessory, but a functional counter-measure against fellow humans bent on cleaving apart my skull? Was it a shame that most of us no longer knew how to fend for ourselves, or a cause for gigantic celebration that most of us no longer had to?

'Goodbye, soldier!'

It was the woman from the welcome desk, walking out to her car. Returning her smile I belatedly appreciated that the previous seven days were the closest I had ever been, and ideally ever would be, to experiencing war. In depressing reality, this was a product of my life in cloistered, first-world suburbia, rather than evidence of any grand historical march towards global harmony. Since 3600 BC the world has known fewer than 300 years of peace; the 14,000-odd wars packed into the rest have accounted for more than three billion human lives. In any given century, more people died in wars than in the one before, and the sombre truth was that twenty centuries back I'd have been one of them. Though my age put me right at the end of a legionary's twenty-five-year career-span, I'd fought like a quaking new recruit. There would have been no second chances, no learning curve; I'd died a swift and panicked boy-soldier's death, over and over again.

Something that was impressed upon me as I flicked through a discarded local newspaper at Copenhagen airport some hours later, and found myself confronted with a half-page photograph of a legionary in a familiarly oversized tunic, cowering, head down, almost apologetically accepting a heavy sword-strike to the back of the neck.

Chapter Three

As the husband of an Icelander who can trace her lineage back to the last great Viking kings, it is my well-worn spousal duty to correct erroneous and hurtful historical stereotypes wherever I encounter them, or pay for it with a drunken scalping.