by Moore, Tim
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.
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 expec
t 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.