I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

by Moore, Tim

I gathered things were building to some sort of climax when we found the cannon crew draped across their weapon in dramatic interpretations of death. 'Hi, Tim!' hissed a couple of corpses as I trotted by with my guard. That would be the last I saw of them, and though I didn't then know it, I found myself appraising my time with the galvanised artillery. Much as I disagreed with many of their opinions – in all probability with huge swathes of everything they held dear – at the end of two long and hugely exhilarating days, these were men who had welcomed a foreign stranger into their ranks without question or hesitation, then through good old Southern hospitality let him share all they had: their food, their blankets, their high-calibre weaponry.

  We pursued the Federals up a steep and messy ridge, and as must be common in war, discipline and unity steadily petered out in weary confusion. I arrived at the bald brow of the hill without my guard, and found a few Confederates slumped against a hedge, awaiting officers and orders. When a tubby young soldier staggered out of the trees and collapsed theatrically at our feet, clutching his stomach, I stifled a bored groan; many others didn't. After a minute or so of rasping death-rattles, someone wandered over and wearily bent down by his head. Then very swiftly jumped back upright, wearing a very different expression. 'OK! Guys! Cut the shit a minute – this guy's in serious trouble.'

  The alacrity with which I volunteered for the mercy-dash back to the refugee camp and its resident medics was contingent on forgetting these facts: (i) the camp was now very far away, and in an uncertain direction; (ii) my shoes were two sizes too big. After three wrong turnings and a full-length, face-first sprawl on the orange gravel, I arrived there in a ragged, skating shuffle, sweat and dust congealed on my desperate face. The ladies were starting to pack things up; between rasping breaths I delivered a bullet-point summary of the situation: man, sick, follow, car.

  By the time we made it back to him, struggling up the last fateful hill on foot with a trunk full of medications and many gallons of water, the semi-naked victim was sitting up between two straightfaced colleagues with a sheepish look on his big red face, and a conspicuous rubbery garment topping the pile of discarded clothing beside him. We were given a terse summary after the pastor had driven him off to hospital: man, fat, corset, heatstroke. If he'd died, I'd feel bad about hating this man as much as I still do.

  Perhaps four hours later, I was lying out beneath the stars, the crackle of a very proximate campfire doing its best to drown out the in-tent snores around. I rolled over and heaved another couple of dirty planks into the blaze, floorboards from the now dismantled front parlour tent. Earlier, at a get-together with an end-of-term mufti-day feel to it, the refugees had gathered around a table there crammed with plastic vats of Mountain Dew and Pepsi, wearing jeans, T-shirts and wistful, weary smiles. Before changing they'd all taken turns to shower under a waterfall down the hill, where the following morning I'd get through two whole bars of motel soap and drown a travel alarm clock.

  Something nipped my neck, then something else: I slowly levered myself half upright, and in the firelight saw a great many small brown things darting frenziedly about my vulcanised sheet. I brushed the worst of them away with a lazy hand, then flumped back down: I was going to sleep on an ants' nest, and didn't even care. It was progress.

  If that was one small step for a man, mankind had dutifully come up with a giant leap. Eighteen months and 2,000 years on I had arrived at the dawn of the modern age: matches, waterproof fabric, tinned food, prescription eyewear. My role was a newspaper correspondent in the contemporary mould, reporting on the civilian backdrop to a war fought with machine-guns and long-range ordnance, a war whose last widow had died just three years before.

  I'm not sure at what point I decided this would be it for me, the moment I'd take my finger off the rewind button. It might have been when I caught my reflection in a Union artillery pick-up wing-mirror and accepted that minus the hat, this was the first outfit I could have worn down Chiswick High Road without having it laughed clean off me by gales of civic derision. Perhaps it was when I saw the Stars and Stripes battle standards fluttering through the gunsmoke, and realised that having recreated the lives and times of all those long-defunct peoples and societies, I had now arrived at the genesis of the modern world's reigning superpower. Or maybe a bit of both, seasoned with the uncomfortable awareness that moving forward from this point would mean pursuing my provisional arrangement with a group of Channel Islanders who spent their weekends in wartime bunkers dressed up as Nazis.

  Two summers before, on a hot hill near Wales, I'd stood outside my roundhouse and portentously speculated whether some Moore-to-be might one day call this home, whether history and civilisation might one day come full circle. Was the hi-tech, high-speed urban existence we'd been perfecting since the 1850s the ultimate expression of man's productive genius, or his destructive stupidity? Sensible opinion accepts that our current lifestyles are entirely unsustainable: the oil's running out, the ice caps are melting, the price of food is shooting upwards because there isn't enough to go round, and not much space left to grow any more. Take Ancient Egypt as your starting point, and there are more people alive today than have ever died.

  Soon, perhaps sooner than we might wish to believe, we would need to lead simpler lives. Smaller scale, more self-sufficient, more physical. And what of the dehumanising effects of modern life, the insularity and mistrust? If anything united the many re-enactors I had met, it was a simple and truly heartwarming quest for gregarious community. All in all, we just weren't meant to live the way we now did: I'd spent the previous eighteen months unlearning the screen-centred, anti-social torpor and blaring practical ignorance that in two short generations had completely redrafted the blueprint of human behaviour, a blueprint which in two more might itself be dangerously redundant. In revisiting the past, I had gone back to the future.

  A nearby bestial snuffle was followed by a distant, echoing howl. Above me stretched the glittering, timeless prospect that had been a constant companion throughout my travels through history. Beside me, the last glowing remnants of the past were quietly going up in smoke.