Free I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History by Tim Moore

brave new future, then torturing them to a complex death.
    This reverie was interrupted when a duo of long-haired Celtic archers popped up from behind a rock on the opposite side of the valley, launching a quickfire succession of rubber-tipped arrows which, with commendable accuracy but no more, thwacked into a close-formation Roman shield barrier erected with efficient haste. Nice try, I thought, just as a swelling roar from the hillside behind alerted both audience and Romans to a rampaging mob of furious Bravehearts, staves and mighty iron swords held aloft. The spectators around me visibly recoiled as the ambushers steamed headlong into the heavily outnumbered Roman ranks; together we watched in harrowed silence as the Legio VIII Augusta was frenziedly battered, clattered, stabbed and clubbed to swift and total destruction.
    At the end of a mad half-minute, the valley floor lay scattered with prone, motionless legionaries, their corpses already being looted by giggling Celtic children who had formed a redundant second line of attack. The victors untied their liberated comrade, then turned to the crowd as one, weapons and plundered helmets held high. ' Toutatis! ' they yelled in unison, and as the spectators emerged from their shock to hail the triumphant rebels, I understood what was going down here. This was to be a re-enactment of Roman history as written not by Tacitus and Livy, but by Goscinny and Uderzo.
    The imperial fallen were brought to life with a dramatic cry of ' Que les morts se relèvent! ', but five minutes later they were once more face down in the Denmark daisies, annihilated in a revenge attack on the village that backfired horribly. After a second resurrection the Romans regrouped, and armed with tennis-ball-tipped javelins marched away for a set-piece coming together, and a further brutal pasting, on the far side of the valley. And that was it. The dead and living took a bow; the audience applauded and filed away. They had come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.
    For some time I sat alone on the hill, brooding on the deluded, wrongheaded injustice of what I had just witnessed, and the pain and humiliation its repetition would shortly accord me, twice a day at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. prompt. The land we now called Denmark lay some way north of both the limits of Roman imperial expansion and whatever might be defined as the Celtic region of influence, yet considered as a geographically transplanted reenactment of Caesar's Gallic campaign, what had taken place here was a ludicrous travesty. A moustachioed comic-strip dwarf gulping magic potion to despatch hapless Romans by the oafish dozen helmet-first into a gorse bush was not history. History was the Battle of Bibracte, where in 58 BC Caesar and 30,000 troops had routed ten times as many Gauls. History was the decisive Battle of Alesia, six years later, where 'as in other examples of ancient warfare, the disarrayed retreating Gauls were easy prey for the disciplined Roman pursuit'. History was Gaul being entirely absorbed within the Roman Empire by 50 BC, and remaining so – without a single notable act of nationalist rebellion or resistance – for over 500 years.
    Yet no such indignant concerns seemed to plague my future colleagues, whom I now watched strip down to their authentic loin-swaddlings and jump gleefully into a small, murky lake near the Gaulish village walls. Once I was sure they weren't talking in Latin I sidled up to one, a considerable young man with a reckless twinkle in his rather rheumy blue eyes, as he climbed back to shore through the reeds. He cut short my introductory mumbles with a jovial, rasping call to attention. ' Eh! Eh! L'anglais est arrivé! '
    An hour later, squatting on the straw-strewn floor of the tent I'd be sharing with five fellow legionaries, I unpacked in a mood – new to me as a living historian – of exultant anticipation. Everything was going splendidly; already, the daft false start of Cinderbury seemed a