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

impersonations of absent legionaries provided much of the after-dark entertainment; gimlet-eyed Paul, a modest, thoughtful man most often to be found reading in our tent; Germain, the quiet one; Francky, a six-foot-two, seventeen-stone teenage colosseum from the badlands of Marseilles; Laurent, a teacher at a technical college who'd sneakily persuaded his students to build the legion's ballista; and two beaky, companionable brothers, Jean-Michel and Thibault, respectively a plumber and a tax inspector.
    Aside from Ira and Jean-Luc's teenage niece – both quartered in the flying-penis pavilion – the female contingent I'd beheld on the legion's website were conspicuous by their absence. No place for them on this big boys' scout camp, this swig-from-the-same-jug, five-to-a-tent, superglue-grade male-bonding belch-fest.
    The park closed at five, and with the sun still high and hot it was just us, the unseen Gauls, and a creeping plethora of ram-goats gathered in vast-bollocked, blank-eyed malevolence outside our palisade. (Rare breeds, of course, which after my Cinderbury alarums I dearly wished to make rarer still.) Jean-Michel sat flaking wood into a barrel for fire-lighting purposes, Thibault was off jogging in his Reeboks, Renaud emerged from the leather-covered provisions tent with a bottle of Pernod. For an idle, comradely hour we slumped on the rope-handled chests that served as mess-tent benches, sipping pastis and lethargically slapping flies off our bare legs.
    Ferried from wooden bowls to sweat-rimmed mouths with wooden spoons and iron-bladed daggers, dinner was bread dipped in olive oil, sausage, walnuts and figs, copiously accompanied with red wine decanted into earthenware jugs from the plastic jerry-can stashed behind a chest in the corner. An endless flow of chatter that included the words romanisation , Charlemagne and Peugeot evolved into a series of emotional monologues on the ideal of a simple life, the tyranny of the alarm clock and the dehumanising nature of office work; my understanding of all this was heavily dependent on the legion's very French habit of illustrating almost everything they said with a flamboyantly expressive mime.
    The sun sank lower and we wandered out of the tent. Shield bosses, the business ends of the rack-stacked javelins and ballista bolts, Renaud's zebra-plumed helmet slung jauntily atop a spear wedged in the dusty earth – the legion's many metallic possessions gleamed softly in the golden sidelight. Off past the lake, a coil of wood-smoke rose into a cloudless sky above the thatched roofs of the oak-girdled Gaulish village, along with muted strains of a jolly, pagan singsong. It was all terribly becoming.
    'We fight two hour only in one day, but it's hard,' yawned Vincent, heralding a tent-bound exodus. 'You will find so tomorrow.' Before I could nod, a rock exploded in the fire, flinging shrapnel and English yelps right across the hillside.
    Nine hours later, ladling porridge out of a smutted copper pot hung from a tripod over the fire, I felt I'd coped as well as could be expected with the sardined intimacy that was an almost universal human experience until perhaps a century back, and still defines military life today. In the tent it was elbow to elbow, knee to buttock, nose to ear; those who didn't snore, farted. To my right: the immovable boy-mountain Francky, his bum-fluffed, Easter Island-sized face never more than a snuffling twitch away from mine. If Francky had snored they'd have known about it in Copenhagen, but instead he talked, an urgent mutter that invariably included ' Maman ' and many instances of the word ' non '. Here was the teenage conscript who didn't hate Gauls and just wanted to go home.
    Germain, to my left, never once made a sound or even moved a muscle, yet unsettled me more than all the restless, guttural snorters combined. The legion were restricted to wooden mock-weapons in combat, but every soldier had brought along a honed and gleaming gladius