At those times between classes when the student body of Moorabbin Tech were turned loose—not to mention on what were dubiously called sports days—the schoolyard resembled nothing quite so much as an ancient battlefield. Apart from the continual eruptions of fights, there were more orderly skirmishes such as the simple game of kick-to-kick where up to a dozen footballs would be booted back and forth between two groups of several hundred boys. No one ever considered dividing them into more practical groups with one football each—instead a pack of twenty or more would fly for each mark, and more than thirty scouts would swoop if the ball spilled to the ground. A lunch break when I managed to get one kick was cause for jubilation.
    When your turn came to bat at cricket, you faced a continual stream of bowlers hurtling in like planes out of the stack at a busy airport, such that you barely had time to retake your stance before the next bouncer would come flying at your head. Everything they did was done for the most violent and chaotic effects possible. The school employed a full-time nurse who was the busiest person in the establishment. But of all the dangerous, berserk activities that went on in the yard daily, nothing was the equal of the game of Trojan Crunch.

“I have to piss again!” he yelled out. “I have to… I have to… I have to!” And he made water, a high arching jet that splattered the leaves and vines. This time he felt the pain, like a long slicing sliver of glass ripping through him. He closed his eyes, the colour drained from his face.
“Now!” he shouted—a high-pitched cracking sound. “It will be easier with that done!” He coughed, grabbed hold of a branch and pulled himself forward, and those Germans who had heard him coming finally saw the Centurion, and made ready with their darts.
The first one entered the fleshy part of Talt’s shoulder, and Talt, feeling his new pain, stopped, looked at the dart, started to laugh. He tore it out, did not wince as the barbs widened the initial wound. Flicking his tongue over his dry, cracked lips, he tried to search the bushes, the trees for some sign of the enemy. He thought he saw them; a branch bent, and he yelled, and made toward it.
What he had been looking for, he finally found.
   Three more darts entered his body, each one prodding him on. There was blood in his mouth, a wet tangy substance that he could taste—recognise. Branches were split as he crashed through them. He caught a brief sight of one of the Germans, went after him, and a spear whistled down through the undergrowth and entered his side. He fell to his knees, tried to pull it out, but his hands slipped with the blood, would not take a firm grasp. He tried to stand, but his legs would not move. He tried to think of something else, a something he must have been taught a long time ago—a way to deal with such a wound as this. But there was nothing, only a film of darkness that began to move out and over the surface of his sight. A part of his mind split away from him. He realised he was dying. For a moment he wondered if it was really true. He had not expected death to be the way it was, like the opening, spreading thighs of a woman…
    In the year of Rome 762, nine years after the birth of Christ, three Roman legions under the command of Proconsul P. Quintilius Varus were trapped in a dense forest near the Rhine and, unable to hold their formations and tactics, were slaughtered by German tribes. It was the first step toward the fall of the empire, and it sent Emperor Augustus run through his palace in a frenzy, shrieking “Varus, give me back my legions.”
    These events were graphically described in a nasty little paperback called The Three Legions by Gregory Solon—the author’s name and writing skills he deployed strongly suggests some better writer working under a pseudonym—and it described the battle scenes with a new sense of realism. The army is crippled by venereal disease and weakened by its other indulgences, the toughest soldier is left exposed to German arrows when he needs to take a cripplingly painful piss, the heroes fumble and stumble in the mud and the blood. I loved it.                 

Unfortunately, the author wasn’t able to find a story to match his graphic descriptive skills and pinched the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles over a whore from The Iliad. Silly bugger. `With a barbarian beauty lay the fate of 30,000 Roman soldiers’ the lurid cover screamed. Actually, there were only 25,000. I treasure it still, even if I am just a little bit ashamed of it.