Where did all the skeletons go from the Battle of Waterloo? A new book suggests they — and some U.S. soldiers’ bones — were plundered for fertilizer and sugar production.
An archaeological excavation of a human skeleton at Mont-Saint-Jean, Belgium, part of the site of the Battle of Waterloo. Through swirling smoke from cannon and musket fire, Marshal Michel Ney squinted at the center of the English line at Waterloo. It was June 18, 1815, and the French commander could see British regiments leaving the field.
“The evidence was overwhelming,” Schäfer said in an interview. “We were finding it reported in local sources, even with the police.” He added, “It was not something that was really discussed even then because it was illegal and frowned upon.” As a result, the excavation of battlefields seems to have accelerated. Wilkin and Schäfer wrote that they “discovered a trend in the exploitation of human skeletal remains that went far beyond the Napoleonic Wars. There were cases of exhumed skeletons of mediaeval plague victims and deceased parishioners in Britain, soldiers from the American Civil War and victims of the First World War.”
The book includes a letter penned anonymously by “a living soldier” from an 1822 issue of the Times of London: The practice also seems to have been adopted in the United States. During the Civil War, many of the estimated 700,000 soldiers who died were buried in mass graves. An 1867 article in the Delaware State Journal includes an eyewitness account:
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