After the battle, many local thieves decided to take advantage of the situation. They stole the belongings of the dead, as well as their bones, for a very unusual purpose.
The Battle of Waterloo is one of the bloodiest battles in history, but surprisingly very few human remains were found after the battle, writes 9news.
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Scholars estimate that around 48,000 people died when Napoleon's French army was defeated by British, Dutch and German forces in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The decisive battle marked the end of the decades-long Napoleonic Wars and crushed France's attempts to dominate Europe.
In their new study, scientists have found that the bones of fallen soldiers at Waterloo were sold as fertilizer. As Professor Tony Pollard from the University of Glasgow notes, when the shooting ended and the smoke cleared, Waterloo turned into an incredibly gloomy place that some decided to take advantage of. fertilizer production, and sold it to the British Isles, the main market.
“After the war, many came here to get the things of the dead. Some even stole teeth to make dentures, while others simply came watch what happened,” said Pollard.
At least three newspapers dating back to the 1820s mention the importation of human bones from European battlefields to make fertilizer.
” The main goal for the then thieves were mass graves, as they contained a huge number of bodies,” the scientists noted.
During the study, experts studied data, recently found descriptions of battlefields and drawings of people who visited this place in the first days after the defeat of Napoleon. Eyewitness accounts describe the exact locations of three mass graves containing up to 13,000 bodies. One such report included the memoirs and letters of a Scottish merchant living in Brussels named James Ker.
“Our next step is to return to Waterloo to try to map the burial sites obtained from the analysis of the records of the first witnesses,” the scientists concluded.
