A group of historians and archaeologists believe that few bodies of the thousands of soldiers and horses who perished in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 have been found for a very particular reason: locals stole the bodies and used their bones to bleach beet sugar.
The battle took place on June 18, 1815, in present-day Belgium, and marked the victory of the Duke of Wellington against Napoleon, who fell definitively. Between 10,000 and 30,000 French, British, German, and Dutch soldiers died.: Apparently many bodies were dug up and sold to the sugar industry.
Belgian historian Bernard Wilkin, head of the State Archives in Liège, explained on public broadcaster RTBF that around 1820 around Waterloo “beet supplanted wheat”. He specified that “the sugar industry was established, with bone ovens. The market value of bones, theoretically animals, skyrocketed”. Interestingly, thousands of horses died in the battle and almost no remains remained.
The peasants of the area, aware of the value of the bones and knowing where the mass graves were, they would have unearthed the corpses to recover the bone remains and sell them as if they were of animal origin so that in those blast furnaces a black powder would be made with them which filtered the sugar syrup.
“From 1834, the written sources show that the incidents multiply: travelers report seeing the unearthed bodies, parliamentarians denounce trafficking in ‘rotten bones’ and the mayor of Braine l’Alleud (a town near Waterloo) warns with a sign that exhumations are prohibited and punishable,” Wilkin said.
In the communal archives of that municipality there are documents that show that the mayor “he spoke clearly of the exhumation of corpses to trade with them”warns against this practice and reminds the population that it is penalized by article 360 of the Penal Code of the time.
The research, in which Professor of Archeology Tony Pollard, from the University of Glasgow, and the German historian Robin Schäfer, have also participated, has allowed to find dozens of documents in Belgian, French and German archives that support his thesis.
An 1879 German newspaper article Prague daily newspaper I suggested that using honey to sweeten foods avoided the risk of “your great-grandfather’s atoms dissolving in your coffee one fine morning”. This is indicated by the British newspaper Daily Mailwhich also publishes the findings this Thursday.
In addition, evidence from parliamentary debates in Belgium suggests that the country did not export bones to France between 1832 and 1833 and that the trade in this material skyrocketed after 1834when 350 thousand kilos of bone remains were sold to the country.
Earlier work by Pollard had shown that some bones of the Waterloo dead had been crushed and used to make fertilizerhighlights the Daily Mail.
For the bones it was possible to pay “hundreds of thousands of francs at the time, several times what a worker can earn in a lifetime”adds the Belgian historian in his testimony to public radio and television, who wonders if that sugar reached the cakes of the time and if the ancestors of today’s Belgians “were cannibals.”