The real fate of the Waterloo fallen

 

So I´ve read "The real fate of the Waterloo fallen" (2023) by Bernard Wilkin, Robin Schäfer and Tony Pollard. This is some really, really sick shit. But then, people 200 years ago lived like dogs. And died like dogs. And if you died with your boots on, chances are somebody stole the boots...and then turned your dead body into fertilizer! For a profit, obviously.

During the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, bones from both dead soldiers and horses were stolen from mass graves all over Europe and shipped to Britain, where they were turned into fertilizer for the expanding agricultural industry. I´m not even sure if "stolen" is the right word, since almost everyone must have been in on it. And the quantities involved were enormous: we´re talking ship loads here. 

Wilkin, Schäfer and Pollard believed that an even more exotic fate befell the dead at Waterloo. Archeological excavations around the town have so far not been able to find the mass graves which simply *must* have been there, and which were documented even by British painters visiting the site just a few years after the famed battle of 1815. So what happened to the dead bodies? The authors believe that the bones were dug up and turned into bone char, which is used to decolorize brown sugar and turn it white.

Yes, you read that right. The fate of the Waterloo fallen was to end up in the Belgian sugar refining industry. The number of dead at Waterloo isn´t precisely known, but the authors use a low range estimate of 10,000. Add to that perhaps 10,000 dead horses and you have a considerable resource just waiting to be exploited. 

Many of the people digging for human bones at recent  battlefields were poor. In Belgium, the presumably low-income farmhands worked for local farmers in the Waterloo area. I assume the bone merchants or sugar refinery owners were of the more affluent classes. 

Of course, things like this are still going on. See Scott Carney´s book "The Red Market" for more details about the Indian trade in human bones stolen from cemeteries, the Chinese trade in organs for transplants coercively taken from unwilling donors in prison, trafficking of children for adoption all over the so-called Third World, and so on. Just don´t say I didn´t warn you!    

The real fate of the Waterloo fallen