In the years after the war, peasants and neighbors dug up the bodies to sell the skeletal remains, passing them off as animal bones.
A group of historians and archaeologists believe that Few bodies of the thousands of soldiers and horses killed at the Battle of Waterloo have been found. of 1815 because the locals stole the bodies and they used their bones to whiten beet sugar.
In the years that followed the famous battle that led to the victory of the Duke of Wellington against the Emperor Napoleon, in which between 10,000 and 30,000 French, British, German and Dutch soldiers were killedthe bodies were dug up and sold to the sugar industry.
The Belgian historian Bernard Wilkin, responsible for the State Archives in Liège, explains in a report published this Thursday by the Belgian public broadcaster RTBF that around 1820 around Waterloo “beets supplanted wheat”.
“The sugar industry was established, with bone ovens. The market value of the bones, theoretically animals, skyrocketed,” Wilkin continues about the years that followed a battle in which thousands of horses also died, of which hardly any skeletons are found.
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 was made with them that filtered the sugar syrup.
“From 1834, the written sources show that the incidents multiply: Travelers Report Seeing Bodies Unearthed, Parliamentarians Denounce Trafficking in ‘Rotten Bones’ and the mayor of Braine l’Alleud (town near Waterloo), warns with a sign that exhumations are prohibited and punishable”, says the historian.
In the communal archives of that municipality there are documents that show that the mayor “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 the Professor of Archeology at the University of Glasgow Tony Pollard and the German historian Robin Schäfer have also participated, has allowed the discovery of dozens of documents in Belgian, French and German archives supporting his thesis.
An 1879 article in the German newspaper Prager Tagblatt suggested that using honey to sweeten food avoided the risk of “your great-grandfather’s atoms dissolving in your coffee on a good morning,” says the British newspaper Daily Mail, which also publishes this Thursday the findings.
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 350,000 kilos of bone remains were sold to the country.
Previous work by Pollard had shown that some of the bones of the Waterloo dead had been crushed and used to make fertilizer, the Daily Mail recalls.
The bones were paid “hundreds of thousands of francs at the time, several times what a worker can earn in his entire life,” adds the Belgian historian in his testimony to public radio and television, who wonders if that sugar came to the pastries of the time and whether the ancestors of today’s Belgians “were cannibals”.