Waterloo, the bones of the fallen in battle used to refine sugar (1 Viewer)

[Poppo]

FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT BERLIN - On June 18, 1815, the Anglo-Prussian armies under the command of the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Gebhard von Blücher triumphed against Napoleon's army in the plain of Waterloo, in Belgium. It was one of the bloodiest battles in history, a massacre that saw the death of at least 20,000 soldiers from both sides. We know everything about the battle that ended the Napoleonic wars. Generations of historians have studied and revealed tactics, episodes, errors, alternating phases of the battle. But more than two centuries later a single, great mystery remained unsolved: what happened to the corpses of the fallen, as well as the carcasses of the thousands of horses killed with them, of which no trace has ever been found. Only a month ago, for the first time, the skeletons of an English soldier and a horse were unearthed by a team of archaeologists at the site of the battle. But nothing more. To solve the enigma is now the study of two authoritative historians, the Belgian Bernard Wilkin and the German Robin Schäfer, who together with the British archaeologist Tony Pollard have documented a sensational and chilling truth: the bones of the dead of Waterloo disappeared because they progressively came and illegally unearthed between 1834 and 1860 to be used extensively by the Belgian sugar industry as filters for refining and bleaching sugar. According to scholars, part of the bones was also transformed into fertilizers. The research, which will be published in September but the results of which have been anticipated by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Daily Mail, relies on dozens of documents of the time hitherto inaccessible and taken from French, Belgian and German archives, including articles by newspaper, administrative orders, letters and written testimonies. "We have found the answer to a question that is over two hundred years old," explains Wilkin, according to which it is the most interesting discovery ever made on Waterloo. Started in 1833, beet cultivation in the battle area was immediately followed by the construction of two large sugar production plants. The following year in Belgium the trade in animal bones was liberalized and exploded, which ground and charred were considered much more effective as a filter for refining and bleaching the raw product. But the battlefield of Waterloo was too good an opportunity for industrialists to limit themselves to the remains of the beasts. Thus, the desecration of the mass graves dug after the battle began. Many newspapers did not hesitate to denounce the scandalous practice: "The peasants of Waterloo blush with shame and disgust, when they see speculators selling noble remains scattered on the battlefield to turn them into bone coal", wrote La Presse in one of the articles cited by the study . In 1835, the newspaper The Independent noted: "The industrialists have obtained permission to remove the dead from the land of honor, to turn the bones of heroes into charcoal. This is enough to characterize an era ". Writing in the Prager Tagesblatt, a German traveler who had visited the places, joked: "Using honey as a sweetener will save you the risk of dissolving your great-grandfather's remains in coffee." Another testimony cited by the research is that of Karl von Leonhard, a famous German archaeologist, who tells in a letter that he saw in 1840 open pits full of human and animal skeletons, while they were being emptied. One of the diggers boasted to him the money value of the bones of grenadiers which "weighed as much as those of horses." Neither were the mild attempts to stop the sacrilegious practice worth much. In fact, the decree by which in 1834 the mayor of Braine-l'Alleud, one of the municipalities of the battle area, declared illegal excavations to collect the bones, with penalties of up to one year in prison and 200 francs fine. . The havoc continued for a long time to come. The study speaks of nearly 2,000 tons of human and animal bones unearthed from the Waterloo field and sold to the sugar industry. The factory closed in 1860. The sugar industry in Belgium ended when there were no more bones to dig. Because of this, archaeologists have never found anything of the remains of the battle dead. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, it is sweet and dignified to die for the homeland, said Orazio. In the case of Waterloo, the first adjective was taken (too much) literally. The second was trampled.