Dan Snow's History Hit - What happened to the bones of the Waterloo battlefield?

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

In June 1815 the French army under the command of Napoleon was decisively beaten by an allied army led by Britain and Prussia at Waterloo in what is now Belgium. This titanic clash took a terrible toll on both men and animals. An estimated 20,000 men lost their lives that bloody day. As archaeologists have attempted to unpick the events of Waterloo a mystery has emerged. What has happened to the remains of the soldiers who fought there?Very few human or animal remains have been found on the site of the battle. However, an international team of archaeologists and historians have joined forces in a bid to solve this enduring puzzle. A new discovery this summer has found some astonishing evidence to now say why that is. It seems enterprising profiteers likely plundered the site for illegal bone trading, predominantly for the European sugar industry.Joining Dan on the podcast is Professor Tony Pollard archaeological director of Waterloo Uncovered, historian and scholar Rob Schaefer and Bernard Wilkin Senior Researcher at the Belgian State Archive. They discuss their theory about the fate of the Waterloo remains and why so few have survived.The paper Tony recently published on graves at Waterloo is available to all as a free open access download - These spots of excavation tell: using early visitor accounts to map the missing graves of waterloo.Warning: this episode contains frank discussion of dead bodies, animal carcasses, mass graves and amputations.This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It is six o'clock in the morning in Utah. I'm here on a fascinating historical project looking at the early years of dinosaur exploration, the so-called Bone Wars. The sun is rising over Dinosaur National Monument, one of the most remarkable parks in the US system, a place which has produced some of the most famous dinosaur skeletons, and a place that was the site of bitter rivalry in the 19th century. This podcast has nothing to do with dinosaurs. It does, however, have something to do with bones. Today, a team of researchers is going public

with a fascinating project they've been working on. Two of them will be very familiar to you as history hit listeners. We've got Rob Schaefer. He's an independent historian and scholar on the podcast right now. We've got Professor Tony Pollard. He's been on many, many times on this podcast. He's a brilliant archaeologist, and he is archaeological director of Waterloo Uncovered. And we're also introducing brand new talent, Bernard Wilkin. He's a historian. He works at the Belgian State Archives. And together, this Brit, this Belgian, this German, very appropriately, have come up with a fascinating new theory.

It's one of the big mysteries of military history. And that is, where are the bodies from the Battle of Waterloo? Battle of Waterloo, one of the greatest battles fought in history to that point. Tens of thousands of men, horses, left, killed on the battlefield following the great clash between the Allies and the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. The battle took place on the 18th of June 1815 and it ended in decisive defeat for Bonaparte. He fled south to France, his final attempt to regain the throne of France defeated. It is a battle that we've talked about in this podcast many times. And we've mentioned the fact

that one of the mysteries of the battle is there's no mass graves have been found. There's a question as to what happened to those bodies. There is myth, there is rumour. But now this trio have given us the best theory yet. And it's shocking, folks. It's shocking. You'll hear how the bodies were dug up,

ground down and added to an industrial process. It's shocking. You'll hear how the bodies were dug up, ground down, and added to an industrial process. It's crazy stuff. So thank you very much to the gents for coming and talking exclusively to this podcast. Rob Schaefer is producing an article for the History Hit website, so you can go and read more on there, historyhit.com. I'm off to check out some dinosaur bones. Enjoy this pod. dot com. I'm off to check out some dinosaur bones. Enjoy this pod. Gentlemen, welcome to the pod. Nice to be here again, Dan. Hi, Dan. Thank you for the invitation. You're more than welcome. Tony, you're a veteran of this podcast. We're always very grateful. You've been on so much recently, but that's because you keep doing such interesting things with interesting people. Just tell me, traditionally, Battle of Waterloo,

well, how many casualties were there on the day? And what do we think happened to that vast number of men and horses who lay on the battlefield that night? It's difficult to come to a concrete figure on casualties in the form of killed in action. But the working figure is around 20,000. I believe there's a new paper about to come out that will be hopefully something approximating a definitive statement on that but it varies but

let's say for the sake of argument 20,000 dead human beings but added to that we've got thousands of dead horses. So in the aftermath of the battle we've got carnage covering two and a half by two and a half miles. So a huge number of corpses and carcasses to be disposed of. And I did some research on early visitor accounts to the battlefield after the battle had taken place, including people who were literally there the day after the battle and wrote about their experiences. And they describe the clearance of the battlefield, which includes stripping all the bodies of their uniforms and the equipment. That's another issue. But the disposal of the dead is obviously an almost industrial activity. And from those accounts, which vary from Charlotte Eaton, who visits on the 15th of July, and Walter Scott, who's there on the 9th of August, but there are people there

before them. And it seems to take around 10 days for most of the bodies. And we're looking here at the human bodies to be disposed of. And local people are hired to do that, to carry out that task. Most of the troops move on. Let's not forget that Napoleon is being pursued south towards Paris. And from the descriptions and indeed from paintings by artists at the time, this is clearly a very complex process. And we're looking at burial. So we're looking at burial of, in some cases, individual soldiers across the battlefield, pretty much where they fell, but also larger pits that could be described as mass graves. So we may have graves with two or three bodies in them, but then we may have graves with hundreds, if not thousands. And there are references to numbers as high as 7 and 14,000

in some of these descriptions. Now clearly some of this is hyperbole but the point is that a lot of bodies have to be disposed of and the other issue is that it's not just burial, it's also burning. We know that corpses are burned. The reasoning for this is possibly, and this is mentioned in the descriptions, that there are just too many bodies to bury. So they try and speed up the process through burning. And that would apply equally to humans and the horses. So this process is prolonged. It's intensive. It changes the landscape. There are descriptions of the mounds of earth that have been thrown back into the graves, covering the battlefields and making them look like fields of molehills. Local people would have long memories of where these burials were, particularly, I guess, if they'd taken place in the burial process.

So that's our understanding. understanding, we can then come on to what we have been faced with as archaeologists actually doing the investigations on the battlefield. Yes, so Tony, just quickly stay with you for a second because you're a great expert on the field. You've spent so much time there. Over the years, Tony, how many bodies from the Battle of Waterloo have been found by archaeologists like you? from the Battle of Waterloo have been found by archaeologists like you? By archaeologists, very, very few. Waterloo Uncovered, which is the veterans charity, as you know, that I'm working with, we've been working on the battlefield since 2015. And up until our engagement with the battlefield, we had one human body, a skeleton recovered by our colleagues in Belgium during work related to the building of the new museum, which opened some years ago. So that's one

individual. There's another skeleton in a museum. There are various skulls that were collected in the 19th century. But by and large, certainly from archaeology, nothing. Now that changed with the work of Waterloo Uncovered in 2019, when we moved from Hugamont, where we'd been putting a lot of time in, and investigating through excavation geophysical anomalies, which might have suggested the presence of burial pits under the ground. And we'd looked at these eyewitness accounts, and we'd used paintings as clues, but came up entirely empty-handed. We didn't find a single grave site at Hugamont, which is the farm on Wellington's right flank. And in 2019, we moved to Mont Saint-Jean, which was behind Wellington Centre, and is a farm that was utilised as the main Anglo-Allied field hospital during the

battle. And it was heavily used. Mick Crumplin, the expert in battlefield surgery, estimates that at least 500 limbs were cut off by field surgeons during the day of the battle. And in 2019, when we were working in an orchard just outside the farm on the other side of the track, we encountered a deposit of human bone and we excavated three amputated legs. This was a phenomenal discovery, very rare by any measure. One of them was found to contain a French musket ball and we could see the cuts of the sore where the surgeon had taken these limbs off. And this is an incredible operation at the time. There are no antibiotics. There's no anesthetic.

So an incredibly painful process. And we didn't know whether the men from whom those legs were removed had survived or not. But we'd found those legs. And we knew from the traces that we'd found, including animal bones close by, which we thought were horse, that the story wasn't finished there. We knew that that was a bigger feature. It looked possibly like a ditch running alongside the track that had been used as a dumping ground for the waste from the nearby field hospital. So we returned there with great expectation in July of this year. And our expectations weren't disappointed. After the

two weeks that we were there we had uncovered the skeletons of three horses, we know there are more, we found more amputated limbs and we also found a complete human skeleton. Now these had not been deposited in a roadside ditch, as we expected. This was in a deliberately dug, flat-based pit. Now, the striking thing was that the horses, and we could see the injuries to their legs in some cases, had been walked into this pit and they're shot. Each one of the three horses had a hole in the skull with a musket ball. So they were put out of their misery basically. Human amputated limbs were deposited and we've

got at least one human burial. Now yet again that trench extends in the direction of the horses and in the direction of the human burial. So there is more there. We have not uncovered the entirety of that trench but what we've got are horses just lying nose to tail, essentially, three of them in this pit, more to come. And then the human body also lying on the bottom of this pit. So it's not packed with bodies. These animals and humans are lying on the bottom of this flat trench, which has then been backfilled. I published a paper not long before we went out to Waterloo in July, at which I suggested from these eyewitness accounts where the masquerades might be located, and so produced a map there, which included our site at Mont Saint-Jean. But I also there had to ask the question, why is it that on a battlefield where 20,000 were killed and thousands of horses,

and we have all these eyewitness accounts of the burial process taking place, why is it after a long time working on that battlefield, Waterloo Uncovered haven't identified more graves through archaeology? And so I looked at the reasons why that might be. And what I came up with, and I'm not the first to identify this by any means, but I'm the first to actually tie it into archaeological results, is the fact that bones were removed from those pits in the years following the battle, shipped to the UK where they were ground down into bone dust and spread on the fields as phosphate-rich fertilizer. And we have evidence for that in the form of newspaper articles from the time. But it has to be said that evidence is pretty sparse.

More research is needed in the UK on the documentary record. But it tied in with the picture that was developing through the archaeology in that these grave sites were missing. Even when we had what we thought was pretty good information from eyewitness accounts and from artist renditions, we came up empty handed. So it looks like, on the basis of what we have, that those bones were removed. Now, yes, we do have this site at Mont Saint-Jean, but it's a rare example from that battlefield. So is this when I now bring in Bernard and Rob. Tony mentioned that more research required over in the UK. Tell me what you guys have been doing and where you've been doing your research and how it's going. Well, I have read Tony's fascinating research results when he published that. And I took the

liberty to contact Tony about this because I asked him whether anyone had ever done any research in local archives in Germany and on the continent in general to see whether we can find correlating evidence that battlefields on the continent were indeed plundered for the bone fertilizer trade. And he said, as far as he knows, that hadn't happened. So I did that. I looked at what resource material is available, and I have found ample evidence that a trade with bones

that were sold to English commission merchants and then sent to the UK did indeed take place in the early years of the 1820s, starting about 1819. And interestingly, if you look where it happened, it happened in all the coastal regions of Germany, for example. So on the Baltic coast and on the North Sea coast, everywhere close and easily accessible for British merchant shipping. And it starts relatively precise in 1819. And what I did is, because I couldn't look into all the available records, as you know, there was no Germany as such in those days. There were lots and lots of small German states, Hanseatic cities, bishoprics and things like that.

So I thought I look at one particular case for a start. And I decided to go for the city of Lübeck, the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, only because so many records survive there. What I found was quite enlightening. So using the provincial news gazetteer of the time, I was able to basically find the exact date when the bone trade as such started, which is in the spring of 1819, when this provincial gazetteer suddenly explodes with advertisements of commission merchants asking people to bring them all the bones they can possibly find from all sources they can possibly imagine. And from then on, it spirals completely out of control. So if you just look at this city, you see that soon after these advertisements appear in the press that British merchants are buying these bones, you find laws trying to regulate this you know there are laws informing people that there is a certain hygienic risk if you dig up bones everywhere and store them in your living room before you sell them and there are also laws being stipulated which say don't bring us human bone because what

happened is when british merchants ascended on continental ports to buy bone, they were asking for an economical commodity which was not only easily accessible for the poorest of the land, it was also one for which there in most states was no export tax. So the selling of bone wasn't regulated in Europe at the time of raw bone. That meant that there was suddenly a way for the poor, the European poor, to make an income by just collecting something which no one else wanted. And very soon, as you can imagine, that escalated because they started digging bovine plague pits. They started digging cemeteries. They started digging, and that's more evidence I found. They also started digging, for example, the mass graves of the siege of Hamburg from 1813 and 1814,

where we found news reports that in 1819, the poor of the city rush out of the city gate and they exhume 15,000 fallen Frenchmen to sell their bones to British commission merchants. Just clarify, what are the Brits doing with these bones? What we do have in the UK are some records. We have records of them coming into ports like Hull. They're going to places like Doncaster and indeed in Scotland to Lossiemouth. And if we look at 19th century agricultural records, we know that it was common for estates and large farms to have bone crushing mills. And we're not just looking at, as Rob said, we're looking at a lot of animal bone, human bone as well, but also things like whale bone. And the bone is being crushed into a powder or what they call bone dust.

And it's then being spread on the fields as a fertilizer because it's phosphate rich. Now, I'm sure as the guys will go on to say, it's not that effective. But on a local basis, we do have records of hundreds of tonnes of this being spread on estates and farms. And certainly in Scotland, there are records of it being fairly effective in the raising of turnips. So prior to the development of superphosphates in the kind of mid-19th century, it was quite an important source of fertilising agent. Well in the early 1800s with Britain being the cradle of early industrialization we have what we call an agricultural crisis. That means in Britain we see the people living on the

land rushing into the major cities to London and to other major industrial cities and they are leaving the countryside which in the end results in overcrowded cities and in a lack of attention in the agricultural regions. Not only are there less workers to till the land, they also don't produce feces for fertilizing the fields anymore. So this is one of the reasons why, especially in the north of Britain at the time, which is mirrored very well in literature of the period, there is an enormous industrial need of fertilization products, of artificial fertilizer. And one of those is, as Tony said, is bone meal. The demand couldn't be satisfied by using only bones from Britain, so they had to go elsewhere. And the closest available source for bone is on the other side

of the channel. And that's where they went. Bernard, you were going to come in. What were you going to say there? The working theory so far has been that bones have been dug from the battlefield of Waterloo to be spread as fertilizer or salt to England. And I think Tony mentioned this letter in the British press in the Times, I think in October 1822. But we need to be reminded that there is no actual physical evidence in the archives in Belgium about the use of bones as fertilizer. The only source we can have is in the British press. And I personally think, as a historian, that this is not very firm evidence because, you know, the article mentioning the trade of bones from the continent of Europe to the port of Halle

is basically saying that bones come from Leipzig, Austerlitz, Waterloo and all the places where during the late bloody war the principal battles was fought. the principal battles was fought. So I find it a bit odd that the journalist or the witness is mentioning all the most famous battles of the Napoleonic Wars in here. And it's even more odd when you look at the primary sources here in Belgium. Tony wrote in his article, in a very good article about the bones, that there is contrary evidence to that findings. that there is contrary evidence to that findings.

There is no testimony of tourists or visitors seeing the graves being disturbed in the early part of the battlefield, in the 1815, 16, and even in the 1820s. There are no evidence for that. So I think that in the article that is going to be published by the three of us, we're making it clear that, in fact, the witness who wrote to the Times in 1822 was actually talking about the situation in general. But for publicity reasons, he mentioned Waterloo and Austerlitz, for example, but this actually is no proper evidence.

But Bernard, tell me about the proper evidence that you found. If I may just jump into that, we have found evidence. It's not that the bone trade for fertilizer did not happen. And it is not that battlefields on the continent were not plundered for bone to use in fertilization or to turn into bone meal. We have found evidence that this did indeed take place. We have got mention in Hamburg, for example, about the plundering of a massive mass grave from the siege of 1813 and 1814. And we have got, it's not in our paper yet, it will be, we have found fantastic police report from the Silesian police in 1833, which actually sent an investigative committee to the battlefield of Eilau, because they had reports that hundreds of people are tearing open the burial pits to lift the bone and to sell that bone off to merchants.

And there are various other examples where we can say that battlefields or mass burials from conflict sites or other human burials were actually opened and the bone was shipped to Britain. But that only happened as far as the evidence goes, very, very early on, 1820, 1821, 1822, because after that, regulations sprang into place. So if you were caught in Lübeck, for example, in 1822, if you dug a human grave or a knackers yard or a plague pit, that would have got you immediately into prison. And in addition to that, from about the same period of time, the countries where this happens, the states where this trade happens in the Baltic and on the North Sea coast, introduce taxation. And with the introduction of taxation of raw bone, they make the product uninteresting for the poor because they can't afford to pay this. And merchants can buy the bone elsewhere cheaper. That is when Britain starts to look for other sources of bone. And in that period of time, in those three or four years, the battlefields of Europe, the Napoleonic battlefields of Europe, can't all have been

plundered off the bone to be used in fertilization. Something else must have happened to take that away. Because there's not only a lack of bone in Waterloo, there's also a lack of bone on all the other major battlefield sites, like Leipzig, where a million soldiers fought in 1813, and where they have so far found about two dozen skeletons or something like that. You listened to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the bodies of Waterloo. What happened to them?

More coming up. Move over Rome, move over Greece. This month on the Ancients, we're heading to the Americas, North, Meso and South. Join us every Sunday this August as we explore this area of the world's extraordinary distant past with leading experts. From the rise and fall of Teotihuacan to the mysterious Nazca Lines. A journey through the ancient Americas, every Sunday this August on the Ancients from History News. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Right, gentlemen, so where are the bones? Well, as the archaeology showed, the bones are not there, so there is a problem. And there is an even bigger problem if we are dismissing the storyology showed, the bones are not there. So there is a problem.

And there is an even bigger problem if we are dismissing the story about phosphate, right? Because, as I said, for Waterloo, the story doesn't hold. So where are the bones? Well, for that, I think we need to go back to another industrial practice. Maybe, Rob, you can talk about it because you speak better English than me. The other industrial practice in the 1820s, we see the rise of another industry, which is the sugar industry. During the Revolutionary and Coalition Wars, Napoleon put continental Europe under blockade. So the ports were closed to British trade.

One of the major imports before the war was cane sugar. So it was Britain and up to a part also the Dutch who supplied the continent with sugar. With the introduction of the blockade, the sugar supplies end. So clever people on the continent, starting in Prussia, try to come up with alternatives to produce sugar from other plants, local plants. In Prussia, in the early 1800s, a scientist experiments with the growth of sugar beet. And he manages to extract the same sugar which you find in sugar cane from the sugar beet. And with that, he sets something into motion, which in its gigantic scale, I think is quite exciting and quite amazing. Maybe Bernard can take over there.

With the sugar beets trade becoming more and more popular on the continent, you can see that sugar becomes a common commodity. People can buy it. There is more demand for it. It's becoming less expensive. becoming less expensive. And from the beginning of the 1820s and especially in the 1830s, we start seeing lots of factories for sugar. And of course, the agricultural side is also booming. You can see that there are fields of sugar beets everywhere in the northern of France

and also in Belgium. So to answer your question about where the bones are, we need to look about the sugar tray. We need to understand how sugar is fabricated from the sugar beet. So the beet is turned into a syrup. And to make it pure, you need to pour the syrup on the top off and mix it with coal, which is made of animal bones.

It's called, help me guys. Animal char, bone char. There you go. And in French, it's called noir animal, so literally black animal. To produce that char, you need to have animal bones that are cooked in that very high temperature for a very long time. And the property is to turn everything into transparent color. For example, if you put animal char into a glass of red wine,

it will look like water after wine. So this becomes an essential ingredient in the production of sugar, right? And as a result, the price of animal bones will explode, really explode. What was once a very cheap ingredient is becoming in a few years' time on the continent something expensive. To give you a figure in Belgium from 1833 to 1840, the value of animal bones was multiplied by 15. It means that there is a business here, right? And we see, for example, that from the beginning of the 1830s, the French will start buying loads of animal bones from Belgium. To give you a few figures, in 1833, the Belgians sold zero kilos of bone. The year after,

they sold about 500,000 kilos. The year after, they sold two millions. The year after, they sold about 500,000 kilos. The year after, they sold 2 million. The year after, 3 million kilos. And we're talking about a lot of money being made here, to the point where it becomes a matter in the Belgian parliament. MPs in Belgium are talking about the value of bone, and they're talking about an illegal trade that is going on the side. Liberal parliamentary from, I think it's Ostend, the north of Belgium, is complaining about those filthy rotten bones leaving Belgium for France by tons.

So we see that a picture emerging. And now we need to turn our attention to Waterloo especially. Because in Waterloo in 1833, we start looking at something like a revolution in the agriculture. They remove everything that was there before, and they start planting sugar beet. And there are travelers saying, oh my God, the battlefield of Waterloo has been changed into a huge field of sugar beets. You cannot recognize the place anymore. And what you see also appearing in the town of Waterloo is the sugar industry. You've got manufacturers of sugars.

You've got the National Refinery of Beetroots that is being implemented there in the 1830s. You see also that there is an industry producing this charcoal made of bones. That's very interesting as well. We thought that there is a hint about where the bones have been dug and where they're going, but we needed firm evidence, of course. So I think that so far, historians have been a bit neglecting local archives in Belgium. Most of the historians working on Waterloo are either French or British.

And I thought to myself, you know, I'm working for the State Archives of Belgium. Perhaps I can find something else with evidence, proper evidence. And you need to know the regulations around bodies, exhumations, burials, and so on. It's a local matter. It's in the municipalities' archives. So I had the idea of going there, in the archives of the municipalities on which the battlefield of Waterloo is. On the first day I went to the archives,

I started finding proper reference explaining what had happened to the bones. So I found the first mention of illegal excavations in 1834. The mayor of Brenneleu, because there is a big misunderstanding here, the Battle of Waterloo didn't happen in Waterloo, as you might know. It happened in Brenne-la-Leu and Blanc-Senois mainly. So if you were to look in the local archives of Waterloo, you wouldn't find anything at all. In Brenne-la-Leu, though, I found the first mention in 1834 about illegal digging. It became a big matter the year

after, actually, in 1835. Suddenly, everywhere in the Belgian and then in the French press, they started talking about this, about the fact that people were digging illegally on the battlefield and taking away the bones. So that's very interesting, of course. And what's more interesting is to look at how the municipality had to deal with that. Because the mayor of Brenneleu, he wrote to the police, the local police asking to stop the trade of bone. He wrote to the higher authorities also to explain what he has done, basically trying to cover his own track. And then there is something extremely important, I think, for the research. He's doing what most mayors of the time would do, is publishing a poster with an official warning that is aiming at the locals,

the farmers and the owners of land on the battlefield of Waterloo. and the owners of land on the battlefield of Waterloo. And he's telling them, you are reminded that exhumating body is a violation of the penal code, Article 360 about exhumations and whatsoever, and that you're facing up to a year in prison and fines if you continue to do so. So we see here that we have official evidence from the local archives that something is taking place. We see also that the people to blame are clearly the farmers who live there, the Belgians actually, who live around the battlefield of Waterloo. There is also something interesting in the phrasing of the mayor, because he says,

I have been mandated to stop this activity. And that's very interesting. Because, you know, one question that will arise always is, how can you dig tons of bones without being noticed, right? The volume of all the bones, it's enormous. I mean, we're talking about millions probably of kilos there. How can you dig that? Well, actually, the sources suggest that the local authorities, they didn't have an interest in stopping the business, the trade in bones, because it's a lot of money for the locals, right? The locals were also the ones electing the mayor. So you can see that when the mayor is reacting, he's reacting because the press has taken a hold on the whole story and that he has to do something.

So he's just doing a simple warning to a poster, but actually we cannot see any trace of arrest, prison, fine, or anything at all. And we have plenty of other evidence that show that actually illegal digging continued for years. And also legal digging. We do know, we have it in traveller accounts of the period from the 1840s in particular, that travellers going to the battlefield say that the local farmers are busying themselves by digging up the horse bone, which is still in ample supply in 1840 and 1850, which is another piece of evidence that there was no clearance of bone in the 1820s when the first accounts about this were published. Bernhardt has got a wonderful account, a German traveler account.

I think that during these official clearances, while digging horses, it is an easy game to also extract everything that isn't horse. So we have a German scientist walking around Waterloo Battlefield during the day, and he sees, you know, openly farmers digging those pits. He's asking them, of course, what are you doing? The farmers, they're just saying, oh, well, you know, we're digging the bones of horses. And then there is another one who's adding to that. Well, yes, but, you know, the soldiers of the Imperial Guard, the French Imperial Guard, they were really big and very yes but you know the soldiers of the imperial guard the

french imperial guard they were really big and very tall you know so their bones they're easily mistaken with horses and that's actually really interesting because you can see that clearly they really don't care and there is no official checks on what they're doing i think that the story that is emerging from the primary sources is that, in fact, nobody on the local level cared about the fate of bones at the time. And the fascinating thing is, as soon as you open this sugar box of Pandora, as soon as you know, if you have the idea that sugar is somehow responsible for the cleansing of the Waterloo battlefield, you start seeing the same elsewhere. So as soon as you know what you are looking for, you will see that the same happened for sugar beet,

for the sugar industry on battlefields in Germany, in Austria, in Spain, even we found evidence in Russia, from everywhere, bone is being dug up into the 1880s and 1890s to supply the so-called spodium factories. That's the industrial term for bonsai, spodium. And this is just incredibly fascinating, I think. So this is not the first time, nor will it be the last, I suspect, that our desire for sugar, for sweet things, has caused us as a species to commit gross ethical and moral violations. Gents, just in short, to finish, this is brand new research.

Are you now convinced that this is the major reason why the Battle of Waterloo has not yielded the mass burial pits that we've expected? And it means that the British, the French, the Allies, Dutch, German, Belgian, Prussian men who fought and died on that battlefield were ground up and used in an industrial process. It certainly looks as though this is a viable answer. And what I love about this is we've got international collaboration. We've got a German, a Belgian and a Brit working on this. We've got archaeology and history in a wonderful synergy.

It demonstrates that when we're looking at military history and battles, we need to look at the social impact of those conflicts and not just the battles themselves. I think this is a project that, as the guys have said, we're going to be publishing on this and doing more research. I would like to see a much wider project looking at the geographical and economic implications of this. But just turning back to Mont Saint-Jean, we clearly have a grave there and it's an incredible combination of amputated limbs, human bodies and horses. That has survived and we've had discussions about why it survived. It is on the immediate doorstep of the farm.

The farmer himself might not have wanted this activity taking place, but it also might not have been viable. Yes, there are horses in it. There are human bodies in it. But as I said, it's not densely packed. There might not have been enough bone. And as the guys have said, it was a local economy, it was local people that were involved, but it was also those local people who buried the dead, who disposed of the horses. So they would have the knowledge of where the big payoffs were, where the mother loads of a lot of these individual graves would have been ploughed out. I mean, we know from the accounts and even the paintings of the time that these fields were being plowed weeks after the battle, that soon. So they would have disappeared. Also, sugar beet

impacts on its environment. We've learned that the roots of the sugar beet can go down upwards of six feet. That will have an impact on buried deposits like graves and disturb them. So we're really looking here, to use that old scientific term, a sort of paradigm shift in our understanding of what's happened in the decades following Waterloo, but also, as the guys have said, other battlefields spread across Europe. It is very exciting. I agree. I think that it changes quite a lot the perspective we have on the Battle of Waterloo and what historians and archaeologists have done so far. I agree with Tony there. I think that it's a great combination of skills and languages and everything. There is much more to do. I also think that it might not be that the farmers have dug everything.

So there is still the scope for archaeological digs and findings, because I'm pretty sure the Belgians missed quite a few places as well. But it will remain as one of the last year's great findings on the history of Waterloo. I think that for me, the lovely thing about all this is all the possibilities we've opened up with this. It's just absolutely fascinating. I'm really, really proud of this. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on and talking about it. Congratulations for all your wonderful research, as you say, across different fields. How do people learn more about the information that you're going

public with today? We have already submitted a paper for the general public in French, unfortunately for those who don't read it, which is going to be published by November in the magazine Napoléon Premier. We are also currently writing on an English academic paper, which is going to be published more than likely in the Journal of Belgian History. And then we're working on something even bigger, which we want to make multilingual as well, so we can reach a broader audience,

which is going to be about the general trade of bones coming from Napoleonic battlefields mostly and other battlefields in the 19th century. So this is going to be probably, I think, by the end of the year or perhaps at the beginning of next year. I don't know yet because I think we need to research more. But yeah, it's going to come pretty soonish, I would say. Thank you very much. Looking forward to that. Gentlemen, thank you very much and congratulations. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Thank you for having us, Dan. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone. you