Near Waterloo: The sugar mill, shown here in an 1834 engraving, was in great need of bones.
Image: archive
To this day, the mortal remains of the more than 20,000 fallen at Waterloo are missing. Researchers have now apparently solved the two-hundred-year-old mystery of their fate. Your results are heartbreaking.
“It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.” No one knows how often these words of the Roman poet Horace have been blared out at young men over the past 2,000 years to portray death on the battlefield as glorious. They were probably also familiar to many of the soldiers who clashed at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. During Napoleon Bonaparte’s final rebellion, allied troops under the English field marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, and the Prussian Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher put an end to it – with a horrendous toll of blood on all sides. At least 20,000 men and their horses were killed. There were probably even more.
Where their remains went is considered one of the great mysteries surrounding the Battle of Waterloo. In the past decade, archaeologists, even with the most sophisticated methods of the 21st century, have only come across a total of two skeletons. There was no shortage of theories. The remains were said to have been excavated in the 1820s, exported to England and made into bone meal before being used in fields as fertiliser. But now three researchers seem to have solved the riddle of the fate of the fallen – with a surprising result that horribly reduces the Horace quote to absurdity.
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