The Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 2022 ended with Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat and thousands of dead soldiers. Curiously, however, only a handful of remains have been found on this battlefield during excavations to date. It’s a mystery where the rest of the dead went. A British archaeologist has now looked for clues in the letters and descriptions of contemporary battlefield tourists.
In the Battle of Waterloo, a town south of Brussels, the French army under Napoleon Bonaparte engaged in a decisive battle against Allied troops under the British Duke of Wellington and the Prussian Field Marshal Fürst Blücher von Wahlstatt. After a fierce battle, Napoleon was defeated and up to 50,000 men lay dead or wounded on the battlefield. Contemporary witnesses reported at the time of columns of wounded transports that took injured soldiers to field hospitals in the area or to hospitals in Brussels.
Few bones found
It is all the more astonishing that hardly any remains of the countless dead from the Battle of Waterloo have been found to this day. While there are bones of unclear origin in the Waterloo Museum, archaeologists from the Waterloo Uncovered project discovered a complete human skeleton for the first time in 2015 during the construction of a new museum and parking lot. In 2019, they also found several leg bones that may have come from amputations of injured soldiers in an area in Mont St Jean that is said to have served as a field hospital during the battle. But so far there is no trace of mass graves of dead soldiers.
In order to come closer to solving this mystery, Tony Pollard, head of the Center for Battlefield Archeology at the University of Glasgow, has now once again compiled and evaluated historical evidence from the period directly after the Battle of Waterloo. “Waterloo was attracting visitors almost before the smoke cleared completely,” he explains. A few days after the battle, people from the area, but also tourists from England and other countries involved in the conflict, came to see the famous battlefield and the site of Bonaparte’s defeat. Among the visitors were writers, diplomats and also painters who portrayed the battlefield and the clean-up work. The famous English poet Sir Walter Scott also paid a visit to Waterloo two months after the battle.
cremated instead of buried?
These early battlefield tourists reported their impressions in letters and other documents in sometimes depressing descriptions. This is how the Englishwoman Charlotte Eaton described how so many dead had to be buried after the battle that they did not fit into the mass graves dug: “The pits were dug, but their filling protruded above the ground surface,” she writes. “These terrible heaps were therefore covered with wood and set on fire.” James Ker, a Scottish trader who lived in Brussels at the time and visited Waterloo immediately after the battle, describes a similar story: “On the French side of the field the stench was so bad that it was thought prudent, for lack of time and helpers, to cremate the dead, men and horses, instead of burying them.”
On the other hand, other contemporary witnesses reported mass graves and burials in many small and large trenches on the battlefield. Painters who captured the aftermath of the battle also depicted both cremations of the dead and mass graves. “Hougoumont, for example, is one of the places where artists depicted the south gate as the site of both burials and cremations,” reports Pollard. Contemporary witnesses also report that many of the dead were robbed of their clothes and belongings by the local population before they were buried. “Many came to steal the belongings of the dead, even teeth are said to have been taken,” says Pollard. Based on the numerous descriptions and images, he has determined where mass graves of dead soldiers are most likely to be and sees three places in particular as promising: the area around Hougoumont, a spot near La Haye Sainte and a sand pit near La Belle Alliance.
However, some of these areas have already been explored by archaeologists from the Waterloo Uncovered project using ground-penetrating radar and test digs. In Hougoumont, electromagnetic measurements revealed subsurface anomalies, but these turned out to be neither graves nor cremation sites. So far, the search has also been fruitless elsewhere. “Overall, the investigations have not shown any evidence of burial pits, either in the form of human relics such as bones or recognizable pits,” reports Pollard. “One reason for this lack of graves may be the cremation of the dead, but even that can only partially explain the countless relics that have disappeared.”
Were the mass graves looted?
Another possible explanation would be looting of the graves: “In the two decades after the Battle of Waterloo, the European battlefields provided a rich supply of bone material that could be ground into bone meal,” explains Pollard. “This was used as fertilizer before the discovery of superphosphates in the 1840s.” According to English newspaper reports from the 1820s, much of this material was brought to England and processed into fertilizers there. An article from November 1829, for example, reported a freighter laden with bones from the Leipzig battlefield, which were said to have been purchased from a Scottish landowner.
However, had the Waterloo mass graves been looted in this way, visitors to the battlefield would certainly have commented. After all, this was a desecration of the peace of the dead, and at the time, British visitors in particular complained about the much smaller interventions in the landscape, as Pollard reports. For example, poet Robert Southey criticized that an area of battle-scarred trees should be sold and cut down. He wrote: “They should be preserved as a memorial to the brave men who lie buried beneath them”. In view of these reactions, it is rather unlikely that a large-scale excavation of the mass graves was not commented on anywhere,” Pollard said.
“The next step is to go back to Waterloo and map and study the sites identified from the reports of early visitors,” says Pollard. “If there were human bones in these quantities, even if the bones were removed, there should still be archaeological traces of them in the pits.” A new geophysical survey is already being planned together with researchers from the Waterloo Uncovered project.
Source: Taylor & Francis; Specialist article: Journal of Conflict Archaeology, doi: 10.1080/15740773.2021.2051895