Abba has written a song about the place, and it was here that Napoleon Bonaparte’s final defeat was a fact: We’re clearly talking about Waterloo. Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader who at the end of the French Revolution became France’s most powerful politician, and who is remembered for his leadership of France during the Napoleonic Wars. Photo: Thomas Coex / AFP The city in Belgium is best known for the bloody battle, which took place exactly 207 years ago. Many thousands of soldiers were killed, but in retrospect few traces of the dead have been found. What really happened to the remains? Now a new study may provide answers. It suggests that bone remains were stolen by thieves and turned into a form of human manure. – Waterloo was a place that attracted people as soon as the smoke had settled. Some were just curious, while others went there to steal the belongings of the dead. This is what Professor Tony Pollard says in a press release. He is employed by Glasgow University in Scotland. The researcher also believes that some may have greedily supplied themselves from the battlefield. And now they hope to find answers through new, archaeological research. Forskning.no first mentioned this case. New descriptions from Waterloo The new theory is based, among other things, on newly discovered descriptions and drawings from the Belgian battlefield. These were made shortly after Napoleon’s defeat. The findings include personal memoirs from a Scottish merchant named James Ker. He writes that men died in his arms a few days after the end of the battle. Ker also tells of three mass graves, which in total are said to have contained about 13,000 dead bodies. But so far no one was able to send in the perfect solution, which is not strange. And Tony Pollard does not have the highest expectations. But they still intend to look. – It is a bit surprising that there are no reliable records of one or more such mass graves, says the Scottish professor. Battle of Waterloo June 18, 1815 at the village of Waterloo, 15 km. south of Brussels. In the battle, Napoleon was defeated by a European alliance led by the British Duke of Wellington and the Prussian Field Marshal Blücher. Napoleon had 72,000 men at his disposal. The Allied army had 112,000 men at its disposal. The casualties were large, with 45,000 men killed and wounded. The battle was Napoleon’s final defeat after 15 years of French warfare. On June 24, Napoleon abdicated. He was sent into exile to the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, where he still spends his days. Source: Large Norwegian encyclopedia Starts searching next month Pollard believes there is a good chance that the dead bodies may have been pulverized and converted into manure. Three newspaper articles from the 1820s refer to the import of human bones from European battlefields, where precisely fertilizer for agriculture was the purpose. And next month the work will start, writes The Guardian. Then Pollard and his colleagues will return to the old battlefield to look for evidence. – If the stories are true, then not every grave can have been completely emptied. But we have few clues and do not know where they are. It would still be interesting to find evidence of such pits, from which bones and remains may have been removed, says the Scottish professor. Professor Tony Pollard will start archaeological research at the historic site next month. The hope is to find remains of what may have been mass graves. Photo: Chris van Houts / Chris van Houts Remains of corpses can disappear quickly Senior researcher at Nibio, Trond Haraldsen, does not think the archaeological investigations in Waterloo will necessarily be able to provide answers. To forskning.no he says that if the degradation conditions where the soldiers were buried have been good, then the traces may have disappeared within 20 years. – The skeletal remains can be dissolved in a few years if the conditions are right for it, Haraldsen says to the website. According to the researchers on the project, there are several reasons why one wants to find answers to the more than 200-year-old riddle. It’s not just about insight, but also about giving veterans answers. Moreover, such a finding could potentially tell a lot about the soldiers’ lives and deaths, the researchers explain.
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What happened to the dead after the Battle of Waterloo? May have been sold as fertilizer for agriculture – news Trøndelag
