WATERLOO FERTILISER
New research suggests bodies of soldiers from the battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815 may have been re-purposed for fertilizer. For eight gruelling hours, the armies exchanged cannon shots, gunfire and sabre strikes, leaving 50,000 soldiers captured, wounded or dead. The battle was one of the deadliest of the century, but only one full skeleton had been found – until this July, when the remains of three amputated limbs were uncovered at Mont-Saint-Jean farm, the site of Wellington’s main field hospital. In a study published in the , Tony Pollard, director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, argues that the bodies from the battlefield were used to make fertilizer. He used written accounts and artwork from early visitors to conclude that there were several mass graves, “so it is somewhat surprising that there is in 1822 estimates that “more than a million bushels of ‘human and inhuman bones’ were imported from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull.”
