Where Did the Waterloo Dead Go? The Evidence for a Trade in Bones

On the evening of 18 June 1815, the fields south of the village of Waterloo held the bodies of many thousands of men, along with many thousands of horses. How many men is still argued over: Wilkin, Schäfer and Pollard put the dead at between 10,000 and 20,000, while Pollard notes that published estimates run from as few as 5,000 to more than 20,000. Visitors in the following days and weeks described the dead being stripped, burned, and buried in pits.¹² Yet two centuries later, despite modern survey methods, archaeologists had excavated only two human skeletons from the battlefield, one in 2012 and one in 2022.¹

That gap between the written record and what lies in the ground is one of the oldest puzzles about the battle. The answer most often given is that the graves were dug up and the bones sold, ground and spread on fields as fertilizer. Recent research has taken that idea seriously enough to test it in archives and in trenches. The result supports a version of the story, but not quite the familiar one.

A rumor with a long life

The claim reached the British public in 1822. A letter signed “a living soldier,” which Bernard Wilkin, Robin Schäfer and Tony Pollard trace to The Times of 18 October that year, reported that more than a million bushels of bones had been landed at Hull in a single year and passed on to Yorkshire bone grinders. In their transcription, the writer claimed that “The neighbourhood of Leipsic, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and of the horse which he rode.” The letter was reprinted widely in Britain and translated on the continent within weeks.¹ Pollard reproduces a version of the same report from The London Observer of November 1822, with different wording, and notes a further item in The Spectator in 1829 about a ship from Hamburg landing bones at Lossiemouth, said to come from the Leipzig battlefields.²

The trade itself was real. Bone had been valued as a soil improver since the seventeenth century. In 1769 chemists showed that phosphate was the principal component of bone, the first dedicated bone mills were working in England by about 1780, and by around 1800 agricultural chemists had concluded that bone’s fertilizing value lay in its calcium phosphate. Demand reached far beyond Britain: in German territories with access to the coast, the poor and the homeless went out into the countryside to dig up bones for English buyers, and in 1819 a bone dealer’s advertisement in Lübeck specified that it would not accept human bone, which suggests some had been offered.¹ Pollard notes that Scottish parish reports of the 1840s record bone mills and the quantities they processed; in one Berwickshire parish a single farmer crushed 160 tons of bones a year, most of them from Hamburg.²

In Germany the evidence is stronger. At Hamburg, a newspaper correspondent described in 1821 how hundreds of collectors had dug at a site where French dead from the siege had been buried. For Leipzig, Wilkin and his co-authors call the evidence that bones from the battlefield were harvested firm and undisputed: Maximilian Speck von Sternburg, who bought land on the Leipzig battlefield in 1822, recorded that poor people brought him bones gathered where thousands of the fallen had been buried barely a few feet deep.¹ For Waterloo, the picture is weaker. Wilkin and his co-authors write plainly that “there are no records to verify the practice at Waterloo” for the British fertilizer trade of the 1820s.¹ Pollard acknowledges that the subject carries “an air of ‘urban myth’” and has often been passed over by historians of the battle.²

Sugar, not only fertilizer

The 2023 study by Wilkin, a researcher at the State Archives of Belgium, Schäfer, a German military historian, and Pollard, a battlefield archaeologist at the University of Glasgow, shifted attention from British farms to Belgian sugar refineries.¹

Beet sugar was a product of the Napoleonic blockade, which cut Europe off from cane sugar. To make white sugar, beet juice had to be filtered and decolorized, and in 1811 the French industrialist Charles Derosne introduced granulated bone char for the purpose. Bone char is made by heating bone in a kiln until it carbonizes. Within a few years the continental beet sugar industry had adopted it, and raw bone became more valuable than ever.¹ In the Belgian parliament in 1836, the deputy Léopold Zoude estimated that a beet sugar factory needed bone char equal to a third of the weight of the sugar it produced.¹

The authors searched the Belgian, French, German, Dutch and British press and the municipal archives of Braine-l’Alleud and Plancenoit, the communes where most of the fighting took place. They found nothing to show large-scale removal of the dead in the years right after the battle: “there is no evidence of large-scale exploitation between 1815 and 1832,” they write.¹ A German reference work of 1825 did report that bones of thousands of horses had been cleared from the field, with “Some went to England, others were burnt and crushed,” in the authors’ translation, and they allow that horse bones in particular may have been taken early. But visitors in the 1820s do not describe major disturbance, and a French writer who spoke to a Braine-l’Alleud farmer in 1829 was told that locals knew where the pits lay and dug up a few bones in the evening when they wanted them, which implies the graves were then still largely intact.¹

The change came in the 1830s. Belgium had banned bone exports in 1824 to protect glue makers. In 1833 a citizen of Liège petitioned to lift the ban. A few years earlier, 100 kilograms of bone had sold for two francs; by 1833 the average price was 7.5. A law of March 1834 freed the trade, subject to a small duty, and exports to France rose from nothing in 1832 and 1833 to about 3,000,000 kilograms in 1836, by figures given in parliament. By 1837 the price had reached 14 francs per 100 kilograms. At the same time the forest around the Waterloo plain was cleared for sugar beet, and a sugar works, the National Sugar Refinery, opened less than five kilometers from the battlefield.¹

What the local archives record

The decisive evidence in the 2023 study comes from the outgoing letter books of the mayor of Braine-l’Alleud. In April 1834 he reported fields that had been illegally dug, adding, in translation, that “it is impossible to identify the perpetrators without sufficient evidence to convict them.” In 1835 further reports describe illegal excavations in the mass graves of Braine-l’Alleud and Plancenoit. In July of that year the mayor posted a proclamation warning that digging up bones on the 1815 battlefield was an offense under article 360 of the penal code, punishable by three months to a year in prison, and telling landowners and farmers not to violate or permit the violation of burials on their property.¹

Press reports in the same years point in the same direction. In August 1835 the French paper L’Indépendant claimed that a company had bought permission to dig the field for the bones of the dead to make bone char. Around 1840 the German geologist Karl von Leonhard saw deep trenches being worked near La Haie Sainte and heard that “Brussels merchants had been trading in ‘Waterloo bones’ for some time,” though the workers he spoke to admitted only to selling horse bones. In 1858 a French physician, Dr Caffe, who had lost a brother in the battle, wrote that the bones dug at Waterloo, “transformed into animal black, went to clarify the beet sugar of Belgium and the northern departments.” Not everyone believed it: the writer Edmond Texier, touring the site around 1850, repeated the story that the bones had gone to make bone char, adding, “they say, but I think this is a slander.”¹ Surviving accounts of the Waterloo sugar works for 1844 and 1845 show that it had a bone furnace and nearly 19 tons of bone char in stock, which proves it made bone char but not where the bone came from.¹

The authors present this as a trade conducted mainly by poor local people for income, tolerated by officials who had little reason to stop it. They estimate that the bones of 10,000 soldiers and 10,000 horses would have weighed roughly 1,700 tonnes, worth up to 238,000 francs at 1837 prices. They record no arrest for grave robbery in the press of the time.¹ A letter written in 1942 by a German soldier stationed in Brussels, repeating what a local guide had told him about the dead being sold to bone char factories, suggests that the story survived in local memory, though it is late, secondhand, and colored by the writer’s prejudices.¹

The archaeology of absence

Since 2015 the veterans’ charity Waterloo Uncovered, working with the Walloon heritage agency, has excavated on the battlefield each year. Around Hougoumont, where visitors reported a mass grave in the orchard and burials outside the south gate, geophysical anomalies turned out to be the remains of brick kilns, and no grave was found. Two small trenches at the sandpit near La Haie Sainte, long associated with burials, also found none, though Pollard stresses that work there was limited.¹²

Pollard’s 2021 paper mapped where early visitors placed the graves, and it proposed that the large graves had been emptied for fertilizer in the decades following the battle, with bone dealers’ agents guided by local people and by published accounts of where the pits lay. He called the fertilizer trade a credible explanation for the missing graves. The 2023 study, of which he is a co-author, revised that timetable: it found no evidence of large-scale removal before 1833 and tied the main removals to bone char rather than fertilizer. Taken at face value, their figures would put about 13,000 bodies in just three groups of mass graves, which he regards as probable exaggeration. He considers other explanations for the missing burials: many bodies were burned; small, shallow graves scattered across the fields would not have survived long under the plough; and earth moved to build the Lion Mound in the 1820s disturbed graves along the ridge, with some bones reported to have been reburied beneath it.² He also set out the strongest objection to his own theory. Later visitors, who complained about other changes to the field such as the Lion Mound, and the guidebooks of the mid-nineteenth century say nothing about graves being quarried, even as references to graves fade from their pages. He concludes that the failure to find graves at Hougoumont offers “only circumstantial evidence” for the removal of remains, and warns against drawing firm conclusions from negative evidence.² The University of Glasgow’s announcement of the paper said that he did not regard the question as “case closed.”³

The excavations have also shown that not every grave vanished. At Mont-Saint-Jean farm, the allied field hospital, a 2019 trench found three amputated legs, and in 2022 the team uncovered a pit holding three horses and a complete human skeleton, a find the 2023 authors read as proof that bone removal did not destroy every burial.¹ They add a physical argument for loss: sugar beet was grown after deep ploughing and its roots can reach more than two meters, so intensive beet farming itself may have broken up buried deposits.¹

Remains returned

The most recent finds came from living memory rather than excavation. After Wilkin spoke about the bone trade at Waterloo in November 2022, an elderly man told him he had kept human remains from Plancenoit in his attic since the 1980s. Tests indicated at least four individuals, probably Prussian soldiers. The same man pointed Wilkin to a metal detectorist who held remains found near the Lion Mound, which may belong to British troops.⁴ The Brussels Times reported that the Plancenoit remains had been dug up during construction in the late 1970s, and that Wilkin was asking anyone holding battlefield remains to bring them forward for study.⁵

The man who gave up the Plancenoit remains asked, in Wilkin’s words to CNN, that they be buried “in a dignified way.” Schäfer has been in contact with the German War Graves Commission, and the researchers hope DNA work might one day allow relatives to come forward.⁴⁵

What can be said

The broad claim, that bones from Napoleonic battlefields entered industrial use, is well documented, and for Leipzig the evidence is strong.¹ For Waterloo, the 1822 story of Yorkshire farmers spreading the bones of the fallen remains unproven: no local records confirm it, and the earliest specific report from the battlefield, in 1825, concerns horses. The stronger case, built from Belgian parliamentary debates, municipal letters and travelers’ testimony, is that graves on the plain were dug from the mid-1830s, largely to feed the bone char kilns of a new sugar industry, alongside the losses caused by burning, ploughing and the building of the Lion Mound.¹² Even its proponents call the work a beginning; the 2023 authors describe Waterloo as “only the tip of the iceberg” of a wider exploitation of the war dead that historians have yet to trace.¹ Readers interested in an earlier chapter of the commerce in human remains may find a parallel in corpse medicine in early modern England.

Footnotes

1. Wilkin, Schäfer and Pollard 2023, Journal of Belgian History LIII(4), pp. 8-30 (introduction; sections II to VIII). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³

2. Pollard 2021, Journal of Conflict Archaeology 16(2), pp. 81-108 and note 4 (burning of bodies; “Removal of burials,” “The counter-argument,” “Conclusion”). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. University of Glasgow news, June 2022. ↩

4. CNN, January 25, 2023. ↩ ↩²

5. The Brussels Times, February 6, 2023. ↩ ↩²