Mystery still surrounds what happened to the bodies of Waterloo militaries

https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_854908_en.html

by Manheim • 4 years ago

73 61 4 years ago

gla.ac.uk

baldr333• 4 years ago

The bodies can't be found because all that was left of the dead was used & sold. Even bones where crushed to make fertilizer. You fight for your country and this is how it ends for you. Truly wicked, not much different than today.

throwaway894345• 4 years ago

1. The article talks about the "used for fertilizer" hypothesis (including why it may not be a closed case).

2. "not much different than today"? Is this just some wild rhetoric or do you actually postulate that armies today are using the bodies of their dead for fertilizer/etc?

pvaldes3• 4 years ago

Not much different than today, if the news about Russia mobile crematoriums are eventually verified

jeffwask• 4 years ago

One's last sacrifice to capitalism/colonialism

chrisseaton• 4 years ago

not much different than today

I think western militaries go to pretty extraordinary lengths to recover and repatriate bodies these days.

In the Falklands in the 1980s there were still some battlefield burials, as that was still the accepted practice, but most of these were dug up after public outcry and I don't think we'd do that anymore, short of a full-scale war of national survival.

jcadam• 4 years ago

Modern communications I would bet has something to do with this. Families often didn't find out that their relative was killed whilst campaigning until weeks/months after the event. No doubt this would have started to change during the mid-late 19th century.

lapetitejort• 4 years ago

I hope that my body is used to its fullest when I'm gone. Ideally they'll harvest anything useful, donate the rest to science, then dispose of what's left using the least amount of energy possible. My body is not to be revered or preserved past what is useful.

galonk• 4 years ago

Wendigos!

bombcar3• 4 years ago

Fee-fi-fo-fum,

I smell the blood of an Englishman,

Be he alive, or be he dead

I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

But apparently not limited to the English, and for fertilizer, which grew the grain, but surprisingly accurate otherwise.

selimthegrim2• 4 years ago

Wasn't it "I smell the blood of a Christian" (presumably as opposed to a "Turk" or "Moor")

travisgriggs• 4 years ago

I know this adds nothing to the otherwise technical and scientific discussions that are the mainstay of HN except to demonstrate what an amazing free association/pattern matching machine the human brain is:

I read the title, skimmed the article, now I’m listening to ABBAs Waterloo on repeat.

bombcar3• 4 years ago

I went to Stonewall Jackson - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-QQI6lb_Hg

Also interesting to think of names that have become "things" - Waterloo "To be decisively defeated by an encounter with a powerful opponent or a problem that is too difficult" or Hindeberg, Titanic, etc.

dhosek• 4 years ago

I immediately thought of the Waterloo C compiler that was available for VM/CMS back in the 80s (there were other Waterloo compilers as well, but that was the only one that I ever used).

bsg75• 4 years ago

https://github.com/open-watcom

s1artibartfast4• 4 years ago

And I am listening to the Elliot Smith Cover of Waterloo Sunset.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tRY2Vx44DE

rossdavidh• 4 years ago

In this case, "mystery" seems like a euphemism for "we don't especially like the most probably theory".

sandworm101• 4 years ago

> "European battlefields may have provided a convenient source of bone that could be ground down into bone-meal, an effective form of fertiliser. One of the main markets for this raw material was the British Isles.”

So quickly we forget. By weight, most of those bones would have been animal bones. Horses and mules were everywhere around armies until the middle of the 20th century. And, pre-refrigeration, armies did not move food around in boxes. It walked behind the army on hooves. The combination of dead horses/mules in combat, plus all the cattle being eaten, means that the vast majority of bones around a battle would not have been be human.

gumby• 4 years ago

And, pre-refrigeration, armies did not move food around in boxes.

Don't forget that canning was invented in response to a prize issued by the Napoleonic army.

However it doesn't look like it was ready for use by the time of the battle at Waterloo.

mc32• 4 years ago

Genghis Khan the great ruthless conqueror of worlds would take herds (cattle and horses/meat and milk) along with his armies in order to feed the soldiers --lucky for him, the steppes were unusually green during his campaigns.

toolslive• 4 years ago

Fun fact: the battle of Waterloo didn't take place in Waterloo but in Braine-l'alleud (3km further). Wellington could not pronounce that so he changed the name in his reports.

Mystery still surrounds what happened to the bodies of Waterloo militaries

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