20. The Unexpected Fate of the Heroes of Waterloo
In 1815, the Battle of Waterloo ended decades of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and established the broad outlines of European geopolitics for nearly a century. Nowadays, we are used to the notion of honoring those killed in war. That can be seen in the solemnity surrounding Unknown Soldier memorials around the world, and the reverence for war cemeteries. However, it was not always so. In 1815, those killed in action were usually stripped of valuables. In an unexpected twist – at least unexpected today – the “valuables” of those killed at Waterloo included their very corpses.
Waterloo’s dead had their teeth pulled out, to get fashioned into dentures. Waterloo was such a bonanza for Britain’s denture industry, that sets made of human teeth were known as “Waterloo dentures” for years afterward. Their bones – like the bones of those killed in other Napoleonic battles such as Austerlitz and Leipzig – were shipped to Britain and ground into fertilizer. As a correspondent wrote in The Observer in 1822: “the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread“.