21. The Businessmen Who Sold the Bones of Soldiers Killed in Battle as Fertilizer
In 1815, the Battle of Waterloo ended decades of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and established the broad outlines of European geopolitics for nearly a century. Today, we take for granted the notion of honoring those killed in the war. It can be seen in the solemnity surrounding Unknown Soldier memorials around the world, or the reverence and care attendant upon the upkeep of war cemeteries. To disrespect the honored fallen strikes us as not just unseemly, but as outright evil. It was not always so.
Back in the days of Waterloo, soldiers killed in action were usually stripped of valuables. Those “valuables” 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“.