Le Point: Did European farmers use the bones of those killed at Waterloo to make sugar?

During the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, the number of dead on the battlefield ranged between 10,000 and 30,000 soldiers, but today archaeologists have found only a few bodies, so where did the rest go?

To answer this question, the French newspaper Le Point quoted the Belgian Radio and Television Corporation (RTBF) as saying that two historians - one Belgian and the other German - in addition to a British archaeologist presented a new, very rare explanation, according to Le Point, that the The bodies may have been used in the sugar industry.

Some historians say that the Allied forces - especially the Anglo-Dutch - under the command of the Duke of Wellington were able in the Battle of Waterloo (a town 20 km from the current Belgian capital Brussels) to defeat Napoleon's forces in one of the fiercest armed confrontations in history, which put an end to Bonaparte's dreams of a great empire This battle, in addition to the dead, left tens of thousands of people wounded.

According to the new discovery, in the years following the battle, European peasants excavated in Waterloo and exhumed the bodies of fallen soldiers in order to resell them, to be used in the sugar industry.

And if a German chemist was the first to extract sugar from beets in 1747, the first to develop this industry was a French scientist in 1811, and it is ironic, according to Le Point, that Napoleon I - who was deprived of the British Navy of sugar cane from the West Indies - encouraged Strongly research to develop beet sugar.

And as the Belgian Radio and Television Corporation explained, it is possible, therefore, that the bones of Waterloo soldiers were used during the process of refining sugar, as they are cooked in ovens before turning into a black powder that allows the sugar syrup to be filtered, and in theory the user of these bones should be animal bones.

With the growth of extracting sugar from beets and the required bones - in theory from animals - the price of bones rose dramatically, which prompted some farmers, especially bankrupt ones, to practice this new profitable business, and here they headed to the mass graves of Waterloo, which they know well.

Written testimonies at the time confirm the existence of this practice, and some evoke an officially banned trade in which "worn bones" are sold, but which may bring in large profits, according to the newspaper.