10. “Indebted to the Bones of Their Children For Their Daily Bread“
Centuries ago, those killed in action were not usually honored. Instead, they were stripped of valuables. Those “valuables” included their very corpses. The dead of Waterloo 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 afterwards.
Even 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. Back then, many people did not think that there was anything weird about using the bodies of the fallen heroes of one of the country’s most iconic battles as 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“.
