After the armies moved on, either routed or doing the routing, the field would be left to the looters.  Soldiers, no doubt, but also camp followers such as wives, prostitutes and baggage train minders, along with any locals.  They’d loot the dead, dying and wounded of anything of value – coins, clothing, weaponry, rings, boots.  Even teeth were pulled out with pliers, which for years were known as Waterloo Teeth.  And it didn’t pay for the wounded to resist too much for fear of having their throats cut.

It’s reckoned that as many as 50,000 men of the Anglo-Dutch, Prussian and French armies lost their lives that day.  But here’s the thing.  Archeologists have found only a handful of remains.  So, 50,000 combatants, not to mention horses, and no skeletons.

For years there existed an urban myth explaining this and now research by the University of Glasgow adds scholastic weight to the theory; namely, that the site at Waterloo (and others at Austerlitz and Jena) witnessed grave robbing on an industrial scale.  It’s believed these mass burial sites were exhumed, the bones stolen and ground down to provide bonemeal fertilizer for the farmers of England.  Imported at Hull, the fields around Doncaster were the likely destination of the stuff “to give us our daily bread”.

Often before the wounded expired

The looters moved in on the dead to acquire

Their bounty  which they would extract with pliers;

The treasure these dead would bequeath

Were known as Waterloo Teeth.