Could be worse?
“a round shot took off his head & spattered the whole battalion with his brain, the colours & ensigns in charge coming in for an extra share. A 2nd shot carried off 6 of the men’s bayonets, a 3rd broke the breastbone of a Lance-Sergeant”
ageofrevolution.org/200-object/can…
Dead horses had metal shoes ripped off for re-selling before being arranged in vast pyres & set alight. The scene was made even more hellish by the stacks of unburied human bodies that lay around for days afterwards, literally going black in the scorching heat of the June sun
The only thing to do was burn the men just as they did the horses - according to one source
"they have been obliged to burn upwards of a thousand carcasses, an awful holocaust to the War-Demon".
militaryhistorynow.com/2018/08/21/bri…
Local scavengers knew used pliers to yank thousands of teeth from the dead bodies of British, French & Prussian soldiers, carefully sorting them according to shape and size to create full sets of teeth.
The flood of dentures that resulted became known as "Waterloo teeth".
‘Oh Sir, only let there be a battle, and there’ll be no want of teeth. I’ll draw them as fast as the men are knocked down.’
Map: In Search Of Waterloo Dead
blighty-at-war.net/waterloo-dead.…
Dentures & Quote: Who Cleared Corpses from Napoleonic Battlefields?
militaryhistorynow.com/2018/08/21/bri…
The Fate of Heroes?
Human remains could still be seen at Waterloo a year later. A company was contracted to collect the visible bones & grind them up for fertilizer. Other Napoleonic battlefields were also reportedly scoured for this purpose. In 1822 a British paper reported:
the Last Boot
"A man of the transport corps, thinking me dead, had stripped me and wishing to pull off the only boot that remained, was dragging me by one leg with his foot against my body. I succeeded in sitting up and spitting out the clots of blood from my throat"
Letter from Waterloo
On 21 June 1815, three days after the Battle of Waterloo, Private James Wilson of the 1st Life Guards wrote a letter to his friend, Corporal Hemsleyin, which he described his part in the battle.
library.chethams.com/blog/letter-fr…
Illustrations by Charles Bell, a Scottish surgeon-anatomist with exceptional artistic talent. He sketched battlefield injuries of wounded soldiers he treated after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, which he later turned into a large series of watercolours
militaryhistorynow.com/2017/03/10/a-s…
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