Planning to visit Waterloo Battlefield? I spent days exploring every corner – museums, memorials, farmsteads – and while the history was unforgettable, questions stayed with me throughout the trip, and weren’t answered until the very end.
Where were the bodies of the Waterloo soldiers buried? What happened to all the bones of the Waterloo battlefield?
An unfathomable 20,000 soldiers and more than 15,000 horses died on these fields in a single day on June 18, 1815. But unlike other great battlefields like Gettysburg (U.S. Civil War), Verdun (World War I), and Normandy (World War II), there were no cemeteries at Waterloo. A battlefield with no graves.
I kept an eye out, I read every informational sign I could, and then finally one brief mention…
What happened to the dead of Waterloo? I’m about to explain, and it may keep you up at night.
The Brutality of Battle
Waterloo wasn’t just decisive, it was devastating. At Hougoumont Farm, the location of some of the most brutal fighting, a tiny chapel once became an impromptu hospital. More than forty wounded men lay waiting in this cramped space as surgeons amputated limbs, one after the next.
I walked out of the chapel and tried to imagine the aftermath of the battle as a whole. The sheer number of bodies in such a small area, the smoke, the sound. It gave me chills. Who cleared the battlefield, and what happened to all the men?
A Nobleman Remembered—And Thousands Forgotten
At the Wellington Museum, I saw a drawing of local people digging mass graves for the dead. So they had been buried close by, but why were there no markers?
At Église St. Joseph, I found rows of marble slabs dedicated to fallen soldiers. One plaque honored Maj. Frederick Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle, whose body was disinterred a few months after the battle, returned to England, and now rests in the family mausoleum at Castle Howard in Yorkshire.
But what of the other men – the ordinary men without noble lineage or titles who had been buried there?
Only Two Bodies Ever Found
In the Memorial Museum, a glass case holds the skeletal remains of a Prussian soldier, discovered in 2022. The sign reads: “One of only two sets of human remains found at the battlefield.”
Two? Out of tens of thousands?
It seemed impossible.
I climbed the Lion’s Mound, hoping the wide view of the farmland might provide perspective or answers. Instead, it deepened the mystery. This land is actively worked, tilled, plowed. What happened to those mass graves?
The Sign That Stopped Me Cold
The answer came on our final day. At Hougoumont Farm, a small, unassuming informational sign offered a grim possibility. Had the bones of the Waterloo battlefield been stolen by souvenir hunters? It didn’t seem likely this morbid practice had happened on a mass scale of ten and a half million bones… But the second part of the sentence made my jaw fall.
“[Some bones] may have been looted as souvenirs… many of the bones may also have been exhumed to be used in the process of refining sugar.”
Sugar?
The Sugar Factories and Bones of the Waterloo Battlefield
My frantic Googling began immediately.
During the Napoleonic wars, supplies of cane sugar from the West Indies were cut off. A cane sugar alternative was found, namely the sugar beet. But sugar from sugar beets is not naturally white, which is the type of sugar everyone wanted.
In order to whiten the beet sugar, it was filtered through a layer of bone ash, which is exactly what it sounds like.
In the years after the battle, two industries emerged near the battlefield of Waterloo, where the fields were now being used to grow … sugar beets:
- Bone mills purchased bones – both human and horse – from local peasants who dug them up. Here they were ground into bone meal.
- Sugar refineries purchased the bone meal, burned it into “bone black,” and used it in the filtering process to whiten the sugar.
The Fate of the Bones
At first the bones had been used to make fertilizer, but that practice was thought to be barbaric and stopped. But using the bones to whiten sugar was Plan B, which apparently was more acceptable. I wasn’t the first to be horrified by this practice as well. One written account, published in the German newspaper Prager Tagblatt in 1879, remarked:
“’Seen in the light of day, sweetening food with honey seems much more poetic than with sugar, for the clarification of which, as everyone knows, bone is used. Using honey to sweeten food avoided the risk of having your great-grandfather’s atoms dissolved in your coffee one fine morning.”
I read that line and just stared at my screen.
The Plot Twist I Didn’t See Coming
After going down the “What Happened to the Bones of Waterloo” rabbit hole, I started wondering if any of the sugar factories still existed.
It turns out one of them did. After some research I realized that it was actually fairly near our hotel. We thought we’d look around in the morning before we left and see if we could find it.
The next morning, as we checked out, my husband spotted a framed poster for the hotel’s restaurant – Sucrerie. It was the sugar factory. The same one I had just been researching. We’d been staying inside it the whole time.
The photo showed the building as it looked in the 19th century. Today, it’s elegant, beautifully restored, and very much alive. The center section is a hotel, and the surrounding buildings belong to a business park. The food was wonderful. The staff, lovely.
Staying in a place so intimately tied to the history we’d spent days exploring made the entire trip feel deeper and more personal. Talk about an immersive experience!
And that morning, as I sat in the dining room with my coffee, I drank it black—as I always do.
🌟 “We ended up staying in the old sugar factory itself – now a gorgeous hotel called The Van Der Valk Waterloo. It was lovely, and if you’re visiting the battlefield, I honestly can’t think of a more surreal place to stay. It’s more than a place to sleep, it’s actually part of the history.”
Book the Van Der Valk Hotel in Waterloo here 👈
Why It Matters
This trip and my unexpected sugar factory side quest were good reminders that history isn’t just maps and timelines and oil paintings of cavalry charges. It’s also what gets buried—and what gets unburied. It’s what we choose to remember, and what we choose to leave out. And sometimes we sugar-coat it.
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Related Posts You May Enjoy:
- How to Visit Waterloo Battlefield – Napoleon’s Last Stand
- Inside Napoleon’s Last Headquarters: Visiting the Caillou Farm in Waterloo
- The Wellington Museum in Waterloo: The Duke’s Headquarters Before Battle
- Waterloo Battlefield Museum Guide: Exploring the Lion’s Mound and the Legacy of Napoleon
- Visiting Hougoumont Farm: The Most Powerful Stop on the Waterloo Battlefield
- Napoleon’s Tomb in Paris: Why It’s Bigger, Wilder & Grander Than You Think
Another amazing story, Jeanne. Thank you.
If only those walls could talk…