It’s hard, sometimes, to understand what life was like before modern medicine. My paternal grandparents saw three of their five children die before they were three years old due to maladies that today would have been trivially easy to treat. Nowhere is this advance in medicine more apparent than in military circles, where soldiers routinely live through and recover from injuries that would have been fatal a century ago.
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Throughout history, this wasn’t the case. I remember reading an apocryphal account of an American Civil War surgeon who bragged about his record on amputations: “40 or 50 percent of my patients survive.” In those days, wounds to limbs were routinely dealt with by amputation. Now we have a gruesome reminder of this, as on the site of the Battle of Waterloo, a site occupied during the battle by British, Dutch, and Prussian forces, archeologists have uncovered the skeletal remains of a pile of amputated arms and legs.
Fought on June 18, 1815, Napoleon’s French forces went up against soldiers from the Seventh Coalition, which was composed of British, Dutch, Prussian, and other nationalities (Napoleon had a knack for pissing off other nations). All told, over 200,000 soldiers were involved in the engagement. Days after the battle, Bonaparte stepped down as France’s leader and was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena, where he died six years later. But the amputated remains of the soldiers who defeated his army remained at Waterloo.
Waterloo Uncovered, a non-profit which works to involve veterans and active military members with the archaeological process, conducted the week-long dig. During the excavation, they found a pit on the site of a field hospital set up by coalition forces. Buried inside was a pile of human limbs, and one complete human skeleton. Several of the limbs showed signs of having been severed by a surgeon’s saw. Across a barrier built out of ammo pouches, they found the body of an ox, as well as seven horses, several of which were euthanized by gunshots to the head.
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Contemplate what it would have been like to have been a common soldier in Wellington’s army, a soldier who, say, took a musket ball through the upper arm, or had a bouncing cannonball remove a foot. The likely — no, the inevitable treatment was amputation by a military surgeon who was likely little more than a barber, who was probably drunk with exhaustion, who had no idea of what a sterile field is, using instruments that had been used to carry out dozens of amputations without being cleaned in any way.
Yipes. Just yipes.
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The pit in question was what counted for a decent burial for the amputated limbs, as well as the body of one (complete) deceased soldier.
The pit was likely dug as a way to clear gore out of the field hospital once the battle had ended. According to the archaeologists, historical records describe more than 500 amputations at the field hospital on the day of the battle, which were described as “piling up in all four corners of the courtyard.”
The horrors of war have always been horrible. As William Tecumseh said:
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I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
It’s hard to find a better example of how right Sherman was than this pit of bones that came from the red field at Waterloo.
