Bernard Wilkin was initially perplexed when, one evening last November, an elderly gentleman approached him and calmly uttered a large word. Wilkin is a historian at the Belgian State Archives, and that evening he had given a lecture on the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and its difficult archaeological work.
After this lecture, the elderly gentleman sought a conversation with him. “He said, Dr. Wilkin, I have Prussian bones in my attic,” the historian told CNN. The man also immediately showed him pictures of the bones that should belong to Prussian soldiers who fought against Napoleon’s troops more than 200 years ago. A sensation: Because so far only the mortal remains of two fighters of the famous battle have been found.
The man explained that he was given the bones by a friend in the 1980s because he was running a “small private museum” at the time. But over the years he has not been able to reconcile his conscience to publicly display the mortal remains. So they lay untouched in his attic for decades – a find that historians have been yearning for for a long time.
But because he was old and didn’t want to take this secret to his grave, he decided to initiate Wilkin. The man, who wants to remain anonymous, became aware of him through his research, the historian said: “He thought to himself: ‘The guy knows something about bones and the Napoleonic Wars and he works for the government.'” He was even more amazed Researchers, however, when the senior casually announced another surprise: A friend of his found the skeletons of four other soldiers with the help of a metal detector.
At the Battle of Waterloo, an alliance of Prussians and British defeated the French army, ending Napoleon’s reign. It is estimated that around 10,000 people died, but hardly any remains have been found on the area of the original battlefield. The reason: the bones were ground up by local farmers and used for sugar production.
The remains of the attic were spared. According to initial analyses, they belonged to at least four soldiers. The research team will now try to extract DNA from the bones. When the investigations are completed, they should be buried with dignity – that was the condition of their previous owner.
Sources: CNN / “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”
