Two centuries on, archaeologists enlist ex-soldiers to unearth secrets of Waterloo

The carnage and horror of the Battle of Waterloo have been laid bare in an excavation by military veterans and archaeologists that has uncovered amputated limbs and the remains of horses that were shot to be put out of their misery.

- Jennifer Rankin

At least 20,000 men - and possibly many more - were killed in the epic 1815 battle when the Duke of Wellington and a European alliance defeated Napoleon's French forces in a decisive and bloody encounter that determined the power balance in Europe for nearly a century.

More than halfway through a two-week dig at Mont-Saint-Jean farm, which served as Wellington's field hospital, researchers have uncovered 15 severed limbs, the skeletons of seven horses and one and a half cows, in addition to the three horses and complete human skeleton uncovered at the same site in 2022.

Archaeologists returned this month to a "purposefully dug pit likely designed to quickly clear the hospital of gore" after the battle.

Tony Pollard, a historian and archaeologist at Glasgow University, said: "On other Napoleonic battlefields, we have burial pits with humans. We have pits with horses. We even have pits with horses and humans. Nowhere else in the archaeological record do we have this combination of limbs, a burial and euthanised horses." Archaeologists working with toothbrushes painstakingly brushed clay soil from tin ammunition boxes that were also found in the pit, located in an apple orchard. Stripped out of leather bags, the boxes were discarded, probably because they were too damaged.