The island that we’ve eaten

Twenty thousand men died on the battlefield at Waterloo, and most were buried close to where they fell. Their bodies were piled into mass graves; hastily covered with a layer of earth before the June heat made the task any more unbearable than it already was. But in the 200 years that have since passed, archaeologists have recovered only a single skeleton from this patch of Belgian ground. The rest of the remains have gone. There is no mystery, though; we know where they went. They were taken to England; ground to a fine powder; distributed to farmers and spread across their fields. There was something, those farmers knew, that was missing from their soil. And that something could be replenished with a sprinkling of bone dust.