A Most Promising Field ( Part One )
By the summer of 1815, Mr Ebenezer Pottle had developed a firm conviction that the Almighty, in His infinite wisdom, had provided mankind with an astonishing variety of useful commodities, although He had regrettably neglected to attach price labels to them. Ebenezer, a practical man of forty-three years with a nose resembling a root vegetable and a waistcoat that had once been respectable, had spent the greater part of his working life discovering profitable uses for things that other people preferred to discard. He had made a modest fortune from horse manure, a smaller one from the purchase and resale of condemned army boots, and an altogether regrettable investment in a machine designed to remove the stones from turnips, which had succeeded principally in removing the turnips themselves. Nevertheless, he remained undeterred. Commerce, he maintained, was merely the art of recognising value where a less imaginative fellow saw rubbish.
It was therefore entirely characteristic of Ebenezer that, when news of the great British victory at Waterloo reached England, he should have been less interested in the downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte than in the agricultural implications of the enormous quantity of dead men and horses reportedly scattered across the Belgian countryside. The Duke of Wellington had won a battle that would occupy military historians for centuries, Napoleon had been sent stumbling towards his final exile, and the map of Europe was once again being rearranged by gentlemen in fine coats who seldom had to dig the graves. Ebenezer, however, sat in the parlour of the Plough and Furrow in Bedfordshire, stirring his small beer with the handle of a spoon, and contemplating the possibility that somewhere across the Channel lay a quantity of bone sufficient to enrich several thousand acres of English soil.
The idea had not come to him entirely unaided. For some years he had traded in bone meal, a valuable fertiliser produced by grinding animal bones into a fine powder rich in phosphates and other minerals useful to growing crops. Farmers had long understood the benefits of manure and other organic materials, while improving agricultural practice and growing demand for food had encouraged a lively market in anything that promised healthier roots, stronger stems, and a better return from an acre of land. Bones from slaughterhouses, butchers, and ordinary farm animals could be collected, crushed, and sold to farmers, who applied the resulting material to their fields. The business was established, respectable enough, and capable of generating a handsome profit for a man who could purchase his raw material cheaply.
The difficulty, as Ebenezer explained to his drinking companion, Mr Silas Bumpstead, was that the supply of bones in England had become disappointingly competitive. Every butcher with a wheelbarrow seemed to have discovered the same splendid secret, and the price of a sack of bone meal had risen to the point where a farmer might reasonably wonder whether he would be better off planting his turnips in gold dust. The great armies of Europe, by contrast, had recently conducted a most extraordinary demonstration of human mortality. At Waterloo, where tens of thousands of men had been killed or wounded and thousands upon thousands of horses had perished, the ground had been soaked with blood and littered with the remnants of a battle whose scale surpassed anything most people could comfortably imagine. If even a fraction of those remains could be recovered and transported to England, Ebenezer reasoned, there might be a fortune waiting for a man with a strong stomach, a reliable cart, and a sufficiently flexible understanding of what constituted an agricultural commodity.
Silas, who had been born with the fortunate ability to recognise an unpleasant idea before it became a personal inconvenience, put down his glass.
“You cannot mean human bones,” he said.
Ebenezer considered this objection with the gravity it deserved. “I mean bones, Silas. The soil is not particularly interested in the previous owner's occupation.”
Silas looked at him for several seconds, as though waiting for the joke to arrive and finding, to his dismay, that it had already been and gone.
“The previous owner,” he repeated.
“Quite. And if the previous owner happened to be a French grenadier, a Hanoverian infantryman, or an English gentleman who had the misfortune to be standing in the wrong place when a cannonball arrived, the chemical composition of his bones remains broadly suitable for agricultural purposes.”
“Good God.”
“God, I imagine, has more pressing matters to attend to.”
It was at this point that Ebenezer began to explain his plan. He would travel to Belgium, engage local labourers to collect bones from the battlefield, arrange for the material to be transported to a suitable port, and ship it to England, where it would be ground into fertiliser and sold to farmers. He would begin with the remains of horses, which were plentiful, relatively uncontroversial, and of considerable size, but he was not inclined to reject human bones if they could be obtained at a price that left room for profit. The whole enterprise, he insisted, would be conducted with the utmost efficiency and, if circumstances permitted, a reasonable degree of dignity.
Silas stared into his beer.
“Dignity,” he said at last, “appears to be the one commodity in your scheme that will be in short supply.”
Ebenezer smiled, ordered another drink, and began calculating the cost of passage to Ostend.
…..Ebenezer's preparations took the better part of three weeks, principally because he had underestimated the number of people who would object to his proposed enterprise before he had even begun it. His wife, Mrs Prudence Pottle, objected on grounds of morality, sanitation, expense, and the possibility that he might return with a French wife, although Ebenezer could see no connection between the last of these and the collection of bones. His solicitor objected because he could not determine whether the proposed cargo should be described on the shipping manifest as agricultural material, animal remains, or something which might cause a conscientious customs officer to reach for a constable. His banker objected because he had known Ebenezer for twenty years and had come to regard enthusiasm as the surest indication that a loan was about to become irrecoverable. In the end, Ebenezer secured a modest sum against his existing business, borrowed another from a cousin who had never quite forgiven him for an incident involving a pig in 1809, and purchased passage across the Channel with the confidence of a man who had mistaken the absence of immediate disaster for proof that everything was going according to plan.
He reached Belgium in the spring of 1822, seven years after the battle, when the countryside around Waterloo had long since begun its return to ordinary agricultural life. The roads carried carts and carriages, the fields were being ploughed and sown, and the villages had acquired the peculiar mixture of prosperity and melancholy that comes from living beside a place where history has performed one of its more violent tricks. Visitors still came to inspect the ground upon which Napoleon had made his final great attempt to overturn Europe, some in the solemn spirit of pilgrimage and others with the undisguised enthusiasm of tourists who wished to say that they had stood where Wellington stood. They purchased souvenirs, questioned local inhabitants, and wandered across fields whose hedges, hollows, and farm buildings recalled the dreadful business of 18 June 1815. Some went away with sketches, others with fragments of musket balls, and a few with what they confidently believed to be buttons from the uniform of a French soldier, although the number of buttons in circulation appeared rather greater than the number of soldiers who had possessed them.
Ebenezer arrived with a notebook, a pair of stout boots, and an appetite for commercial opportunity that would have embarrassed a more sensitive man. He lodged at a modest inn where the beds were hard, the beer was sour, and the landlady regarded his French as a personal insult. His first morning was spent attempting to explain to the local mayor that he wished to purchase bones, whereupon the mayor, who had spent several years defending his community against soldiers, requisitioning officers, and opportunistic foreigners, informed him that Belgium had suffered quite enough from men who arrived with grand schemes and empty promises. Ebenezer replied that his own scheme was entirely peaceful, since his prospective customers were already dead, and the mayor ordered him out of the office.
The matter might have ended there had Ebenezer not discovered that the commercial instinct was not confined to England. In a tavern outside the village, he met a farmer named Jules Van der Velde, a broad-shouldered fellow with a grey moustache, a weather-beaten face, and the expression of a man who had spent forty years watching other people make fortunes from the things he produced. Jules had been a young man during the battle and remembered the smoke, the gunfire, the terrified horses, and the appalling number of dead and wounded left in the fields. He had helped with the aftermath, when the wounded were carried away, possessions were recovered, and the dead were buried in hurried graves or disposed of by other means where the number of bodies made ordinary burial impracticable. He had no romantic illusions about war. Men arrived in fine uniforms and left in bloody heaps, and afterwards the farmer was expected to repair the fences, manure the land, and somehow persuade the next harvest to grow as though nothing extraordinary had happened.
When Ebenezer explained his purpose, Jules did not immediately dismiss him. He asked whether the Englishman understood that a battlefield was not a butcher's yard, and whether he proposed to dig wherever he pleased. Ebenezer assured him that he intended to employ local men, pay fairly, respect the property of landowners, and avoid disturbing any grave without permission. These assurances were delivered with such grave sincerity that Jules suspected at once that the Englishman was capable of being both a fool and a nuisance, though perhaps a profitable fool and a nuisance. They agreed to visit the fields together the following morning.
The weather was unhelpful. A cold drizzle drifted across the plain, turning the tracks to mud and lending the distant trees the appearance of smudges upon damp paper. Jules led the way across fields whose green growth concealed the memory of violence, pausing occasionally to point out the ground where batteries had stood, where cavalry had charged, or where the fighting around a farm had been particularly savage. Ebenezer listened with professional attention, although his gaze repeatedly wandered towards the soil. He had expected the battlefield to resemble the illustrations in his books, with abandoned muskets, shattered wheels, and the occasional skull lying decoratively beside a tuft of grass. Instead, he found a working landscape, punctuated by the ordinary signs of rural life, and was obliged to accept that the business he had imagined would require more digging, more labour, and considerably less picturesque evidence than he had hoped.
Jules explained that many bodies had been buried in large pits after the battle, while others had been burned or buried elsewhere. The precise locations were not always certain, and the passage of years had softened the distinction between the ground that had witnessed slaughter and the ground that had merely grown potatoes afterwards. There were stories of men who had found bones while ploughing, and of traders who had shown an interest in collecting them, but such tales were often difficult to distinguish from rumour, exaggeration, and the profitable invention of a man who wished to sell something unpleasant to a foreigner. Ebenezer, who had never allowed uncertainty to interfere with an invoice, asked whether Jules knew where the largest deposits might be found.
Jules stopped beside a hedge and looked at him for a long moment.
“You English,” he said eventually, “come here to remember your victory. You bring ladies, gentlemen, guides, and artists. You stand on the hill and describe the courage of your soldiers. And now you have come to ask where the dead are buried so that you may take them away.”
Ebenezer felt the remark land more heavily than he expected. He had thought of the enterprise as an extension of his ordinary trade, a matter of supply and demand, transport costs, and agricultural improvement. He had not thought very much about the fact that the bones had belonged to men who had been somebody's sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers, or that the fields he hoped to exploit were still inhabited by people who remembered the battle not as a glorious chapter in a national story but as an unwelcome catastrophe that had taken place in their own back gardens.
He cleared his throat. “I do not propose to rob the dead for pleasure, monsieur. I am a businessman.”
“An important distinction,” Jules replied, “although I suspect the dead may find it difficult to appreciate.”
Nevertheless, the two men continued their walk, and by the time they returned to the inn they had reached a cautious understanding. Jules would make enquiries among local farmers, but he would not promise to disturb graves, and any collection would depend upon permission from the relevant landowners and the practical realities of the work. Ebenezer accepted these terms with the expression of a man agreeing to a regrettable reduction in his profit margin, though he had begun to understand that the enterprise would require more than shovels and sacks.
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