The fate of the bones of the thousands who fell in his battle waterloo has occupied historians for decades. Although more than two centuries have passed since 1815 and the triumph of the Duke of Wellington over his troops. Napoleononly two skeletons of the fallen were found on the battlefield, the last one was found a month ago.

A new study published exclusively by the Daily Mail shows that the bones of thousands of the dead and tens of thousands of their horses have not been found because they were crushed and used to turn brown sugar into white. In all likelihood, the unheard-of practice was applied to other fields of the Napoleonic wars.

At Waterloo, the sugar factory was located six kilometers from the mass graves, from where the bones of dead soldiers and animals were recovered. At least, this is the version offered by historians Dr. Bernard Wilkin and Robin Shaffer, as well as Tony Pollard, professor of archeology at the University of Glasgow. Scientists looked at historical records in Belgium, France and Germany, where they found thousands of reports from the time that bones were removed after 1834 and used to refine sugar.

One such report was published in the German newspaper Prager Tagblatt in 1879. “Using honey as a sweetener is preferable to sweetening tea with your great-grandfather’s bones,” the journalist wrote. Moreover, a French traveler who visited Waterloo in the 1830s said that “it is a pity that the most important memory of modern history should be mutilated for the sake of sugar.”

The bone trade was allowed in Belgium in 1834. Twenty years earlier, French businessman Charles Deron discovered that powdered and heated bones were a better filter for sugar beets than coal.

Last June, Professor Tony Pollard, who signed the study, proposed another theory about the fate of bones. According to her, they were used as fertilizer.