THE WATERLOO SOLDIER'S COINS

Here are some pictures from the Waterloo Museum. Only two full skeletons have ever been recovered from the battleground, this one from the site of a recently installed parking lot. He was probably one of Blucher's German states soldiers as he has coins from them in his purse and (ironically) Napoleonic coins too, plus (dispositively) a ball from a French musket in the spot where his right lung used to be. They think the soldier lost the top of his head to a postmortem plow.

Waterloo is a challenge for a car-less tourist to visit from Brussels, but well worth the effort. I found two excellent books in the gift shop: The Waterloo Soldier - An Archaeological Investigation at the Heart of the Conflict, Dominique Bosquet et al., Wallonia Public Services (2017) ISBN 978-2-930711-35-5 (while complete on the post-mortem of the body, no list of the coins in detail) and Gordon Corrigan Waterloo - A New History of the Battle and its Armies, paperback by Atlantic Books (2015) ISBN 9781848879294

   

 

 

 

 

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web