The Conflict Continuum

An electronic screech from my hand-held metal detector draws my attention to the ground in front of me. Digging my trowel into the sun-cracked dirt, I start following the sound. After a few moments, a small metallic object protrudes from the soil and I tease it into my hand. The bullet is one of many the Waterloo Uncovered team has found hidden under the topsoil, buried for centuries before the walls of Hougoumont Farm on the battlefield of Waterloo.

I turn the bullet around, fingers tracing where impact has folded the lead back onto itself. It was not by chance that the place where I knelt was called ‘the killing field’. Napoleon Bonaparte, desperate to break the allied lines before Prussian reinforcements bolstered their numbers, had sent waves of French soldiers through the open field to assault the walls of Hougoumont Farm in the early stages of the battle. Entrenched behind the farm walls, British and Scottish soldiers hewn down waves of French attackers as they broke from the treeline.

Looking over my shoulder I eye the stone farm wall. Although not particularly high, the walls still formed a formidable obstacle for the French. One of the more fascinating discoveries made by the Waterloo Uncovered team was the presence of bullets in the farm’s interior courtyard, indicating that french soldiers had, however briefly, managed to scale the walls. Ultimately, French efforts to seize Hougoumont Farm proved futile and remained firmly in Allied hands by the time the Allied forces routed Napoleon’s main battleline.

Carefully placing the bullet into a ziplock bag, I returned to scanning the ground with the metal detector, flanked by colleagues armed with similar devices to my left and right. Together we slowly move across the killing field, stopping every few feet to investigate another bullet, button, or other remnant of the past. Although to soldiers in 1815 they were no more than battlefield debris, each artifact tells a story, providing a glimpse into the lives of those fighting on the iconic battlefield of Waterloo