When Clement Boland, a former private with 2nd Battalion, The Mercian Regiment, saw a 50-metre wide depression in the ground where the first shots of the Battle of Waterloo were fired, the first thing he felt was “sadness”.
There, beneath layers of soil, in a quarry that archaeologists believe may be the first evidence of a mass grave from that notoriously bloody fight over two centuries ago, was a piece of French musket flint. The poor state of the flint, dated 1812, indicates that the weapon was jamming as it was being fired.
