... in the modern era. It's a given that fabric and metals are high cost of production from raw inputs, and pre-mechanisation would be far too valuable to just leave in the fields. Post mechanisation the problem is logistics. (The factory war era pretty much begins with the Napoleonic war: Marc Brunel (Isembards father) made boot making machines and block making machines for the british war supply chain. You can see the blockworks in Portsmouth harbour and bits of the machines are in the science museum, London)
I think "battlefield pick-over" is not a busted trope. Logistics means you use the stuff to hand, be it 155mm shells you captured taking a Russian trench system, or arrows left over from a stupid french knight charge over muddy ground towards english archers.
The point here, is that a vaguely disgusting re-use of the consequences of war, is that dead bodies turn out to be valuable, not just the grave goods around them. You want phosphates for fertilizer enough that digging up bones to burn to make it, is worthwhile. You would think that the slaughter of cattle and sheep provided enough but a few thousand buried soldiers is a pretty good deposit.
In times past soldiers piss has been used to make gunpowder, dung was used in leathermaking. What's the difference here to using urine, and digging up dead mans bones?
I remember hearing that there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases... Humans never have valued far enough removed dead...
And surely yes, if I were local peasant near battlefield I would go and pick through it after everyone is gone. Or at latest when most of the stink is gone... Metals at least had value.
“It was claimed by author Mark Twain that mummies had been used as fuel for locomotives. In his 1869 travel book called The Innocents Abroad, Twain describes the first railroad in Egypt. Because of the lack of trees and the price of coal, Twain claims that the Egyptians used mummies instead. He wrote, “[The fuel used] for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose.””
Also, FTA: “we know the British imported mummies and bones from Egypt on an industrial scale”
If you're seriously asking, I highly doubt so. Great Britain has massive deposits of relatively clean, accessible coal. They are mostly in Wales but also in England and Scotland. Therefore there would be little reason to import any fuel from Egypt; over that distance, the steam ship would probably consume as many mummies as it was carrying.
Archaeology was a booming field in Britain throughout the 19th century, being a fashionable pursuit for predominantly upper-class individuals. Many private collections were started, and most of the great museums were founded during this time. Egyptology in particular struck a chord with European society at the time.
Just have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums_with_Egyptian_... to get an rough idea of the extent of Egypt-mania in Britain; the 'UK' section dwarfs the others! So although that quote is rather vague, I strongly suspect that it is simply referring to the large quantity of Egyptian artefacts that were being excavated and moved to museums in Britain, especially after Epypt was annexed by and amalgamated into the British Empire in 1882.
It goes further than that. If you find someone who's almost dead but not quite, you can steal that person's organs, netting you way more than metals, weapons, or anything else you're likely to find on a battlefield.
"vaguely disgusting" has another dimension in the modern era. I read once that by contemporary standards human bodies are essentially hazardous waste and every graveyard is essentially a superfund site.
Embalming is very rare in places like continental Europe, and large swathes of the non-western world has religious bans on embalming, so formaldehyde in graveyards is almost purely a problem in the anglosphere.
I think "battlefield pick-over" is not a busted trope. Logistics means you use the stuff to hand, be it 155mm shells you captured taking a Russian trench system, or arrows left over from a stupid french knight charge over muddy ground towards english archers.
The point here, is that a vaguely disgusting re-use of the consequences of war, is that dead bodies turn out to be valuable, not just the grave goods around them. You want phosphates for fertilizer enough that digging up bones to burn to make it, is worthwhile. You would think that the slaughter of cattle and sheep provided enough but a few thousand buried soldiers is a pretty good deposit.
In times past soldiers piss has been used to make gunpowder, dung was used in leathermaking. What's the difference here to using urine, and digging up dead mans bones?