Physical anthropologist April Pijpelink spent months investigating what had happened to the dead from the mass grave. The outcome surprised her. They turned out not to have died in battle. “We thought they were real fighters because they were soldiers,” she says. “Judging by the bones, they did not die from their injuries. Most of the boys had meningitis.”
Pijpelink found the same pattern in about 25 skeletons. That’s why she thinks it must have been a bacteria. “There were so many traces of infection. I can see that, for example, by how fragile the top area of a skull is,” she explains. “These British probably came to the Netherlands to fight, but they ended up in a hospital in Vianen. And you can imagine how the hygiene was there hundreds of years ago.”
Ordinary man
Archaeologist Hans Veenstra speaks of a unique find. “Certainly if you look at the people that were found,” says Veenstra. “History is full of texts about the elite. People of power, money and status. How often do you hear about the common man? Not that often. These guys are still anonymous, but they do fill a gap of a forgotten piece of history.”
Now that the investigations have been completed, the bones have all been returned to a depot in Utrecht. Alderman Christa Hendriksen of the municipality of Vijfheerenlanden, which includes Vianen, hopes that it will not stop there.
“Hopefully the new college will continue with this special find. It would be nice if we could draw them even further from anonymity. That we – for example – have a facial reconstruction made from one skeleton. To be able to say: this is what people looked like who fought here. As a sort of final honor for the boys who fell.”
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