After the Napoleonic Wars ended on the fields of Belgium, in 1815, many British took to wearing dentures that had been pried from the dead on the battlefield — “Waterloo teeth,” they were called. Scavengers scoured the same fields for bones, of both men and animals, and shipped millions of bushels to Yorkshire, where they were ground into dust and used for fertilizer.
So recounts Margaret MacMillan, the Canadian historian, in “War: How Conflict Shaped Us,” her richly eclectic discussion of how culture and society have been molded by warfare throughout history. As the above anecdotes suggest, MacMillan argues that war — fighting and killing — is so intimately bound up with what it means to be human that viewing it as an aberration misses the point; it’s in our bones. “War is waged by men; not beasts, or by gods,” MacMillan writes, quoting Frederic Manning, a poet and novelist of World War I. “To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance.”
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