Soldiers' relatives, officials and French villagers Tuesday marked the launch of an operation to recover hundreds of fallen Australian and British troops from a World War I mass grave. Military top brass gathered with British, Australian and French dignitaries on a patch of land near the northern French village of Fromelles, for a formal blessing of the site at the start of a five-month dig.
"Today marks the beginning of the journey to afford many of those killed at Fromelles with a fitting and dignified final place of rest," said Admiral Sir Ian Garnett, vice chairman of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Archaeologists and forensics experts hope to recover the bodies of up to 400 servicemen from Pheasants Wood outside Fromelles, today a tranquil red brick hamlet near what was once the World War I front line.
Genetic tests will hopefully allow some of the men to be identified, and all will be given a full military funeral, 94 years after they lost their lives in a doomed assault on German lines, on July 19, 1916. "They are lying so far away from home. It's wonderful they are finally being given the honour due to them," said Robert Witt, a 64-year-old pilgrim from Sydney whose two great uncles fought on the Western Front. "I feel humble that they gave their lives so many miles from their homeland. I just hope we can find and identify as many possible," he added.
"The fallen who are buried here will at last be recognised for their service," added Chris Munro, 55, a Sydney schoolteacher who leads a 350-strong group of families and friends of the Australian World War I troops. Alongside the relatives, locals and a flag-bearing honour guard, Britain's junior defence minister Quentin Davies and Australia's ambassador to France David Ritchie also paid their respects to the men.
After a religious blessing of the site, an earthmover rolled back a symbolic strip of topsoil, exposing clay pits where experts will spend the next five months painstakingly recovering each soldier's body. The team includes forensic anthropologists and scientists, with expertise ranging from Roman digs to the Srebrenica war crimes investigation in Bosnia, along with an ordnance officer to deal with any unexploded munitions.
Between 250 and 400 Australians and Britons slain in the Battle of Fromelles are thought to have been buried by German forces, without name tags, in five separate pits in Pheasants Wood. Test digs ordered by the Australian army in 2007 and 2008 revealed human remains, along with buttons from military underwear, in what is thought to be the largest unmarked Allied war grave found since the 1918 Armistice.
Since the site was identified four years ago, thanks to an Australian amateur historian, hundreds of well-wishers have visited the sleepy village west of the city of Lille. From July 19 next year, the anniversary of the battle, they will be greeted by a new Commonwealth war cemetery, built on land donated by the French state. The remains will be reburied initially as unknown soldiers, each with a headstone and a British or Australian military badge where identifiable from scraps of uniform or equipment.
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