26 May 2008 Family History Local History

An interesting article this morning from Melbourne's 'Age Newspaper'. According to this report, the head of the Australian Army History Unit makes the surprising announcement that the experts no longer believe the grave contains British soldiers.

RAIN is forecast in Pheasant's Wood, Fromelles, this morning — the kind that creates cloying mud, soaks woollen uniforms and that made the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers a misery during World War I.

But a little water to soften the earth will be welcomed by the team of Scottish and Australian archaeologists who will begin digging deep inside this wooded copse in the battlefields of northern France to see, once and for all, whether the decade-long obsession of Victorian school teacher Lambis Englezos is more than a hunch.

Army historian Roger Lee told The Age yesterday that eight pits — not just one as previously believed — have been found in the area, and are now thought to contain the remains of at least 160 Australian soldiers, but probably no British remains at all. Until now, it was widely believed that this one mass grave, forgotten during the post-war clean-up led by the Germans, contained several hundred bodies, the majority British.

"We think there are eight pits and Australians are buried in at least five and maybe even six … we won't know until we find the remains … and under the agreements we have with the French and the Commonwealth graves commission, we cannot remove remains," Mr Lee said.

"But we now think it is quite likely that there are no British there at all … the story has always been 160 Australians, some 200 to 300 British and now we don't believe there are any. But we do not know who the others are … it really is a kind of mystery story and we won't know till we get in there."

And so at 9.30am, the team of archaeologists and historians armed with shovels and sieves, guided by high-tech equipment, will turn the first sod in a much-anticipated exercise to find some of the souls lost during one of the most ferocious battles to envelop Australian troops.

An estimated 5533 diggers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner on that night of July 19-20, 1916 — one of the worst 24-hour periods for Australians at war.

Of the 1719 Australian diggers who died at the hands of German forces, the bodies of about 170 were never found.

Those soldiers have obsessed Mr Englezos, who embarked on a sleuthing mission eight years ago and slowly gathered evidence to persuade Australian defence historians to mount a case for the search.

Roger Lee was one of the sceptics but has been convinced that the soldiers were undisturbed for nine decades since German troops buried the remains in mass graves.

"(Mr Englezos) found evidence buried behind Pheasant's Wood … yes, the panel was sceptical and I admit I was too. We couldn't believe that they could miss a mass grave in the recovery after the war," he said.

"So we asked Glasgow University to do a survey last May, and they came back and said the evidence was clear. There are men buried there and the scatter patterns and other evidence show that there has been no disturbance."

This week, finally, Australia will know.