Military History | Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery — Two Hundred and Fifty, Found Ninety Years On

The graves were behind the German line. On the night of 19 July 1916 the 5th Australian Division and the British 61st (2nd South Midland) Division attacked the German 6th Bavarian Reserve Division across a few hundred metres of flat Flanders ground, toward a strongpoint the troops called the Sugarloaf. The assault was a feint, meant to hold German reserves away from the Somme offensive eighty kilometres to the south. It failed within a day, and the ground taken was given up by the morning of the 20th. The Australian War Memorial records 5,533 Australian casualties in that single night and calls it the worst twenty-four hours in Australia's military history; the British division lost about 1,547, and the German defenders, by the British official history's account, between 1,600 and 2,000. Behind their line, German troops buried the Allied dead in pits dug near Pheasant Wood. The pits were closed over, and for more than ninety years the men in them were counted among the missing. From 2002 a retired Melbourne schoolteacher, Lambis Englezos, argued they were still there. A geophysical survey in 2007 and a trial excavation by Glasgow University archaeologists in 2008 confirmed it; through the summer of 2009 the remains of 250 soldiers were lifted from the ground. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission built a new cemetery close by — its first in some fifty years — and reburied the 250 here, the last of them on 19 July 2010, the ninety-fourth anniversary. An Australian and British board has since matched the dead to living descendants by DNA. By May 2026, 181 of the 250 had been named; sixty-nine headstones still read "Known Unto God." The naming goes on, a few more read out at the cemetery most anniversaries. 📸 Cover: Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery — the Cross of Sacrifice, the reburied graves and the entrance shelter, photograph by Wikimedia Commons user Carcharoth, CC BY-SA 3.0. Second image: the Musée de la Bataille de Fromelles beside the cemetery today, photograph by Pierre André, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.