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Sydney Morning Herald The dig at Fromelles has finally ended with just 250 bodies - not 400 - found and exhumed from the field beside Pheasant Wood in northern France. The four-month excavation has officially wrapped up and the English archaeological team that led the recovery will finish on site at the weekend, paving the way for the remains of the World War I soldiers, now believed to be mostly Australian, to be reburied. Burials, with full military honours, are to be held on every second day, for a month from January 30 next year to the end of February. The men will be given individual, unmarked headstones unless their identities can be ascertained through DNA testing. Members of the public will be able to visit the site during the funerals and view the proceedings from a special area. The 250 soldiers, killed in the Battle of Fromelles that began on July 19, 1916, were the first to fight in an operation that involved both British and Australian troops. They were buried in eight pits, dug by German soldiers. In total, 1547 men from the 61st British Division were lost, wounded or went missing while the 5th Australian Dividion suffered 5533 losses. The men are to be reburied in a new military cemetery at Fromelles, under construction by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. DNA samples taken from their bodies are being worked on by a British laboratory in a bid to extract viable strands for testing against descendants and relatives. It has been confirmed that the identification is likely to take many more months as work continues behind the scenes to establish genealogies and identify appropriate descendants. All the material found on site is to be presented to a specially convened identification board which is due to meet in March next year. The British Minister for Veterans , Kevan Jones, said the end of the dig represented a milestone in the development of the project. I am grateful for the work that Oxford Archaeology has done," he said. "I know they have been working in very tough conditions and they have recovered the remains of these brave soldiers with the utmost care and respect. Now we will do everything we can to try to identify each and every one of these fallen soldiers. What is most important is that these men are laid to rest with full military honours and the dignity they deserve. The Minister for Defence Personnel, Greg Combet, said: A total of 250 sets of remains and 1200 artefacts have been excavated from six graves. While identification of the remains is an extremely complex process I remain hopeful that we will be able to identify a number of those that we have found. The whereabouts of the mass grave was officially confirmed in May 2008 after years of research by Melbourne amateur historian Lambis Englezos who pinpointed the exact location alongside Pheasant Wood, on Fromelles' outskirts. Anyone who believes they may be related to a soldier killed at Fromelles should contact the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre by phoning 0011 44 1452 712 612, extension 6303, or by emailing
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