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arranged for a brief but solemn closing ceremony on the site. The local equivalent of the RSL provided a wonderfully colourful guard of honour in their dress uniforms and carrying their regimental colours. The gendarmerie and the French, Australian and British Armies sent representatives. The GUARD team, led by Tony Pollard, stood proudly in the crowd. The guest of honour, Mme Marie-Paule Demassiet, the owner of the land on which the graves stood, took her seat in front. The Mayor of Fromelles, Monsieur Hubert Huchette, said that the people of Fromelles remembered and honoured the sacrifices of the Australian and British troops who fought to save their liberty. He promised that the memory would be passed on to future generations and never forgotten.
    It was after the ceremony had concluded that the most emotional moment of the day occurred. While most people were mingling, and Lambis and Tim were being interviewed by the TV crews present, Mme Demassiet quietly approached Mike O’Brien. Without any fanfare she said she felt she no longer owned the land and that it now belonged to ‘les soldats’ (the soldiers who lay in it). Her gift lent strength to the logic of exhuming the remains in the graves at Pheasant Wood and reburying them in a new cemetery on the site.
    In another moment that Lambis had been anticipating for years the sculptor, Peter Corlett, made a second casting of his evocative bronze work, Cobbers, that has graced the Australian Memorial Park outside Fromelles since July 1998. On the 92nd anniversary of the Battle of Fromelles, the replica was unveiled on the corner of St Kilda Road and Domain Road.
    Following the discovery of the mass graves at Pheasant Wood, the British and Australian governments set up a jointly funded body, the Fromelles Management Board, to recover, identify and re-inter the bodies. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission acted as its agent and provided day-to-day project management building the Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery between 2009 and 2010. The inaugural reburial – watched by around 400 people from the viewing area outside the cemetery walls and attended by representatives from Australia, France and the UK – took place on 30 January 2010.

    The Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery seen from above on the morning of the Cemetery Dedication Ceremony, 19 July 2010 ( PHOTO COURTESY CWGC )
    The first new CWGC cemetery in more than 50 years, the Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery contains the graves of the 250 British and Australian soldiers who were reburied with full military honours in a series of funeral services between January and February 2010. Care was taken that each body be reburied beside the same soldier he had laid next to for 93 years.
    The original location of the mass graves, which was offered as a possible site for the cemetery by Mme Demassiet, proved to be too prone to flooding. Instead, a nearby location was chosen about 120 metres to the southwest of the village but on a higher piece of land.
    Designed by CWGC architect Barry Edwards, the hexagonal cemetery incorporates radial rows of headstones leading towards a raised Cross of Sacrifice on its southern side. The cross is visible from the nearby VC Corner Australian Cemetery and Memorial and, in turn, the Fromelles battlefield can be seen from the Cross’s elevated terrace. The construction costs for the new cemetery were covered by funding from CWGC member countries while the funding for the excavations, DNA analysis and reburial ceremonies was shared equally by the British and Australian governments.
    Archaeologists from Oxford Archaeology working with LGC Forensics were involved in the project to indentify the soldiers. British and Australian governments agreed in August 2009 that all remains would be tested for DNA samples; however, in some cases only small amounts of DNA have been found and thus there is potential for remains to go unidentified. The forensics team aim to