"[4] It resulted from a plan to divert German attention from the Battle of the Somme, but historians estimate that 5,500 Australians and 2,000 British troops were killed or wounded.

[6] Many difficulties faced frontline Allied units in the sector following the battle, and the Australian 5th Division found it necessary to bury 400 of its own dead, in a mass grave, about two kilometres north of Fromelles.

The Bois de Phaisan (Pheasant Wood) site, which was confirmed by archaeologists from Glasgow University in July 2007, was reportedly the largest mass grave of Western Allied soldiers to have been discovered since the end of World War I.

[9] After DNA samples were taken, the bodies were reburied in individual graves, about 120 metres from their previous site, at the new Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery.

Prior to the discovery of the mass graves at Pheasant Wood, Fromelles was known only for being the place where the Australian Imperial Force had experienced its first, and disastrous, taste of action on the Western Front.

British losses were numbered in their many thousands in and along this line, but the majority of the men killed in action in this area between 1914 and 1918 are commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing in Belgium.