Brigadier Mark O'Brien, a military historian who served in Vietnam and who is in France to represent the Australian army at the excavation, described the incident as "a disaster - ill-conceived, poorly planned, poorly carried out".

One survivor described the bullets "swishing in a flat criss-crossed lattice of death ... hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid".

The Australian troops had arrived in France just a few days earlier. A fellow officer wrote of the Australian Brigadier General HE Elliott, nicknamed Pompey after a famous footballer of the day, greeting the survivors, comforting the wounded, picking his way between the dead bodies - then returning to his headquar...

Brigadier Mark O'Brien, a military historian who served in Vietnam and who is in France to represent the Australian army at the excavation, described the incident as "a disaster - ill-conceived, poorly planned, poorly carried out".

One survivor described the bullets "swishing in a flat criss-crossed lattice of death ... hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid".

The Australian troops had arrived in France just a few days earlier. A fellow officer wrote of the Australian Brigadier General HE Elliott, nicknamed Pompey after a famous footballer of the day, greeting the survivors, comforting the wounded, picking his way between the dead bodies - then returning to his headquarters, burying his head in his hands and sobbing. Elliott later described the incident as "a tactical abortion". He survived the war, but never really recovered from the horror of Fromelles, and killed himself in 1929.

The site, identified by trawling through German records, was located last year by aerial photography and ground penetrating radar. In the past week an archaeological excavation led by Tony Pollard, director of Glasgow University's centre for battlefield archaeology, has proved that the bodies still lie where the Germans hastily buried them, in a series of pits 10 metres long and 2.5 metres wide.

Pollard said: "Having worked in this mud ourselves for weeks, we have great respect for the work they did, with nothing except picks and shovels."