Face To Face With The 'Lost' 85 Diggers Of The French Battlefield Of Fromelles Share : 
For the first time two Australian researchers have painstakingly pieced together the stories of the dead from a French battlefield. Paola Totaro reports.He calls her Marples and she affectionately refers to him as Sherlock. He's a determined, quiet cop with a forensic background; she's a chatty grandmother with degrees in social research and 30 years' genealogy experience.
They live vastly different lives but West Australian Sandra Playle and Victorian Tim Lycett are united by a singular passion: to give identities to the men buried in the shadow of Fromelles' tiny Pheasant Wood. These men, even boys, died on July 19-20, 1916, in what the Australian War Memorial calls Australia's ''worst 24 hours''. In a battle intended in part as a diversion to the Battle of the Somme, 80 kilometres to the south, Australians saw their first action on the Western Front; 5533 of them were killed, wounded or captured.
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