Three unknown Australian soldiers whose remains lay where they fell for nearly a century have at last been given funerals and now rest with more than 700 of their mates in the French countryside.
An Australian military contingent conducted the funeral service at the Pozieres British Cemetery on Saturday, the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Pozieres which cost more than 6700 Australian lives in the summer of 1916.
Full military honours were given to the men, with their coffins being drummed into the cemetery, a three-shot salute given by a firing party and the Last Post played at the end of the ceremony.
The men, identified as Australian by their insignia and bits of uniform, were found over the past five years, two in a farm irrigation ditch near Mouquet Farm, where fierce fighting took place, and the other in fields near Pozieres village.
Their remains were held at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission centre at Beaurains in northern France while investigations into their identity were carried out.
DNA samples were taken but to date their identities remain unknown.
Chief of Army, Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell, told Saturday's service that the army was committed to one day identifying them, "to give back their names and in doing so help give them back to their families".
"Today, 100 years after they fell, we will lay them to rest among their mates," he said.
General Campbell said Australia's 1st Division successfully took Pozieres on the first day of the attack on July 23, 1916, but then endured constant German shelling and counter attacks, suffering 5285 casualties before being relieved by the 2nd Division.
That division held Pozieres but in the process suffered 6858 casualties.
"The efforts of the 1st Anzac Corps at Pozieres were remarkable but the costs were incredibly high," General Campbell said.
He quoted a letter from a lieutenant in the 2nd Division describing the battlefield where "there remained nothing but a churned mass of debris with bricks, stones and girders and bodies pounded to nothing.
"In forests there are not even tree trunks, not a leaf or a twig, all is buried and churned up."
General Campbell said such conditions led to many of those who were killed going missing.
Alan Cooper, an investigations manager with the Australian Army's Unrecovered War Casualties unit, told reporters before the service that there were thousands of soldiers still missing around the Pozieres area alone.
DNA samples were taken from found remains and personal items examined but it was often difficult to find living relatives.
"It's very humbling to recover the remains of Australian soldiers from the battlefields of World War I and give them the funerals they deserve after they had lain for so long in the fields of northern France," Mr Cooper said.
"This is their first funeral, it's not a reburial, these guys were found with their rifles and their pistols.
"This is the first opportunity we get to honour their sacrifice."
