Nearly 93 years after Joseph Henry Humphries was killed by German machineguns in the First World War, his family hope that his body may have been found — in a mass grave in a foreign field.

Work begins today to exhume the remains of up to 400 unknown soldiers discovered in burial pits at the edge of a dense wood in the sleepy French village of Fromelles.

Private Humphries was among those believed killed in the Battle of Fromelles on July 19, 1916. His great-niece, Maureen Eden, 57, from Warrington, Cheshire, said: “It’s amazing to think that he could be lying there, alongside all those he fought with.

“It’s hard to put into words. It’s so sad, because my great-uncle’s parents never found out what happened to him.

“His wife lived to the age of 93 without ever knowing what became of her husband’s body.”

Private Humphries was born in Warrington in 1894. He moved to Australia in 1915 after spending four years on a training ship as punishment for stealing fruit from a market in Liverpool.

He married Dagmar Christoffersen then joined the 60th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force. The Battle of Fromelles was to be their first and, in many cases, last taste of action on the Western Front.

In the past few days a makeshift village of cabins and temporary mortuaries has sprung up in Fromelles, northwest France, as a team of forensic archaeologists begins work.

Green tents at the bottom of Pheasant Wood mark the position of eight pits dug hurriedly behind the German lines in 1916.

A slight knoll in the grass shows where the temporary railway line once ran. It was used by German troops to carry British and Australian bodies from the front line to the spot where they would lie undiscovered for two generations.

Only 962 people live in Fromelles but for nearly a century they have unwittingly shared their village with between 225 and 400 corpses.

The family of Martial Delebarre has lived in Fromelles for a thousand years. “It was an incredible moment in my life when we found out these bodies were in the village,” he said.

“It was such a moving feeling. My great-grandmother died of a heart attack while the Germans were shelling those men.”

The bodies will be placed in individual graves in the shadow of the church spire in the first war cemetery to be built in half a century, only a few hundred yards from where they have lain for so long.

Mr Delebarre, who runs the war museum in the village, said: “Those soldiers have always been able to hear the church bells and it is beautiful that they will still be able to hear them in the new cemetery.”

David Adams, from Brisbane, visited the grave site last week. Mr Adams, who was born in Cheltenham and spent 12 years in the Australian Navy, could not disguise his emotion at visiting the site of where Australians suffered a severe loss of life.

He placed a single poppy by the modest memorial plaque and said: “We feel very strongly about what the Australians gave up and contributed here. They were extremely courageous and fought above their weight.”

Scans of the mass graves show that the German troops laid the bodies with dignity, arranging them in neat rows, wrapped individually in groundsheets.

The uniforms and wrappings will have degraded but DNA samples will be taken from the bones in an effort to identify them.

Nigel Steel, of the Imperial War Museum, South London, said: “This is a unique discovery. The significance is immense — to bring historians and relatives literally face to face with the dead of the First World War in their hundreds. Most of us have never seen anything like this.”

Hubert Huchette, the Mayor of Fromelles, said: “We are in awe and admiration of the desire of the British and Australians to honour the memory of their dead.”

The work, under the auspices of Oxford Archaeology and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, is expected to last for six months.

Missing in action

— The Battle of Fromelles began on July 19, 1916

— Within 24 hours 5,533 men from the 5th Australian Division were killed, wounded or missing. The 61st British Division suffered 1,547 casualties

— Historians believe that up to 400 of the missing were killed and buried by the Germans

— The land was confirmed as a group burial site in May last year

— The bodies of more than 165,000 Commonwealth soldiers are missing, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission says

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