The discovery means that the epitaph Harry Willis' grief-stricken mother composed in 1918 will be inscribed on his headstone by the time a memorial service to commemorate the 94th anniversary of the battle in July takes place. It will read simply: ''Beloved son of John and Janet Willis of Alberton, Victoria''. ''And that's all it needs to say,'' said the soldier's great-nephew Tim Whitford. Mr Whitford - a former tank commander and a key figure in the push for an official search for the men - said he drove to tell his grandmother the news as soon as he received the phone call yesterday morning saying Harry had been identified. "I am still speechless an hour later,'' Mr Whitford said. ''You have all these defence mechanisms … in my heart, in my head I believed that it was him and that he was trying to help us find him,'' he said. "But then you also try to set yourself up so that you won't be shattered if it didn't happen. It hits you like a truck when it's confirmed and that happened again this morning."

Private Willis, a farm hand from Yarram, left his family of 14 siblings to join the 31st Battalion in 1915. Eleven months later, on June 19, 1916, he was dead, one of 1900 men who died and another 3100 who were injured or went missing in the bloodiest 24 hours in Australian military history. That figure is equivalent to Australia's combined casualties in the Boer, Korean and Vietnam wars. The Diggers fell on that fateful June night on a slice of lush farmland just north of the tiny town of Fromelles. It was their first battle in France. Outnumbered two to one, the men were ordered to cross a 400-metre patch of ground to reach the German lines - fields already covered by the bodies of English soldiers killed in a similar battle the year before. A few made it through, only to be cut off, captured or killed as they tried desperately to return to the Allied trenches. During the next few days, German forces dragged hundreds of bodies from the fields to avoid disease in the high summer and buried them in graves near the village. Most were recovered but one mass grave - at Pheasant Wood - went undiscovered for 90 years. Now, after two years' work, Australian war history books will be able to close another chapter.

Viable DNA has been obtained from all but about six sets of remains, with testing on samples to continue until 2014. Just three sets of remains of the 250 have been identified as British. Their individual identities have yet to be confirmed. Mr Whitford, whose wife Liz and daughter, Alexandra, 8, spent several weeks at Pheasant Wood during the preliminary excavation in 2008, was present when a team from Glasgow University found the first remains. The Whitford family have been waiting anxiously since the men were exhumed by an English firm, Oxford Archaeology, last year. They were reinterred with full military honours in individual, unmarked graves last month. Those identified will now have their headstones inscribed in time for a ceremony on the anniversary of the battle, on Monday, July 19, 2010, at the new war graves cemetery. Mr Whitford was accompanied on his visit to his grandmother yesterday by Lambis Englezos, whose tenacious research drove the search for the men. He described the news as seriously wonderful. "This is about dignity and about identity … now the soldiers have been restored to their families and restored to their countries." Others identified include Berrol Mendelsohn, 24, great-uncle to Melbourne man Oliver Mendelsohn. ''Somewhat in spite of myself, I felt quite emotional when I got the call,'' Dr Mendelsohn said. He said he might attend the June service if it ''takes into account that Berrol Mendelsohn was a Jew''.

Then there is Private Herbert George Pollard who was born in Northcote in 1891. Private Pollard was a farmer, single and living at Kew in Melbourne when he enlisted in July 1915 and a member of the 29th Battalion when he died. Lastly, Private Arnold Holmes born at New Lenton in Nottingham, England, in 1889. A psychiatric warder, he was single and living at the hospital for the insane in Perth, when he enlisted in July 1915. He was a member of the 32nd Battalion.