The Somme battlefield, a place synonymous with carnage and heroism, still guards its secrets beneath the peaceful fields of northern France. In the summer of 2016, a team of experts embarked on a mission to uncover one of the most terrifying and bizarre weapons of World War I: a massive flamethrower buried in a secret tunnel. Historian Peter Barton, archaeologist Tony Pollard, and a team of Royal Engineers had just 15 days to locate and excavate this weapon, known as the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector, before it was lost forever.

The stakes were high. The Somme offensive, launched on July 1, 1916, was the bloodiest day in British military history, with 60,000 casualties. Yet, in this small corner near Mametz, something different happened: the Allies broke through the German lines. Peter Barton had discovered a top-secret plan that might explain this success: a network of shallow tunnels, called saps, dug under No Man’s Land to deliver troops and weapons directly into enemy trenches. One of these saps, Sap 14, contained the flamethrower, a 56-foot-long, 2.5-ton monster capable of unleashing a 100-meter jet of burning oil.

But finding the sap was only half the battle. The team faced a landscape littered with unexploded munitions, and the constant threat of collapse. As they began digging, they uncovered poignant artifacts: a bullet-clipped coin, a jar of Vaseline with fingerprints still visible, and even the remains of soldiers who had fallen in the war. Each find brought the past to life, but the clock was ticking.

“We’ve got a real job of detective work on our hands,” remarked Tony Pollard, as they struggled to locate the elusive tunnels. Geophysics offered a glimmer of hope, revealing anomalies that might be the sap, but the excavation was fraught with difficulty. Days passed with little progress, and frustration mounted.

Then, a breakthrough: at the Eastern incline, they found a valve, part of the flamethrower’s intricate mechanism. “That’s flame projector, is it? There’s no doubt of that,” Peter exclaimed, his excitement palpable. The valve, numbered 280, was a key component that controlled the flow of oil. It was a tangible piece of history, and it proved that the flamethrower was indeed buried there.

With renewed determination, the team raced against time to uncover more. But nature had other plans. A ferocious storm flooded the site, turning it into a quagmire. “We’ve got three tons of water in there,” Gary, the bomb disposal expert, reported. The team resorted to a bucket chain, bailing out the trench by hand, their spirits undampened.

As the days dwindled, they finally exposed the incline, a twisted structure of timber and corrugated iron, shattered by a German shell. Inside, they found more parts: a projection pipe, part number 321. “It’s like an ancient cannon,” Tony observed, as they carefully removed it. The excavation was a success, but the ultimate goal—to fire a rebuilt version of the flamethrower—still lay ahead.

Meanwhile, at the Royal Engineers’ base in Chatham, a team led by Staff Sergeant Steve Boand was constructing a modern replica. Using a diesel engine and a centrifugal pump, they aimed to recreate the weapon’s devastating effect. The test firing was a tense moment. As the kerosene ignited, a massive fireball erupted, and the heat was intense. “Good grief, that’s burning my face!” someone shouted. The replica worked, and with the addition of diesel, it was even more terrifying, just as Livens had intended.

The story of the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector is one of ingenuity and horror. Invented by William Livens, a young engineer driven by a personal vendetta after the sinking of the Lusitania, it was used only a few times before becoming obsolete. Yet, its legacy lives on in the tunnels beneath the Somme, a testament to the lengths to which humanity will go in times of war.

Back on the ridge where the two trees stand, Peter Barton fixed his gaze on the ground beneath his boots. This was the spot where the other two projectors had actually made it into position, where Livens’s creation had roared to life at 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916. “They gained all their objectives here,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “Elsewhere, nothing.”

The contrast with the northern sector could not have been starker. Ten miles away, near Serre, the same morning had produced a catastrophe. There, the tunnels had been dug, the saps were ready—and yet the infantry had been ordered over the top regardless. Peter and Tony had walked that ground earlier, and the silence had said everything.

“Underneath their feet was their salvation,” Peter reflected. “They could have used those tunnels. With a bit of thought, a bit of communication, a bit of ingenuity.” Instead, 60,000 men had fallen in a single day, and the First Newfoundland Regiment had been all but annihilated.

What struck the team most was how quickly the lesson was learned. Within days of the disaster, the high command had ordered more saps—many more, quadrupling the number along the front. By 1917, at Vimy Ridge, at Arras, at Messines, the same Russian saps were driven beneath No Man’s Land on a massive scale. “They instantly realized the mistake they’d made,” Peter said. The tragedy was that the realization had cost a generation.

Tony crouched at the edge of the excavation, brushing soil from a fragment of trench timber. “It’s easy to judge them from a hundred years away,” he admitted. “But the evidence is right here in the ground. The saps worked. The men who dug them knew what they were doing.”

As the sun dropped low over the fields, the team gathered for a final walk of the site. The trenches they had opened were already being carefully backfilled, returned to the farmland that had swallowed them for nearly a century. Soon there would be nothing to see but wheat and clay.

Peter stopped at the spot where the Eastern incline had been found, now a shallow scar in the earth. “We came looking for a machine,” he said, “and we found a moment in time. A few moments, in color.” The valve, the projection pipe, the shattered timbers—they were more than relics. They were the fingerprints of men who had hacked a tunnel through the dark, hoping to save the lives of the soldiers above them.

That evening, the team shared a last meal in the village, the conversation drifting between the finds and the men who had made them. Somewhere in the fields beyond the window, the ground held its remaining secrets—the parts of the projector that would stay buried, the soldiers who would never be named.

“Mission accomplished,” Tony had declared at the close of the dig, and the words hung in the air, both an ending and a beginning. For the story of Sap 14 was not finished; it had merely been given back to history, now told for the first time.

The following morning, the team made one last visit to the site before dispersing. The excavation was closed, the trenches backfilled, but Peter Barton stood at the edge of the field with a folded map in his hand, tracing the line of Sap 14 with his finger.

“There’s one thing that still bothers me,” he admitted to Tony. “The war diaries say three projectors were hauled into the saps that night. Ours was struck by a shell. But the other two—they were fired. And nobody has ever found a single trace of them.”

Tony nodded slowly. “Buried where they stood, most likely. The Germans counter-bombarded that ground for weeks afterward. Nothing left but scrap and ash.”

Peter folded the map and tucked it away. “Somewhere under these fields, there are two more of these machines. Waiting.”

Back in Chatham, the Royal Engineers were dismantling the replica. Steve Boand supervised as his students unbolted the nozzle and drained the last of the diesel from the tanks. The test range smelled of soot and kerosene, and the grass where the flame had landed was scorched black in a long, tapering streak.

“That’s the closest anyone’s come to seeing it since 1916,” Steve said, wiping his hands on a rag. “And I’ll be honest with you—I’m in no hurry to do it again.”

One of his students, a young sapper barely out of training, stared at the blackened ground. “What happened to the men who operated the real ones?” he asked.

Steve paused. “Nobody knows. Seven-man crews. They went over the top with everyone else.”

The young sapper said nothing. He knelt and touched the scorched earth, then stood and went back to work.

In the workshop, the recovered valve from Sap 14 sat on a bench beneath a lamp, cleaned and catalogued. Beside it lay the projection pipe, still flecked with rust. A conservator from the Imperial War Museum had come to collect them, and she handled each piece as though it might crumble at her touch.

“These will go on display,” she promised. “People should see them. They should understand what was built down there in the dark.”

Peter, who had made the trip to see them off, nodded. “Tell them about the men who dug the tunnel, too. Not just the machine.”

She smiled. “I will.”

Outside, the rain had started again, soft and steady, the same rain that had flooded the dig and nearly ended the project. Peter pulled his collar up and walked to his car, passing the parade ground where Livens himself had once drilled as a frustrated signaller, dreaming of a weapon that would change the war.

“He got his wish,” Peter murmured. “For all the good it did anyone.”

He drove south, back toward the Somme, where the fields were already turning green again over the trenches. The farmers would plant their crops, the seasons would turn, and the earth would keep what it kept. But for fifteen days in the summer of 2016, a small team had reached down into that earth and pulled a story back into the light.

At the village of Mametz, Peter stopped at the small crossroads and looked east, toward the ridge with the two trees. Somewhere beneath that ground, the last two flame projectors lay where they had fallen, silent and forgotten, their crews long since marched away into history.

“Not forgotten,” he said aloud, to no one. “Not anymore.”

He started the engine and drove on, and the fields of the Somme slipped past the window, peaceful and ordinary, holding their secrets close.

Months later, a letter arrived at Peter’s office in London. It was from a farmer near Mametz, who had been ploughing a field at the edge of the old German line and struck something metallic. “It’s a tube, about eight inches across,” the farmer wrote. “My neighbour says it might be from the war.”

Peter read the letter twice, then picked up the phone and called Tony. “It’s a projection pipe,” he said, his voice tight. “It has to be. One of the two we never found.”

Tony was silent for a moment. “Or it’s a length of drainage pipe from 1950,” he replied. “We’ve been here before, Peter.”

But Peter was already reaching for his coat. “Then we’ll find out,” he said. “I’ll see you at the ridge.”

He drove south through the afternoon, the fields of the Somme green and gold in the late sun. Somewhere beneath them, two machines still waited in the dark, their crews long gone, their story only half told.

And Peter Barton, map on the seat beside him, was going back to finish it.

What do you think they will find when they return—another piece of history, or another wild goose chase? Tell us in the comments below.