But the moderate south-east wind was not strong enough to move the clouds, and the visibility was so poor that the huge menacing shape of the giant airship was invisible to the probing searchlights on Apsley Gate. Only the steady throb of its four 210-horse-power Maybach engines could he heard in the streets below. And it was raining. It was five past ten on the night of Sunday the 24th of September 1916. The Great War had been in progress for just over two years, and the nation was still reeling from the losses on the first day of the Battle of the Somme: 58,000 casualties of which a third were dead. The maroons, warning of an air raid, had been set off thirty minutes earlier from the nearby fire station in Greycoat Place. At the time, there were thirteen people in the old Victorian house at 143 Washbourne Street; it was perhaps fortunate that there were not more. When the alert had sounded, a few of the residents had made for the basement of the four-storied dwelling. Others, some in nightclothes with just an overcoat or even a blanket around their shoulders, had fled the short distance to Victoria railway station, there to seek sanctuary in the depths of the Underground railway system.
