The Spy Mill
It Did Not Wait for Winds to Swing Its Arms for German Guidance
In a book, recently published, called Espions, Espionnage, one story has to do with a windmill: “Celebrated along the whole Aisne front, there existed at Craonne a mill boldly designated, ‘Mill of the Spy.’... The miller, devoted to the interests of our enemies, had found the means of informing them of the movements of our troops by disposing the arms of the mill in different positions.” The French has a beautifully final sound—“the miller, devoted to the interests of our enemies.” “But to tell the truth, neither the miller himself nor the actual information which he was able to impart, made a great deal of difference in the fighting. What it was, that made, or almost made, the difference, I believe, has never been satisfactorily ascertained. The miller at least was not there, then. Of course he may have had confederates, but if so, the destruction of the mill was so sudden, so complete, that there was left no trace of them.”
The information given by the mill to the Germans was almost entirely negligible, and would have penetrated to them anyway through the medium of the spies with which both lines were always swarming. Of course, at first, before they realized the agency of the mill, the French were not a little troubled and disconcerted by the amount of data the Germans seemed to possess, and the speed with which it was acquired. For instance, for a while the Boches amused themselves with knowingly greeting each regiment as it moved up to take its turn in the front line trench. There was a measure of clairvoyance implied in the big white board with black lettering that would go up on top of the German barbed wire as surely as there was a change of guard on the French side: “Bonjour, 77e!” or the number of French trench casualties: “Morts ——,” “Blessés ——.” And so it went on day after day.
A week of this, in dull, rainy weather, was enough to set nerves on edge, but then they caught the miller, whose execution put, it was thought, the quietus on the mill. And upon the morning of the 27th of November, they moved forward stealthily to the surprise attack.
Then a poilu looked back. It was a miserable, gray, shrouded morning, when the shadow cast by any object is merely a blur around that object—the whole a blot upon a cloudy plain. The mill stood, a black, spectral shape in the fog, on a slight eminence, the most commanding point in the surrounding country. As he looked, suddenly a long, black arm fell, abruptly, while the corresponding one, lighter in color, rose a foot or two. Besides the troops, it was the only moving thing in that breathless landscape. “Sacré-bleu!” a poilu exclaimed. As one and another began to gape behind them at his sudden start of surprise, slowly the whole motion was reversed. Light arm down, black arm up. Nothing more occurred. The mill was as motionless as they, though afterwards some of them declared that they had been able to see Tom Bene himself, hanging, with a ghastly face, athwart the arms, as men are sometimes hung to the spokes of a wheel. Then, as a sound came from the German trenches, as with one impulse, the men rushed—back toward the mill, which they literally, by means of fire and bombs, tore shred from shred. Then they turned to meet the Germans, who, warned by this extraordinary wigwagging, by whatever agency or agencies, had instituted a counter-attack. The French were not driven, but they stood the attack in their own trenches. “Afterwards, to those who had been there to see, more vivid than the angels at Mons, more vivid than the vision of the Little Corporal, to those who thought they saw it, was that gray morning, the foiled attack, and this malevolent motion of a secret intelligence in a dream landscape.”