THE RELIEF
Anxious indeed was this night for the Maid. Her unerring instinct told
her that the English should make a counter attack, under cover of night,
on the weary French, sleeping on their arms under the open sky or in the
ruined Augustines, the broad stream flowing between them and safety.
This, all authorities agree, they ought to have done; exactly why they
did not do it, perhaps John Talbot alone knows. We know only that the
night passed quietly, and that at sunrise on May seventh Joan heard mass
and set forth on her high errand.
"There is much to do!" she said. "More than I ever had yet!"
Much indeed! The "boulevard" had high walls, and could be approached
only by scaling-ladders; round it was a deep ditch or fosse. Beyond
stood the Tourelles, still more strongly fortified. To take these two
strongholds in the face of Talbot and his bulldogs was a heavy task
indeed; but Joan was full of confidence and cheer. As she mounted her
horse, a man brought her "_une alose_" a sea-trout or shad, for her
breakfast.
"Keep it for supper!" said the Maid merrily to good Père Boucher, her
friendly host. "I will bring back a 'goddam' to eat it with me; and I
shall bring him back across the bridge!"
So she rode out, with her captains about her on either side, Dunois, and
La Hire, De Gaucourt, Xaintrailles and the rest, a valiant company. One
chronicler says that the captains went unwillingly, thinking the odds
heavy against them. One would rather think that they shared their
girl-leader's confidence; surely Dunois and La Hire did. They crossed
the river in boats, and with them every man who could be spared from the
city, which must be guarded from a possible attack by Talbot. French
men-at-arms, Scottish and Italian mercenaries, citizens and apprentices,
flocked to the banner of the Maid, armed with guns, crossbows, clubs, or
whatever weapon came to hand; carrying great shields, too, and movable
sheds to shelter their advance.
Inside the forts, six hundred English yeomen awaited them with
confidence equal to their own. They were well armed; their great gun
_Passe Volant_ could throw an eighty-pound stone ball across the river
and into the city; moreover, they had possession, that necessary nine
points of the law, and English hearts for the tenth part; small wonder
they were confident.
It was still early morning when the French rushed to the assault,
planting their scaling ladders along the walls, wherever foothold could
be found; swarming up them like bees, shouting, cutting, slashing,
receiving cut and slash in return.
"Well the English fought," says the old chronicle, "for the French were
scaling at once in various places, in thick swarms, attacking on the
highest parts of their walls, with such hardihood and valor, that to see
them you would have thought they deemed themselves immortal. But the
English drove them back many times, and tumbled them from high to low;
fighting with bowshot and gunshot, with axes, lances, bills, and leaden
maces, and even with their fists, so that there was some loss in killed
and wounded."[38]
Smoke and flame, shouts and cries, hissing of bolts and whistling
bullets, with now and then the crash of the great stone balls; a wild
scene; and always in the front rank the Maid, her white banner floating
under the wall, her clear voice calling, directing, thrilling all who
heard it.
So through the morning the fight raged. About noon a bolt or arrow
struck her, the point passing through steel and flesh, and standing out
a handbreadth behind her shoulder.
"She shrank and wept," says Father Pasquerel; but she would not have a
charm sung over the wound to stay the bleeding. "I would rather die,"
she said, "than so sin against the will of God."[39]
She prayed, and feeling her strength returning, drew out the arrow with
her own hand.
Dunois thinks she paid no further attention to the wound, and went on
fighting till evening; but Father Pasquerel says she had it dressed
with olive oil, and paused long enough to confess to him.
The English, seeing the Maid wounded, took heart even as the French lost
it. The day was passing; "the place, to all men of the sword, seemed
impregnable."[40]
"Doubt not!" cried the Maid; "the place is ours!"
But even Dunois held that "there was no hope of victory this day." He
gave orders to sound the recall and withdraw the troops across the
river. The day was lost?
Not so! "But then," he says, "the Maid came to me, and asked me to wait
yet a little while. Then she mounted her horse, and went alone into the
vineyard, some way from the throng of men, and in that vineyard she
abode in prayer for about a quarter of an hour. Then she came back, and
straightway took her standard into her hands and planted it on the edge
of the fosse."
Seeing her once more in her place, steel and iron having apparently no
power upon her, the English "shuddered, and fear fell upon them." They
too, remember, had had their prophecies. "A virgin would mount on the
backs of their archers!" A month, a week ago, they had still laughed at
this. Now the "mysterious consolation" which seemed to radiate from the
person of the Maid on all faithful Frenchmen, heartening and uplifting
them, became for her adversaries a mysterious terror, striking cold on
the stoutest heart.
The French had already sounded the retreat; the banner of the Maid,
borne all day long by her faithful standard-bearer, d'Aulon, had already
been handed by him to a comrade for the withdrawal; when at Joan's
earnest prayer the recall was countermanded.
D'Aulon said to his friend, a Basque whom he knew well, "If I dismount
and go forward to the foot of the wall, will you follow me?"
He sprang from his saddle, held up his shield against the shower of
arrows, and leaped into the ditch, supposing that the Basque was
following him. The Maid at this moment saw her standard in the hands of
the Basque, who also had gone down into the ditch. She seems not to have
recognized his purpose. She thought that her standard was lost, or was
being betrayed, and seized the end of the floating flag.
"Ha! my standard! my standard!" she cried, and she so shook the flag
that it waved wildly like a signal for instant onset. The men-at-arms
conceived it to be such a signal, and gathered for attack.
"Ha! Basque, is this what you promised me?" cried d'Aulon. Thereon the
Basque tore the flag from the hands of the Maid, ran through the ditch,
and stood beside d'Aulon, close to the enemy's wall. By this time the
whole company of those who loved her had rallied and were round her.
"Watch!" said Joan to a knight at her side, "Watch till the tail of my
standard touches the wall!"
A few moments passed.
"Joan, the flag touches the wall!"
"Then enter, all is yours!"[41]
Then, like a wave of the sea, the French flung themselves upon the
ladders; scaled the wall, mounted the crest, leaped or fell down on the
inside; cut, thrust, hacked, all with such irresistible fury that the
English, after valiant resistance, finally turned and fled to the
drawbridge that crossed to the Tourelles.
Ah! The bridge was in flames! Smoke rolled over it, tongues of flame
shot out red between the planks.
Seeing this, Joan's heart went out to the men who had wronged and
insulted her, yet had fought so valiantly.
"Glasdale!" she cried; "Glasdale! yield thee to the King of Heaven! Thou
calledst me harlot, but I have great pity on thy soul and the souls of
thy company!"
Glasdale, brave as he was brutal, made no answer, but turned to meet a
new peril, dire indeed. The people of the city had made a fireship and
loaded it with inflammable material, lighted the mass, and towed it all
flaming under the wooden drawbridge. The bridge flared to heaven, yet
with heroic courage Glasdale and a handful of his knights shepherded the
greater part of the defenders of the lost boulevard over the burning
bridge, back into the stone enclosure of the Tourelles, themselves
meantime holding the bridge with axe and sword.
The fugitives reached the fort only to find themselves assailed from a
new quarter. Those watching the fight saw with amazement and terror men
crossing from the city to the Tourelles, apparently through the air,
over a gap where two arches were broken. A miracle? No, only quickness
of wit and action. An old gutter had been found and laid across the gap,
and over this frail support walked the Prior of the Knights of Malta,
followed by his men-at-arms.
Finding all lost but honor, Glasdale and his faithful few turned and
leaped on the burning drawbridge, hoping to make good their retreat into
the fort. The charred beams broke under them, and borne down by their
heavy armor, the brave English sank beneath the tide, while on the bank
the "Witch of the Armagnacs" knelt weeping, and prayed for their souls.
Dunois, La Hire, and the rest were more concerned at losing so much good
ransom.
For all was over; of all the valiant defenders of the two forts, not one
man escaped death or captivity.
The red flames lit up the ruined forts; in Orleans the joy bells rang
their wildest peal; and over the bridge, as she had promised, "crossing
on ill-laid planks and half-broken arches," the Maid of Orleans rode
back to the city she had saved.
Seventeen years old; a peasant maiden, who could not read or write; she
had fought and won one of the "fifteen decisive battles of the world."
FOOTNOTES:
[38] Quoted by A. Lang, p. 120.
[39] Guizot.
[40] Percival de Cagny.
[41] A. Lang, p. 122.