[Illustration: Joan hears the Voice]
Once Joan saw more of war than these schoolboy bickers. It was in 1425,
when she was a girl of thirteen. There was a kind of robber chief on the
English side, a man named Henri d'Orly, from Savoy, who dwelt in the
castle of Doulevant. There he and his band of armed men lived and drank
and plundered far and near. One day there galloped into Domremy a
squadron of spearmen, who rode through the fields driving together the
cattle of the villagers, among them the cows of Joan's father. The
country people could make no resistance; they were glad enough if their
houses were not burned. So off rode Henri d'Orly's men, driving the
cattle with their spear-points along the track to the castle of
Doulevant. But cows are not fast travellers, and when the robbers had
reached a little village called Dommartin le France they rested, and
went to the tavern to make merry. But by this time a lady, Madame
d'Ogevillier, had sent in all haste to the Count de Vaudemont to tell
him how the villagers of Domremy had been ruined. So he called his
squire, Barthelemy de Clefmont, and bade him summon his spears and mount
and ride. It reminds us of the old Scottish ballad, where Jamie Telfer
of the Fair Dodhead has seen all his cattle driven out of his stalls by
the English; and he runs to Branxholme and warns the water, and they
with Harden pursue the English, defeat them, and recover Telfer's kye,
with a great spoil out of England. Just so Barthelemy de Clefmont, with
seven or eight lances, galloped down the path to Dommartin le France.
There they found the cattle, and d'Orly's men fled like cowards. So
Barthelemy with his comrades was returning very joyously, when Henri
d'Orly rode up with a troop of horse and followed hard after Barthelemy.
He was wounded by a lance, but he cut his way through d'Orly's men, and
also brought the cattle back safely--a very gallant deed of arms. We may
fancy the delight of the villagers when 'the kye cam' hame.' It may have
been now that an event happened, of which Joan does not tell us herself,
but which was reported by the king's seneschal, in June 1429, when Joan
had just begun her wonderful career. The children of the village, says
the seneschal, were running races and leaping in wild joy about the
fields; possibly their gladness was caused by the unexpected rescue of
their cattle. Joan ran so much more fleetly than the rest, and leaped so
far, that the children believed she actually _flew_, and they told her
so! Tired and breathless, 'out of herself,' says the seneschal, she
paused, and in that moment she heard a Voice, but saw no man; the Voice
bade her go home, because her mother had need of her. And when she came
home the Voice said many things to her about the great deeds which God
bade her do for France. We shall later hear Joan's own account of how
her visions and Voices first came to her.[3]
Three years later there was an alarm, and the Domremy people fled to
Neufchateau, Joan going with her parents. Afterwards her enemies tried
to prove that she had been a servant at an inn in Neufchateau, had lived
roughly with grooms and soldiers, and had learned to ride. But this was
absolutely untrue. An ordinary child would have thought little of war
and of the sorrows of her country in the flowery fields of Domremy and
Vaucouleurs; but Joan always thought of the miseries of _France la
belle_, fair France, and prayed for her country and her king. A great
road, on the lines of an old Roman way, passed near Domremy, so Joan
would hear all the miserable news from travellers. Probably she showed
what was in her mind, for her father dreamed that she 'had gone off with
soldiers,' and this dream struck him so much, that he told his sons that
he, or they, must drown Joan if she so disgraced herself. For many girls
of bad character, lazy and rude, followed the soldiers, as they always
have done, and always will. Joan's father thought that his dream meant
that Joan would be like these women. It would be interesting to know
whether he was in the habit of dreaming true dreams. For Joan, his
child, dreamed when wide awake, dreamed dreams immortal, which brought
her to her glory and her doom.