Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (25 page)

As the constable of France—commander in chief of its armed forces—from 1370 to 1380, Du Guesclin
“managed to subordinate French notions of chivalrous conduct to intelligent planning and execution.” He characteristically avoided frontal assaults to carry out a battery of separate minor attacks that guaranteed expeditious and definitive victories, fracturing the attention of the enemy’s military captains and destroying the morale of their forces. The Roman emperor Fabius Maximus, who delivered Rome’s 202
BC
victory over Carthage during the Second Punic War, is credited for instituting what came to be called the Fabian strategy and earned him the title “Father of Terrorism.” Dunois’s council, to which he had not invited hotheaded Joan, determined that the numerical inferiority of the
French forces demanded they use diversionary tactics as well as incite the general populace to undertake acts of sabotage. To follow a course of uncloaked aggression could only end in slaughter and defeat, they reasoned, an invitation for the enemy to cross over the Loire and obliterate the whole of France. Joan picked the direct strike as the only feasible strategy for an army that trusted in the protection of God: a course of stealth and surprise implied a failure of faith.

According to the testimony of Simon Charles, as reported to him by Raoul de Gaucourt, grand master of Charles’s household and captain of Chinon,
“Any attack or charge was out of the question.” Gaucourt was deputized to watch at the city’s gates “and prevent anyone from breaking out.” Joan ignored the command.

Finding her way blocked, she called Gaucourt “wicked,” as she had her page, a word reserved for anyone, friend or foe, who frustrated her cause. “Whether you like it or not,” she said, “the soldiers will charge, and they will win as they have done in other places.” Backed by the town’s garrison and the citizenry, largely in agreement with Joan, the army she’d infused with her impatience “broke out” of Orléans, and Dunois girded himself for what he expected to be a costly and unavoidable disaster. No matter what inexperienced nonsense Joan planned, the soldiers were behind her, and the captains’ council was left with no choice but to align their focus with hers. The dreaded imminence of Fastolf and fresh enemy forces allowed them to produce a face-saving rationalization as they set out with Joan, La Hire,
“and many other knights and squires and around four thousand soldiers,” as the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
reported.

“La Hire and the Maid,” Jean d’Aulon testified, “who were always in the van[guard] to protect the rest, swiftly couched their lances and were the first to strike out at the enemy.” The French army crossed the Loire east of the city and made a westerly charge along the boulevard of the Augustins, where they met the English, who
“sallied out of the Tourelles in great strength, shouting loudly, and falling on the French.” On both sides combat was
“strong and harsh,” but, the
Journal
continued, “the Maid and La Hire all of their army joined together and attacked the English with such great force and courage that they caused them to recoil all the way.” The bastille of the Augustins was taken, the English locked inside the Tourelles, the
“majority of the
enemy … killed or captured,” Jean testified, “and the lords with their men and their Maid remained beside [the bastille] all that night,” sleeping armored on the ground, Joan happy for the excuse to stop limping. When she’d dismounted to enter the Augustins on foot with her jubilant infantry, mostly commoners like herself, she’d stepped on a
chausse-trappe
, a little bit of mischief designed to sprain an ankle or pierce a foot. Known today as a “caltrop” (from the Latin
calcitrapa
, or foot trap), the weapon was a simple one, four iron spikes arranged so that three formed a tripod base and one projected upward, waiting for the tread of man or beast, penetrating that much more deeply when a foot or hoof struck it while running. Intended to slow the advance of both infantry and cavalry,
chausse-trappes
were strewn over battlefields, not so lowly a contrivance that images of them weren’t included in coats of arms as a symbol of resistance.

“Get up early tomorrow, earlier than you did today,” Joan told Pasquerel before retiring. “Keep close to me all the time. For tomorrow I shall have much to do, more than I ever had, and tomorrow the blood will spurt from my body above my breast.”

Having decided that their unexpected success rested on what had turned out to be a surprise attack, in that the English would never have expected the French to take such a suicidal gamble, the captains met to review their position at the end of the day, again excluding Joan. Given the size of the English army relative to the French, whose one significant victory was so impossible that only a fool would expect another like it, the council decided that the French would pause to rest and send out spies and then fine-tune their battle plan with the secrets they gathered, the only way to match the might of a larger army.
“Seeing that the city is well-stocked with provisions, we shall very likely be able to hold Orléans until the King sends aid,” they told Joan. “The council does not think it needful for the soldiers to sally forth tomorrow.” The captains ought to have guessed Joan’s response to their temporizing; they’d heard it often enough.

“You have been to your council, and I to mine,” she said. “And believe me, the counsel of my Lord will be put into effect, and will endure, while your counsel will perish.”

“Behold you scoffers, and wonder, and perish,” the Evangelist Luke wrote, summoning the seventh-century
BC
prophet
Habakkuk’s
apocalyptic message, which resounds throughout the New Testament, proclaiming a cornerstone of Christianity:
“The just shall live by his faith,” the faithless perish.

The soldiers did believe the Maid, and the dissenting captains were left again with no choice but to follow the lead of an army that would mutiny at their failure to fall in behind her. They saw no point in hurrying a conflagration that was in any case guaranteed, as the English would eventually have to burst from the Tourelles. Caught between Orléans’s hive of fevered citizens, every hour more of them, women and children included, swarming over the ramparts with their helmet-splitting rocks and pots of boiling oil or lime, and a French army under a spell of energetic savagery that made their numerical disadvantage irrelevant, the English could wait to make a move until hunger decided their fate. If they could wait for a few days before attacking, Dunois and the others had reasoned, reinforcements might arrive. Still, better to join the Maid in acting rashly than to allow her to publicly pull rank on them by assuming all of their soldiers. Whether or not they were to prevail, the French would trade their lives to outrun the dishonor of failing to keep up with a girl, even if she had bewitched the horse she sat on.

Joan was up by sunrise on the morning of Saturday, May 7, preparing for what would prove the
“bloodiest military engagement of the Hundred Years War since Agincourt” just as she would any other day. She made her confession to Pasquerel, she heard Mass, and she received the Eucharist. As the French army had slept in the field, clothed and armored, she had her forces mobilized by dawn and had charged at the English before they’d had a chance to even inspect, let alone repair, the bulwark around the Tourelles, and the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
reported a
“spectacular assault during which there were performed many great feats of arms …[T]he French scaled the different places adeptly and attacked the angles at the highest of the strong and sturdy fortifications so that they seemed by this to be immortal.” Having nowhere to run, the English fought back as desperately as the situation merited, and the French losses were severe as well.

“I myself was the first to plant the ladder against the said fortress of the Bridge,” Joan told the examiner, under a rain of arrows, rocks, and cannonballs. “I was raising the ladder, and as I was raising the ladder I was wounded in the neck by a crossbolt”—distinguished from the crossbow by the projectile it launched, which looked more like a dart than an arrow and was discharged by a bow mounted on a stock. The bolt, shorter and heavier than an arrow, fell from above and penetrated the mail between her harness’s breast and shoulder plates, its impact great enough to stun and fell her. According to the
Histoire du siège d’Orléans
, the Lord of Gamaches, the same who had called Joan a “little saucebox,”
“rode up hastily to defend her with his axe, seeing that the English were about to descend from their walls to surround her. ‘Take my horse,’ he said, and added a generous apology.” The
Histoire
was written by J. B. P. Jollois in 1833; Gamaches’s vindication may reflect a chivalrous impulse rather than the historian’s discovery of fact. Whether or not the captain resigned himself to the peculiar power Joan represented, he would never know that his toehold in history would rest on his proximity to a girl who seized control of not just one but two armies.

The wound did bleed copiously enough to merit Joan’s prediction that it would “spurt from my body,” and as she was carried to safety, English soldiers were exulting, screaming that they’d “killed the witch!” Once she had been released from her harness to allow for the removal of the bolt, it was clear that, though its head had, as Dunois remembered it,
“penetrated her flesh between her neck and her shoulder for a depth of six inches,” it had stopped fortuitously short of puncturing a lung or severing a major artery. No eyewitness remembered Joan pulling the bolt from her own breast, and reports of her doing so, like that in the
Chronique de la Pucelle
, are likely apocryphal, Joan’s valiant defense of her inviolate body amplifying her virginity. Her confessor wouldn’t have replaced heroism with tears, not any more than Dunois would relate the depth of the wound without mentioning that she had taken hold of the projectile’s shaft and extracted it herself. Probably, she endured its removal by a medic, whose arsenal of curatives was limited, in the case of flesh wounds, to olive oil and pig’s grease.
“When some soldiers saw her thus wounded, they wanted to lay a charm on her,” Pasquerel testified, “but she refused it, saying,
‘I would rather die than do what I know to be a sin, or to be against God’s law.’ ”

Having established Joan’s punctilious observance of a scriptural command, her confessor added that “she said she knew she must die one day, but she did not know when, where, how, or at what hour.” Joan allowed the wound to be bandaged and afterward confessed to Pasquerel “with tears and lamentations,” for each time she returned from battle her conscience carried a new burden of casualties and deaths. Refusing to rest after the bleeding had slowed under the bandage’s pressure, she demanded to be re-armored and, despite what would have been an incapacitating if not fatal injury for any other mortal, returned to the front for another six hours of combat, appearing to the enemy as having been resurrected by a supernatural means. Then she told her soldiers
“that when they saw the wind blowing in the direction of the fortress, then they would capture it,” her page testified.

“Glasdale, Glasdale, give in, give in to the King of Heaven!” she shouted at the captain in charge of the eight hundred or so English occupying the Tourelles. “You have called me a whore, but I have great pity for your soul and for your men’s souls.” Below them, the river burned, the people of Orléans having dragged one of the city’s barges under the bridge and set it on fire. “Then,” Pasquerel continued, “Glasdale, armed from head to foot, fell into the Loire and was drowned, and Joan, moved to pity, began to weep bitterly for the soul of this Glasdale and of all the rest, who were drowned there in great numbers.” The
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris
provided a funereal epilogue:
“Afterwards [Glasdale] was fished up, cut in quarters, and boiled, and embalmed.” It was in this reduced and disassembled state that the vanquished waited a week for passage home, to a cemetery across the channel.

What few English survived the battle were taken captive, and the French remained in control of the smoking bridge when Dunois called off hostilities, as beyond the bridge the two armies had been locked in indecisive combat for hours. It was eight o’clock in the evening, and he told the exhausted army to retreat for the night into the city, where they would be fed and allowed to rest.

“Then the Maid came up to me,” Dunois testified, “and requested
me to wait a little longer. Thereupon she mounted her horse and herself retired into a little vineyard at some distance from the crowd of men, and in that vineyard, she remained at prayer for eight minutes.” When she came back, she promised her soldiers, “In God’s name, tonight we shall enter the city over the bridge.”

“Immediately,” Dunois said, Joan
“took up her standard and placed it on the edge of the ditch. As soon as she was present, the English trembled and were seized by fear; the soldiers of the King recovered courage and began the ascent, delivering the boulevard by assault without meeting any resistance. The boulevard was thus taken and the English found there were put to flight and all killed.”