Joan of Arc (8 page)

It is remarkable to consider that five months before this event, she had been living in her father's house at Domrémy.

It wasn't till May 4 that she saw her first real fighting. Dunois had told her that Sir John Fastolf, an English commander on whom Shakespeare's Falstaff might be based, was on his way, a day's march from the city. Joan was delighted that at last she would be in the midst of battle. She told Dunois to let her know as soon as Fastolf approached, and went to her room for a rest. A short time later, Joan sprang from her bed and woke her page, telling him that her voices had told her to go against the English. In great agitation,she demanded that she be armed, and she leaped onto her horse. She shouted impatiently for her banner, and it was passed to her through the window. Riding through the town, she heard the news of French blood being shed, which made her weep but did not slow her down.

To her surprise, it was not Sir John Fastolf with whom the French were engaged, but the garrison of a minor fort close to town, a monastery, St. Loup, that the English had taken and fortified. Things were going badly for the French until Joan appeared. Then the English saw the tide turn; they perceived that with Joan at the head of the French they would be defeated. In order to escape, they dressed themselves up in the church vestments they found in the old monastery. Joan appears to have been taken in by this ruse, and stopped the soldiers from slaughtering the people she believed to be priests.

This was the first time the French had succeeded in capturing an English work. It meant that the French could pour supplies and troops into the city by a second gate. Joan insisted that the troops should all be confessed, and decreed that there be no fighting on the next day, May 5, Ascension Day. This reluctance to fight on a feast is important, for it indicates that at this point in her career her military judgment and her religious scruples were coordinated; later, when she was more desperate, they would not be.

After the fall of Fort St. Loup, the English fled to a well-fortified fort or bastille called St. Augustin on the other side of the river. When Joan arrived there, she planted her standard on the edge of the first ditch. But she stepped on a caltrop, a spiked ball, which put her out of the fight. Undiscouraged, the soldiers pushed on and took the fort of St. Augustin. Joan soon returned to her men, made St. Augustin her new headquarters, and prepared for the major Battle of Orléans.

That night the French captains, fearing they didn't have enough troops for a major battle, asked Joan to wait until more help arrived, but she refused and vowed to attack in the morning. Even wounded (it was her first battle wound, though a minor one) she exhibited her characteristic bold courage.

The next morning, May 7, Dunois attacked. Joan charged into the boulevard. About noon, an arrow entered her body, just above her left breast, at exactly the place she had prophesied to her confessor on her way from Chinon to Orléans. She fell back, in shock and in great pain. She wept, despite her foreknowledge of the nature of her wound. It is as though she were surprised, not that she had been struck by an arrow, but that it would hurt. This is a particularly adolescent brand of surprise: the shock at the vulnerability of a body imagined invulnerable. The arrow is said to have penetrated six inches. She is said to have pulled the arrow out herself, but this detail, as well as the detail of the depth of six inches, may be more myth than reality. What is undeniable is that after her wound was dressed with fat (she refused the offer of charms being placed on it) she rested awhile, but joined the fighting again. At 8 P.M., the Bastard wanted to quit for the night. Joan begged him to go on, and she withdrew into a vineyard, where she prayed for a quarter of an hour. She then returned to the battle. Upon seeing her, the soldiers reacted with “great ardor” to the sight of their wounded heroine with them again. But then the trumpet was blown for the retreat. Joan ignored it, disobeying the orders of the other commanders.

Joan was on foot, taking part in an assault that involved crossing the moat and scaling the wall. The soldier who was carrying her standard fainted from exhaustion, and he passed the standard to another soldier, called Le Basque. Jean d'Aulon, the master of her retinue, challenged Le Basque to follow him and charged into the moat, covering himself with his shield to protect himself from stones. Le Basque was slow to follow, and Joan caught up with him before he entered the moat, outraged that a stranger was carrying her standard. She seized it. The soldiers could see the standard, blown by a wind so that it pointed toward the bridge. The soldiers believed, either because Joan had told them or because they had invented the story, that when the standard blew in the direction of the enemy, they would take the wall. The wall
was
taken, and quickly the entire boulevard.

The French had now gained control of the north and south banks of the river and of the bridge, and the English, seeing the handwriting on the wall, lifted the siege on May 8. They collected their army to the north of the town, expectingthe French to follow up their victory. Joan gathered her army and went out to confront them. The two armies looked at each other over the field, and then Joan ordered that mass should be said in the field, in fact two masses. Told that the English were marching off, she ordered her troops not to attack, because it was Sunday.

But the English had left Orléans for good, without a major battle, if we understand battle to mean a full-scale confrontation of armies. Their passivity after Joan's arrival is inexplicable; their forces were greater, and they probably could have prevailed. It is precisely this passivity that led people to believe Joan did what she did because of witchcraft, and to accuse her of it at her trial. In a week, Joan had accomplished what well-trained and well-organized captains had not been able to do in six months.

In their joy over the liberation of their city, the bourgeois and the soldiers came together to give thanks in the city's churches. This itself was a major victory: The bourgeois had so feared the undisciplined behavior of the men-at-arms that they were reluctant to have them in the city. But with Joan at their head, all the citizens of Orléans, from the oldest to the youngest, prayed and gave thanks for the Maid who had saved their city. From then on she would be known as the Maid of Orléans.

What are we to make of the Battle of Orléans, and what does it tell us about Joan? Certainly it doesn't suggest that she was a great tactician, as none of the important military decisions were made by her. Some of what she did seems naïve, as when she was duped by the soldiers dressing as priests, and some of the events happened without her bidding, as when Le Basque took her standard and she followed it. What the battle does indicate, indisputably, is her extraordinary physical courage and stamina, her genius for recovery. And it tells us that, both for the French and for the English, she was a presence whose importance and power stemmed not from any traceable action or behavior but from an atmosphere that preceded and surrounded her. So it was not necessary for her to do one thing rather than another; it was necessary only that she be there. And it was necessary that she win. The French needed someone like Joan, someone to break through their paralysis. She broke through and handed them victory. If she had not been victorious, the story would have ended there.

To say that the victory at Orléans was not a victory of Joan's tactics is not to say that if she hadn't behaved with heroic daring the outcome of the battle would have been the same. It is simply to say that the victory, and the reverberations and interpretations that followed it, can be traced to a combination of her hypervisible action and incandescent spirit. This is the point at which myth, symbol, and act collide and create a new essence, when a power is born that is greater than, and different from, any of its separate components. Gift, chance, accident, coincidence. The theological term, of course, is grace.

People who met Joan felt transformed, able to do things they would not have done. This is because they saw her doing things that they had never seen anyone do. And, for a while, their faith seemed justified because she was remarkably successful.

In order to consolidate her victory at Orléans, Joan had to rout the English from the surrounding towns, particularly Jargeau. On June 10, she approached the town, where the French army had up to this point experienced little success. A supply train was about to reach the English. Once again, Joan's appearance on the scene inspired the troops; they rallied and began a bombardment, bringing down one of the fortified towers. It was at Jargeau that one of Joan's minor miracles took place. She told the duke of Alençon to move, foreseeing that a cannonball was going to hit the spot where he was standing. He obeyed her, moved, and another knight was killed when the cannonball hit. Was this miraculous or just good foresight? If she knew that the ball would hit, why didn't she tell both knights to move? Or did she feel she should use her powers only sparingly, in this case to keep the promise to Alençon's wife that she would keep him safe? A domestic tone enters the scene: a friend's promise to the wife of a friend.

After a battle of three or four hours, the English retreated. During the battle, Joan was knocked off a ladder by a stone, but the helmet she wore protected her from serious injury. Once again, she rose up quickly and went back to work.

When the French succeeded in taking the towns of Meung and Beauregency, the English realized that the Loire campaign was over. So they quit and began to march back toward Paris. The French pursued them. One of the French captains, La Hire, had with him a crack troop, a group of clever scouts and skirmishers (the marines of their day). He decided that the moment to strike was at hand. He didn't wait for the main French army to support him, and he attacked boldly, achieving a quick and complete victory. Talbot (the great English commander idealized by Shakespeare in
Henry VI
) was taken, and the French murdered two thousand soldiers. Only two hundred were taken prisoner—those who were rich enough to afford the possibility of ransom.

Joan arrived only at this point, in the midst of the slaughter. She was shocked by the reality of the human cost of war. She saw a French soldier strike an English prisoner on the head, leaving him bleeding on the ground, close to death. She dismounted and cradled the Englishman's head, hearing his dying confession. This is, to say the least, unusual behavior for a victorious commander.

Joan was given credit for the surrender of the English, though in fact she had taken no part in the fighting.

It is somewhat surprising that after the victory at Orléans and the small but related victories at Meung, Patay, and Jargeau, she chose not to seize the military moment and press forward on the energetic tide she'd raised but to quit the field for the purpose of anointing the king at Rheims. The explanation for this is Joan's consummate understanding of the power of symbols. Until there was a coronation at Rheims, Charles would be not a king but a dauphin, the son of a dead father, the boy in waiting. The imposition of the mystical oils of Clovis would, she understood, undo the stigma of doubt that had been cast upon him by his mother's suggestion of his illegitimacy. It would also be a vivifying blast through the malaise that had gripped the people and prevented them from moving forward, or moving at all.

But natures do not change quickly, and Charles, whose dominant characteristics included ambivalent vacillation, resisted Joan's attempts to get him crowned. When she went to de la Trémoille's castle at Sully to see him, he told her to calm down and not trouble herself so much for him. She wept and told him, “Have no doubt you will gain your whole kingdom and soon be crowned.”
²
Part of his hesitation might have come from the fact that he was living as de la Trémoille's guest, and the party of de la Trémoille was never on Joan's side; it is likely that he would have warned Charles that he had created a monster who would end up devouring him.

Joan was sulky and impatient at the king's delay, and her frustration led her to arrogate certain powers to herself that were not properly hers. She had the duke of Alençon, her favorite noble companion, sound the trumpets and mount his horse. She told him, “It is time to go to the gentle king Charles to put him on his road to his coronation at Rheims.”
³
She wrote a letter to the citizens of the town of Tournai, taking credit for all the military successes the army had achieved and telling them, “I pray and require you to be ready to come to the anointing of the gentle King Charles at Rheims where we shall be soon, and to come into our presence when you know that we approach. ”
⁴
Charles, however, had given her no specific promise or specific date.

But even his pusillanimous temperament was not unmoved by Joan's great popular success. Great numbers of men joined her ranks, swelling the army to proportions that were unknown before her arrival. This worried Charles, since he knew he didn't have the resources to pay all these soldiers (later on these men would suffer greatly from being improperly provisioned), but, by the end of June, he was prepared to move on to Rheims.

The cities on the way to Rheims were Burgundian in sympathy, and they did not willingly open their doors to Charles. Part of their reluctance was that they didn't want the notoriously ill-disciplined French troops within their walls. The city of Troyes greeted Joan and Charles with cannon shots from the garrison, but the French forces outnumbered them. The bishop of Troyes came out to see Charles, urging him to wait while he negotiated with the townspeople.

The army was nearly starving, and it was only a fortuitous coincidence that saved them. Living in Troyes at the time was Joan's old friend the apocalyptic preacher Brother Richard, who was staunchly loyal to the French. The army was saved from starvation because of the townspeople's misunderstanding of one of his sermons the previous year. He had said, “Sow, good people, sow plenty of beans, for he who should come will come very soon.”
⁵
What he meant was the Antichrist, but the people understood that “he who should come” as Charles. The soldiers ate the beans and survived.