Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (24 page)

It was a Sunday; Joan went to Mass and then rode through town with her squire and her two pages. Inspecting the battlements, she made slow progress as everywhere she went crowds pressed thick around her and her horse. The next day, she left everyone behind to reconnoiter outside the city’s walls and discover the environs’ blind spots and strongholds, and on Tuesday, May 3, the people of Orléans held a formal citywide procession in Joan’s honor and
“presented money and gifts to the Maid and her companions, and asked them to deliver their town from its siege.” As was her habit, Joan ended the day in prayer, this time in the cathedral, and from there went back to the Bouchers’ and to bed.

The next morning,
“as soon as she learned we were returning and bringing the reinforcements we had gone to fetch,” Jean d’Aulon testified, “the Maid immediately mounted her horse and rode out with some of her men to meet and help us,” adding that “if it had been necessary she would have rescued us.” With the aid of her own and better counsel, she escorted Dunois and the augmented army back to Orléans “before the enemy’s eyes,” ushering every soldier from the nearby garrisons of Gien, Montargis, Châteaudun, and Châteaurenard through the Burgundy Gate without incident. She was eager to tell Dunois how much she’d learned about the city’s fortifications, and he to confirm that rumors of Sir John Fastolf’s approach were
true. Fastolf and his army had reached Janville, no farther north than a day’s march, at which point the French could assume they’d join the English forces already gathering at Saint-Loup. It seemed to Jean d’Aulon that “the Maid was highly delighted with this news,” for she immediately prevailed upon Dunois to mobilize for an attack.

“Bastard, Bastard,” he remembered her saying, “in the name of God, I command you to let me know as soon as you hear of Fastolf’s coming. For if he gets through without my knowing it, I swear to you that I will have your head cut off.”

“I do not doubt that,” Dunois said, exhibiting the courtly patience he’d be called on to use in many if not most of his dealings with the Maid, “and I will be certain to let you know.”

Joan and Jean returned to the Bouchers’, where they intended to rest in preparation for combat. Joan lay down on a bed with Charlotte, the Bouchers’ daughter, who was nine and a child “much-honored” by such intimacy and who, Sackville-West hoped,
“observed the rules that children were then taught to observe when sharing a bed: to keep to their own side, not to fidget, and to sleep with their mouths shut.” Jean was dozing
“on a couch that was in the Maid’s room,” when Joan was roused by her voices’ strident call, and Pasquerel, who was lodged with the others, remembered her leaping from Charlotte’s bed and crying, “Where are the men who should be arming me? The blood of our men is flowing on the ground!” She woke Jean. “In the name of God!” she said. “My counsel has told me that I must attack the English, but I do not know if I should go to their bastille, or against Fastolf, who is to revictual them.” While Jean was being armed, there came a great tumult from the street outside the Bouchers’, “a great noise and loud cries from those in the city, who shouted that the enemy were doing great harm to the French.”

“Oh wicked boy!” Joan said when she found her page awake and therefore accountable. “Why did you not tell me that French blood is being spilled?”

“She urged me to go and fetch her horse,” Louis de Coutes testified. “In the meantime, she had herself harnessed by her hostess and her hostess’s daughter.” They began at her feet, with the leather shoes worn under the armored boot, called
sabatons
, identified by their exaggeratedly long and memorably pointed toes, and then, one to a
leg, moved up to the greaves, or shin plates, followed by a plate for each knee and thigh, followed by the gambeson—worn under the shirt, like a bulletproof vest—over which went a tunic of chain lined on top with a layer of leather, the hauberk, the cuirass (breastplate), spaulders (which protected the shoulders), gauntlets, and at last the helmet. In sum, a lot of buckling.

“When I had harnessed her horse,” Louis said, “I found her ready in her armor” and highly irritated to discover that in his agitated rush her page had forgotten her standard, which he had to run inside to fetch and pass to her through the window. Immediately, “Joan galloped off in the direction of the Burgundy gate, and her hostess bade me run after her, which I did.” As she passed through the gate, she saw a gravely wounded French soldier being carried into the city and began to weep, telling Jean d’Aulon, who had caught up with her, that
“she never saw French blood without her hair standing on end.” By now it was clear the battle was at the boulevard of Saint-Loup, and she hurried east on the Via Agrippa to join the charge. En route,
“she found many wounded, which distressed her greatly,” Pasquerel testified.

Joan rode with the cavalry, a medieval army’s assault troops, her presence exciting them to giddy bloodlust. The battalion of mounted knights led the charge, galloping full tilt with foot soldiers following in their wake, ranks of archers proceeding under the cover of a shield wall carried by infantry, followed by pikemen and hand-to-hand combat soldiers armed with axes, hammers, maces, and morning stars (spiked clubs). Knights used lances only for the initial strike and often broke and discarded them upon penetrating the enemy line. Once past that line and into the melee, they switched to hand-to-hand combat with swords. Illustrations from the period, validated by archaeological evidence, allow for a reasonably accurate picture of siege warfare, not only the combat formations and the structures under attack, but the weaponry as well. Gunpowder artillery was as yet crude, but it was effective.
“By 1429 purchases of gunpowder by the French royal treasury were in thousands of pounds rather than the hundreds of the previous century.” A culverin, or hand cannon, was an inexpensive weapon—no trigger, just a barrel and a muzzle loader—its projectile more likely to penetrate plate armor than a longbow’s arrow was, but
far less accurate. The big cannon, however, didn’t need to be accurate to knock down heavy fortifications, making doors of walls, and the combustion of gunpowder brought the fire-and-brimstone smell of sulfur and a hellish level of noise that was in itself a weapon against both man and beast, testing the skills of seasoned knights. Reserved for battle, destriers were restless, charged stallions that demanded a much higher level of horsemanship than any other mount. A well-timed series of blasts could dismantle an otherwise organized charge of riders mounted on horses unprepared to be terrorized by the din.

Chansons de geste couldn’t have warned Joan of the reality of combat, not any more than the plundering of
écorcheurs
had approximated warfare. If it had been difficult for her to reconcile the chaste knights of romance—
“protectors and defenders” who were “the big and the strong and the handsome and the nimble and the loyal and the valorous and the courageous, those who were full of the qualities of the heart and the body”—with lesser men of lower morals, it was far worse to learn that picturesque skirmishes conceived by troubadours to fit the niceties of assonance had hidden the filth and degradation of battle.
“The Franks there strike with vigour and with heat, / Cutting through wrists and ribs and chines in-deed,”
The Song of Roland
sung, “Through garments to the lively flesh beneath; / On the green grass the clear blood runs in streams.” In reality, no more than one in four cavalry forces was of noble birth or manners. The weight of mounted horses with infantry underfoot rendered marshy land, like that on either side of the Loire, into a slippery muck of dirt and blood and excrement that made it a rough slog, when not an impossibility, to drag heavy artillery—cannon, counterweight trebuchets, or catapults, and bombards—and its equally heavy ammunition within range of enemy boulevards. Still, three hours of hard fighting delivered the French to a decisive victory, and having emptied the ramparts of Saint-Loup, the soldiers set about destroying them. According to the author of the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
, by the time it was done, 140 Englishmen had been killed, and another forty taken prisoner—representing all the enemy forces, Jean d’Aulon testified, the French having carried out the
“assault with very few losses.” Had the Maid’s entry into the war been met with failure, it would have punctured and deflated her army’s confidence, made evident by the fierceness of their
attack. While her comrades celebrated what was a critical if small victory, Joan, sickened by the carnage she’d inspired, wept.

“They’re dead,” she says to Dunois in Anderson’s
Joan of Lorraine.
“Horribly dead … In the midst of evil. And it was I that killed them … I have been the death of many men … I thought victory would be beautiful. But it’s ugly and bloody and hateful.”

“The voice of Heaven drives me on,” Schiller’s Joan bemoans, “not my own will—rage like an angry spirit … no joy to me, dealing out death.”

According to Pasquerel, Joan refrained from fighting on May 5, as it was Ascension Day, and made do with warmongering on paper.

You men of England, who have no right to this Kingdom of France, the King of Heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Pucelle, to abandon your strongholds and go back to your country. If not, I will make a war cry [“hahu”] that will be remembered forever. And I am writing this to you for the third and final time; I will not write anything further.

Jesus Maria

Joan the Pucelle

[In postscript] I have sent my letters to you in an honest manner but you are holding my messengers [or “heralds” in French], for you have kept my herald called Guyenne. If you are willing to send him back to me I will return you some of the men captured at the fortress of Saint-Loup, for they are not all dead.

“She took an arrow,” Pasquerel testified, “tied the letter with a thread to the tip and told an archer to fire this arrow at the English,” crying, “Read, this is news!”

“News from the Armagnac’s whore!” they shouted upon reading the letter. “When she heard this, Joan began to sigh and weep copious tears, invoking the King of Heaven to her aid.” She would always be
quick to tears and equally quick to dry them. This time she had been comforted, she later reassured Pasquerel, “for she had had news of her Lord.” Too, once she considered the transaction, she saw it made little material difference that the English had taunted and insulted her. Whatever they said, they hadn’t ignored or even dismissed her; in fact, the prompt return of her herald suggested that they took her seriously enough to proceed with caution.

Like Schiller, Joan’s confessor downplayed the bloodlust—in service to a cause for which Joan would readily lay down her own life, but bloodlust nonetheless—that inspired her remorse and made sure to testify as to Joan’s punctilious observation of a holy day, an overdue riposte to her inquisitors having made much of those occasions on which she chose war over worship. Still, her squire and her page remembered that she didn’t allow the previous day’s euphoria to fade, but, as Jean d’Aulon told it,
“when the Maid and her people saw how great a victory they had won over their enemies on the day before, they came out of the city in fair order to attack a certain other bastille in front of the place, called the Bastille of Saint Jean le Blanc.”

The boulevard of Saint-Jean-le-Blanc was on the riverbank opposite Orléans and required Joan and her forces to
“cross to a certain island,” the Île aux Boeufs, “that lay in the Loire, where they would assemble” and from there launch an attack by using two barges to create a bridge to the shore. From there the troops charged over the boulevard—ramparts—to the fortress, only to find it deserted. In that retaking the bastille of Saint-Jean-le-Blanc was accomplished without active combat, Pasquerel was technically correct that Joan hadn’t engaged in battle on May 5, but she had been looking for one. Still, it was hard to be disappointed in a bloodless victory when the English, with their superior forces, had turned and run to hide in the stronger battlement of the bastille of the Augustins, one of the two great bridgehead fortifications blocking the main entrance to the city. Along with the Tourelles, immediately to its north, it squatted at the end of what functioned as a drawbridge does over a moat; to cross the Loire and enter Orléans, one had to get past both fortifications. Even had the French chosen to move on from the small wins of Saint-Loup and Saint-Jean-le-Blanc to the equally winnable skirmishes required to chase the English from the northern and western avenues, they would
eventually have had to attack the choke hold on the city represented by the Augustins and the Tourelles, considered by military historians among
“the most imposing fortifications ever built”: twenty meters long, twenty-six meters wide, surrounded by a ditch eight meters deep.

Dunois and the other captains argued for the kind of conservative gambit favored by Bertrand Du Guesclin, a national hero whose military career Joan had admired. Like Joan, Du Guesclin was one of a handful of military leaders throughout the Middle Ages whose extraordinary victories catapulted them from middle-class anonymity to knighthood, a process analogous to making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, as it required ennobling a commoner and endowing him—or, in the case of Joan, her—with a coat of arms. Among European countries, France was the most inflexible in requiring irrefutable proof of noble ancestry from the would-be knight.
Lettres d’ennoblissement
were issued rarely and didn’t deliver Joan or her hero Du Guesclin to the aristocracy so much as remove them from the hierarchy of social strata, freeing them to form bonds of attachment with all people. Joan’s ability
“to use the power of her charisma to persuade Frenchmen of all social classes to serve the higher cause of France with little or no pay” would prove key to her success. “Perhaps as true a knight as a real-life man of the fourteenth century could be,” Joan’s hero was, like her, a figure of “extraordinary popularity”—a man revered as a true-life Galahad, his reputation that of
“being ‘the most courteous’ and ‘the least covetous’ knight as well as a terrific fighter and born leader.”