Orléans—“Or-lé-ans,” she whispered. Even the name rang like a bell, calling back her very best days. “Orléans.” Inseparable from Joan of Arc. Even from dreams of Joan of Arc, for she’d known, as soon as she knew that she had a fate apart from the other girls of the village, that she would raise the siege of Orléans. That was how Joan of Arc would save France.
She left the court for Orléans in late April 1429. She was seventeen.
The English had been besieging the city for over a year. It was nearly surrounded. The people were half starved—her first victory was simply to send a party of soldiers to skirmish with the English just as night fell, while she slipped into the town with a herd of swine. There was wild rejoicing. Food, and a virgin, both from God! The people of Orléans feasted and crowded around, kissing her feet and even her horse.
“This is the beginning,” she told them with tears in her eyes. “We shall be free.”
“Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret are with me,” she said, and went out on the ramparts to look over the English army she was soon to defeat.
The savage, invincible English army, whom the French hadn’t beaten in a hundred years. She stood there, and was overcome with it all. With the mystery of life, and of her presence in Orléans with an army, just as her saints had said, most improbably, absurdly, really, when she was a shepherd girl, no different from the rest, unlikely to go anywhere, much less to Orléans.
But here she stood, at the head of the king’s army, with God’s grace upon her. She would win. She looked out at the English soldiers, the doomed.
“You soldiers!” she called to them. “I have great pity for you! Listen to me! You don’t have to die in France!”
What?
“Go back to England, soldiers, so we don’t have to kill you!”
Orléans was the last significant pocket of resistance in France. The English had only to win here—mop up, really—and then they could put their own king, Henry VI, son of Henry V, on the throne of France.
“Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret send pity! They are crying for you! But you can go back to England, you don’t have to die here now!”
Die? The English didn’t die in France, they killed in France, even if outnumbered, even when surrounded. Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt! “Few in number but valiant in war”—these soldiers could even say it in Latin. “Ten Englishmen equal a hundred French”—that was the first mathematics they’d learned. They’d followed their fathers to France to do what the English always did there: lead the French to slaughter, “like a flock of sheep.”
And now, this girl? With pity for them? They were dumbstruck at first.
“Go back to England, where God loves you, too! For Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine have promised that we shall win!”
Now the English soldiers found their voice. “Slut!” they shouted at Joan of Arc. “Whore!”
“When we beat you, we’ll put you back in skirts and use you like the whore you are!”
She was stunned. She’d come to them in good faith, dressed in pants! And still, they insulted her like—a woman.
“God is with me!” she cried.
“The only ones with you are pimps and infidels!”
She climbed back down from the walls after that in tears, but her words had found their mark. She was a “whore” to the English soldiers that night, but by the next day, when the fighting started, she had become a witch. And then she was invincible.
The battle lasted for three days. The English were scattered in small forts outside the city, which turned out to be impossible to defend against the large French force that Joan of Arc had inspired. The English didn’t bother to concentrate their own forces, relying on their usual courage and luck, but their courage was flagging in the face of the witch, and the luck this time was with Joan of Arc.
Go, daughter of God, her saints were whispering to her throughout, we are with you, and she felt them, always. The English left their outlying forts, one by one, and concentrated their army in the tower, Les Tourelles, on the bridge in front of the city.
It was the eighth of May, 1429. The night before, Joan of Arc had led her whole army to mass, confession, and Communion. The townspeople had come, too, crowding in, overflowing the church, receiving the blessing, being blessed. Beseeching, together with God’s virgin, what they felt might truly be granted—deliverance.
Victory. “I could die here among you happily,” said Joan of Arc to the people of Orléans that night. It was all she’d hoped, dreamed even, out there alone in the hills of Domrémy. She found that battle agreed with her. She fought hard, feared nothing, sought always to be in the thick of things. She was wounded once, in the soft flesh between her neck and shoulder, but though she bled, she scarcely felt it, and it didn’t stop her. She remained in the field.
That day, she refused to stop fighting, even in the evening, when they’d been at it since dawn. The generals assured her they could do no more that day, and when she refused to call a halt, they held a council without her, and sounded a retreat.
She was furious. “You have been with your council,” she cried to the generals, “and I have been with mine!”
She turned directly to the soldiers. “My saints have promised us victory tonight!” She rallied them despite the high command, and led them herself on another sally, out of the city. And when the English saw the French, the timid, weak, home-for-dinner French, ready to fight on as though possessed—“The witch!”—they panicked and fled.
Stampeded, terrified, out of Les Tourelles, onto the bridge, in their armor, too many of them, until the bridge collapsed under their weight, and they fell into the Loire and sank like stones.
The Siege of Orléans was lifted. Bells rang, people danced through the streets, laughing, singing, cheering—Joan of Arc! She ate nothing but bread dipped in watered-down wine. She led the townspeople to a mass of thanksgiving, still in her armor.
Her armor, her standard, her sword—they seemed almost part of her now, like her strong arms and short hair. Much later, when some women were helping her to undress, they were shocked to see her entire body battered black and blue.
“From the armor,” she told them. She’d had to sleep in it on the journey from Chinon to Orléans.
No one slept in armor, not the boldest of knights, not the hardest among them, but Joan of Arc always did, she’d told her men on that journey, “to be ready,” she’d said. They were impressed.
She told the truth, however, to the women: she’d found herself there among men, her first night on the march, and couldn’t figure out how to take off her armor without—undressing. Turning from a soldier into a woman who was taking off her clothes.
The first night had been the worst, she said, and the next morning she’d had to grit her teeth even to stand up, much less get on her horse. But that had proved a small price to pay for what she had gained.
The women of Orléans understood her perfectly. “Men don’t feel desire around me,” she told them. “I am free.”
They nodded, and bathed her limbs tenderly, and laid her in their softest bed.