Saint Joan of Arc

by Vita Sackville-West

  Her answers were frequently apt to be so simple that nobody could believe in them.

  VI

  Her few possessions became the subject of the most sinister interpretations. Those words JHESUS MARIA, which she used as a heading to her lettersfn24 and also caused to be inscribed on her standard, reappeared most unfortunately for her on one of her rings. She had two rings. One of them had been given to her by her brother, the other by either her father or her mother; she does not appear to have been very certain which. In fact, she betrayed a rather pathetic vagueness about the ring when they questioned her about it at her trial: she could not say whether it was made of gold or of some alloy (laiton), modestly adding that if it was made of gold at all, it was not of very fine gold. It had no stone in it. So far as she could make out, a cross and the words Jhesus Maria were engraved on it, but she did not know who had caused them to be engraved. She had never used it to effect cures. In spite of her vagueness about this ring, a vagueness which is to be attributed partly to her natural ignorance of precious metals and partly to her inability to read, she certainly treasured it, so much that she was in the habit of looking down at it on her finger whenever she was about to enter into battle, thinking meanwhile of her father and mother, and of Saint Catherine whom she had touched with the hand that was wearing it. By an additional little twist of cruelty her enemies took both her rings away from her when she was captured, one of them being handed over to the Burgundians and the other retained by the Bishop of Beauvais. At her trial she begged that one of them might be returned to her, and the other given to the Church. There is no record of either request having been granted.fn25

  VII

  We can thus compose a fairly complete inventory of Jeanne’s personal possessions at the time she set out for the deliverance of Orleans. She had her suit of armour, humbly made without any blazon whatsoever. She had her horse. She had her standard – a proud standard, bearing the image of Christ, the world, two angels, and the lilies of France. She had a lance. She had a pennon. She had a small battle-axe, which she sometimes carried in her hand. She had her two rings, one of which might be made of gold or might not, but which reproduced, as in a tiny mirror, the words written on the standard floating above her head: JHESUS MARIA.

  A letter addressed, about five weeks later (June 8th, 1429), by the young Gui de Laval to his mother and grandmother, describes her with a freshness which has lost nothing after the lapse of five centuries:

  ‘I saw her mount a great black charger, a little axe in her hand, armed entirely en blanc,fn26 but for her head. The horse, which was making a great fuss before the door of her lodging, would not allow her: to mount, so she said, “Lead him to the cross,” which was in front of the neighbouring church. And then she mounted, and he stirred no more than if he had been bound. And then she turned towards the door of the church, saying in a fairly feminine voice, ‘You, priests, and people of the Church, form yourselves into a procession and offer prayers to God.” And then, having returned to her road, she said, ‘Go on! go on!’ her little axe in her hand, her standard furled and carried by a graceful page.’fn27

  Among the many vivid and personal touches which make the figure of Jeanne not only legendary but human, one must record the pride of a citizen of Poitiers, one Christofle du Peirat, who in 1495, then being nearly a hundred years old, told Jean Bouchet, a boy of nineteen, that he had seen Jeanne mount her horse when she left for Orleans. ‘Et me monstra une petite pierre qui est au coing de la rue Sainct Estienne, ou elle print avantage pour monter sur son cheval.’fn28

  9. ORLEANS (1)

  I

  It would be tedious and unnecessary to go into too many details relating to the siege of Orleans previous to Jeanne’s arrival. It has been described many times elsewhere, and this is no military handbook. It must suffice to say here that by April 29th, 1429, Orleans had been besieged for about six months, i.e. since October 12th, 1428, in, as I read the story, a rather half-hearted and ineffectual way. Lord Salisbury had been killed by a cannon-ball shortly after the siege had begun, thus depriving the English of their first commander. The Duke of Bedford had never thrown himself with any conviction into the siege. ‘And all things there prospered for you,’ he wrote, ‘till the time of the siege of Orleans taken in hand, God knoweth by what advice.’fn1 His government in London either would not or could not send him the reinforcements he needed, and indeed he scarcely encouraged them to do so. He asked for men and money, as was his duty, but was careful to point out that, without ‘great expense of money the siege cannot be maintained,’ which was almost tantamount to saying that they had better allow him to cut his loss and retire. By April, large numbers of the English had deserted; the Duke of Burgundy; after a dispute with the Duke of Bedford, had withdrawn his troops; a contingent of Norman vassals had gone crossly back to Normandy. The English, although they could hinder and hamper, could not entirely prevent the entry of food, men, and money into the town. Either one holds a very exaggerated idea of the closeness of mediaeval sieges, or else the English were unusually lax in the way they permitted the enemy and his convoys to pass freely in and out. It must be remembered that the English had not drawn a complete circle round the town, as a glance at the map will show: only three quarters of the circle, on the north, west, and south, were complete. As M Jollois, the historian of the siege, points out, it is easy to see that all roads of approach were not intercepted, and that between the Bastille of Saint Loup and that of Saint Pouair, nearly three miles apart, no obstacle existed to prevent the entry of provisions and munitions into the town. Of course, they were relatively short of supplies, but there was no imminent question of their giving in through starvation. The mere statistics of the supplies which kept on arriving are enough to show that whatever their friends outside could send, the besieged population could smuggle in. Thus, on April 2nd, nine fat beasts arrived, and two horses laden with kids and other provisions; on April 5th, a hundred and eighteen pigs, six fat beasts, and two horses laden with cheese and butter; on April 6th, twenty-six homed beasts; on April 7th, seventeen pigs and eight horses, six of them laden with wheat. That is no bad record for four almost consecutive days, and the Orlcanais, although anxious, cannot have been desperate. Everybody, in fact, had arrived at a sort of stalemate; neither the besieged nor the besiegers could move. It was not a position for good morale on either side. It was a discouraging position for both parties. But it was a serious position. Orleans was a key place, not lightly to be abandoned. It must have been quite obvious by April 1429, after six dilatory months of failure, that the English must make a determining attempt or else withdraw. In spite of t11e Duke of Bedford’s lack of enthusiasm, they were not likely to withdraw after so prolonged an expenditure of men, money, and prestige. Nor were the besieged likely to give in, so long as starvation did not absolutely compel them to do so. That was, roughly, the position when Jeanne took matters in hand. What Jeanne did was to settle in a few days a dispute which had been going on for six months. And this she did, I believe, by her personal influence entirely. At the same time, I also believe that she arrived at what is now called the psychological moment. She arrived at ilie moment when ilie English no longer had the heart or ilie means to stage the conclusive attack. Without wishing to denigrate her tactical achievement at Orleans, I think we must recognise that achievement to have been largely psychological; psychological rather than military. Her personal example and confidence were worth ten thousand men. There is no denigration in saying that Jeanne was probably the only person then capable of inspiring the French troops and citizens to rid Orleans of an enemy who had held them in a snake-rabbit fascination for half a year. The particular inspiration which she brought to them at Orleans after six months’ siege reflects, as a sort of symbol, the general inspiration which she brought to the whole of France after nearly a hundred years of war.

  The relief of Orleans was not Jeanne’s real achievement. Her exploit here has been much exaggerated, and Orleans is for ever historicall
y associated with her name. History does always, for some odd reason, give rise to such disproportionate associations; on examination, they seldom prove to be wholly justified; on examination, one usually finds that they stand as the symbol of a wider truth.

  Jeanne’s real achievement was not the relief of Orleans, but the regeneration of the soul of a flagging France.

  II

  In the meantime, however, to those concerned in the struggle in April 1429, the siege of Orleans was important. The French were more or less shut up inside the town, which was entirely surrounded by walls, reinforced at intervals by strong towers, and pierced by four gates, the Porte de Bourgogne, the Porte de Paris, the Porte Bannier, and the Porte Regnard. The river protected them on the south, spanned by a single bridge, which was commanded by two strong English positions, one at the Bastille des Augustins and the other at a fort on the bridge itself known as les Tourelles. Apart from these two important forts, the English held strategical positions almost, though not quite, all round the walled town. They held forts and towers – bastilles. Thus the usual idea of a besieged town completely ringed by a strong and un-broken line of the enemy is, at any rate in the case of Orleans, misleading in the extreme. The only true picture to draw is a picture of fortifications at stated though irregularly spaced intervals, with undefended gaps in between. They gave nicknames to these fortifications in very much the same way as other English soldiers gave nicknames during a much grimmer war. Thus the Bastille des Douze Pierres at Orleans was familiarly known as London, the Bastille du Pressoir Ars as Rouen, and the Bastille de Saint Pouair as Paris. The French, too, in a kind of prophecy of la grosse Bertha, had their pet names for both their own cannon and that of their enemies: when the great English Passevolant flung its primitive ammunition, in the shape of one-hundred-pound balls of stone into the city, the French Rifflard replied. Another detail oddly recalls that other war. Much as the English and the German troops called an unofficial truce and played football in No Man’s Land, so on Christmas Day, 1428, did the English send to the French commander to borrow a troupe of musicians. The Bastard of Orleans courteously responded, despatching une note de haulx ménestriers trompettes, et clarons, who came and played to them for several hours, faisans grant mélodie. This truce, however, was of definite and brief duration, lasting only from nine in the morning till three o’clock in the afternoon, after which both parties gecterent trés fort et horriblement bombardes et canons.fn2 The crash of stone balls again replaced the clear notes of the English carols.

  It seems, at moments, to have been quite a friendly sort of siege. Perhaps war, then as now, was too serious a thing to be taken seriously all the time. Men had to have their jokes, in order to be able to endure it at all. Perhaps international hatred is never so deep-rooted as the love of the dangerous game. Anyhow, we find not only the English borrowing an orchestra from their enemies on Christmas Day, but the Bastard himself sending a warm fur to the Earl of Suffolk in exchange for a plate of figs.

  One wonders how the Bastard addressed his fur coat to Lord Suffolk, for English names puzzled the French considerably. Suffolk himself appears as Chuffort in the Bastard’s own deposition, and his family name de la Pole rather naturally becomes La Poule. But even these were more fortunate attempts than some others. Sir Robert Willoughby is scarcely recognisable or pronounceable as de Wlbi, or Lord Poynings, who could take his choice of names between the seigneur de Bumus or de Pougnis. Falconbridge becomes Fouquembergue; Hungerford gets transformed into Hougue Foie. Gethyn defeated them completely, and Mathew Gough appeared to them more acceptable as Matago.

  III

  The readjustment of our ideas as to the closeness and efficiency of the siege must be supplemented by a constant recollection of the small scale and clumsy conditions of mediaeval war. Thus when Jeanne arrived at Orleans on April 29th the garrison, according to a careful computation, probably consisted of some three thousand men. By the time her reinforcements were complete, she could dispose of perhaps five or six thousand. The civil population of Orleans amounted to something like thirty thousand souls, of whom perhaps five thousand were men capable of taking part in the defence. We thus get ten to eleven thousand men under arms. The English, on their side, could throw about the same number into the field.fn3 Hand-to-hand fighting being inevitable where no long-distance weapons existed, other than stones or arrows, personal protection became a matter of the greatest importance, and contributes enormously to our impression of an inelegant, bulky, and spear-streaked mêlée in which each man was struggling for himself. The weapons both of defence and offence were correspondingly primitive. On the one hand you had the defenders relying principally upon their towers, their high walls, their deep moats or fosses both dry and wet; commanding any path of approach not only by archers and cross-bow men sheltering behind the battlements, but also by enormous pieces of complicated machinery capable of launching great balls of stone to crash down on the heads of the attacking party. The size of these machines and their ammunition of course varied; but some formidable details are on record; thus, the account-books of Orleans prove that when the cannon mounted on the Tour St Paul was demolished, twenty-six waggons were necessary to remove its wooden framework, and when the town of Montargis lent the cannon known as the Rifflard to Orleans, twenty-two horses were required to drag it up to the Hôtel de Ville. The missiles protected by these monsters were of accordant size. The Rifflard itself could throw a stone weighing a hundred and twenty pounds; and other cannon balls, presumed to have been flung against the city by the English, are now peacefully resting on the paving-stones of Orleans with estimated weights varying from seventy to ninety-four kilogrammes, and a circumference of a metre to nearly a metre and a half. They were all of stone, for it was only in the succeeding reign that iron balls were substituted. An especially hard stone was chosen for projectiles to be used against walls or masonry; a softer stone could be used for projectiles intended only to crack the human skull.fn4 Although Orleans boasted of seventy-one cannon and bombardes, they seem to have been singularly ill-served, for only twelve master-gunners were provided, some of them, but not all, with an assistant. It thus seems fair to presume that all the bouches à feu could not be in action at the same time, but only those stationed on the threatened section of the defences, wherever that happened to be. The gunners could move round although their engines could not. We must not, however, forget the more mobile culverins or miniature cannon which (it is thought) were of very recent invention and which were employed almost for the first time at the siege of Orleans. As they weighed only ten to twelve pounds, they could readily be carried from place to place.

  The French had a wag amongst them, in charge of a culverin; he was called Maître Jehan, and was a compatriot of Jeanne, whom he followed faithfully until the Burgundians took her prisoner at Compiègne. This wag, who had made a ‘hide’ for himself and his weapon inside one of the piers of a bridge over the Loire, was in the habit of shooting his projectiles with great accuracy to the equally great detriment of the English. Every now and again, in order to make fun of the English, who were watching him with apprehension from their towers of fortification, he would emerge to throw himself down on the ground in the pretence of being either dead or wounded, and would even get himself carried back into the city, presumably on a stretcher, only to return later to his culverin in order to teach the English that he was still alive and active, to their great harm and displeasure,fn5 a piece of Gallic wit which the English were unable to appreciate.

  IV

  The rude equipment of those ensconced behind their walls finds its counterpart in the equipment of the attacking party. Armed with lances, swords, leaden maces, and that particularly damaging weapon the guisarme or battle-axe, which could first smash through armour with its hatchet-blade and then turn itself round to dig into the flesh with its sharp iron spike, they advanced to the assault under cover of large wooden shields, known as pavas or pavois.fn6 One’s usual idea of a shield is of a buckler held be
fore the chest and body. The French pavois was not like that at all. Far from being carried before the chest, it was worn upon the back, so that its wearer might creep or run forward in a stooping position, relatively safeguarded from any shower of stones, arrows, or boiling oil which the enemy might see fit to send down upon him from above. Its construction was as simple as that of an ordinary barrel; and indeed if we can imagine a barrel sawn perpendicularly in half, covered over with stout leather, reinforced by two hoops, and fitted with two leather straps nailed on the inside, through which the arms were slipped to the shoulder, and can further imagine that this contrivance must be large enough to cover not only the buttocks and back but also the head of its wearer, we shall form some idea of what a mediaeval attacking party looked like. It must have looked like a battalion of giant tortoises advancing under their shells. Ladders or lances must have looked very queer, sloping, and thin, sticking out from under the cover of such horizontal and convex forms. The pavois had the advantage of leaving both hands free, whether to carry scaling-ladders or to cling to the rungs of those ladders once they had been set against the walls. It left the hands free, indeed, for any use; even for the final desperate use of scattering chausse-trappes in the path of a pursuant enemy in cases of repulse. These chausse-trappes or calthrops were always carried: four spiked iron balls which, flung behind one, would lame a horse in the soft frog of his foot, or cause the running feet of dismounted men to stumble in avoidance and thus delay their chase – an elementary device, but efficacious; so efficacious as on one occasion to catch the miraculous Pucelle in person.