"I would return to that my land flung in the teeth of war, I would cast down my robe and crown that pleasure me no more, And don the armor that I knew, the valiant sword I bore. "And angels militant shall fling the gates of Heaven wide, And souls new-dead whose lives were shed like leaves on war's red tide Shall cross their swords above our heads and cheer us as we ride. "For with me goes that soldier saint, Saint Michael of the sword, And I shall ride on his right side, a page beside his lord, And men shall follow like swift blades to reap a sure reward. "Grant that I answer this my call, yea, though the end may be The naked shame, the biting flame, the last, long agony; I would go singing down that road where fagots wait for me. "Mine be the fire about my feet, the smoke above my head; So might I glow, a torch to show the path my heroes tread; _My Captain! Oh, my Captain, let me go back!_" she said. --_Theodosia Garrison._ In the fourth year of the Great War (1918), the sufferings of France, the immemorial battlefield of nations, were in all our hearts. We heard from time to time that France was "bled white"; that she had been injured past recovery; that she was dying. Students of History know better than this. France does not die. She bleeds; yes! she has bled, and stanched her wounds and gone gloriously on, and bled again, since the days when Gaul and Iberian, Kymrian and Phoenician, Hun and Goth, raged and fought to and fro over the patient fields of the "pleasant land." Ask Caesar and Vercingetorix, Attila and Theodoric, Clovis and Charles the Hammer, if France can die, and hear their shadowy laughter! Wave after wave, sea upon sea, of blood and carnage, sweep over her; she remains imperishable. The sun of her day of glory never sets. Her darkest day, perhaps, was that against which her brightest flower shines white. In telling, however briefly, the story of Joan the Maid, it is necessary to call back that day, in some ways so like our own; to see what was the soil from which that flower sprang in all its radiant purity. The Hundred Years' War prepared the soil; ploughed and harrowed, burned and pulverized: that war which began in 1340 with Edward III. of England's assuming the title of King of France and quartering the French arms with those of England; which ended in 1453 with the departure of the English from France, which they had meantime (in some part) ruled and harried. Their departure was due chiefly to the genius of a peasant girl of eighteen years. France in the fifteenth century: what was it like?