So she rode out, with her captains about her on either side, Dunois, and La Hire, De Gaucourt, Xaintrailles and the rest, a valiant company. One chronicler says that the captains went unwillingly, thinking the odds heavy against them. One would rather think that they shared their girl-leader's confidence; surely Dunois and La Hire did. They crossed the river in boats, and with them every man who could be spared from the city, which must be guarded from a possible attack by Talbot. French men-at-arms, Scottish and Italian mercenaries, citizens and apprentices, flocked to the banner of the Maid, armed with guns, crossbows, clubs, or whatever weapon came to hand; carrying great shields, too, and movable sheds to shelter their advance. Inside the forts, six hundred English yeomen awaited them with confidence equal to their own. They were well armed; their great gun _Passe Volant_ could throw an eighty-pound stone ball across the river and into the city; moreover, they had possession, that necessary nine points of the law, and English hearts for the tenth part; small wonder they were confident. It was still early morning when the French rushed to the assault, planting their scaling ladders along the walls, wherever foothold could be found; swarming up them like bees, shouting, cutting, slashing, receiving cut and slash in return. "Well the English fought," says the old chronicle, "for the French were scaling at once in various places, in thick swarms, attacking on the highest parts of their walls, with such hardihood and valor, that to see them you would have thought they deemed themselves immortal. But the English drove them back many times, and tumbled them from high to low; fighting with bowshot and gunshot, with axes, lances, bills, and leaden maces, and even with their fists, so that there was some loss in killed and wounded."[38] Smoke and flame, shouts and cries, hissing of bolts and whistling bullets, with now and then the crash of the great stone balls; a wild scene; and always in the front rank the Maid, her white banner floating under the wall, her clear voice calling, directing, thrilling all who heard it. So through the morning the fight raged. About noon a bolt or arrow struck her, the point passing through steel and flesh, and standing out a handbreadth behind her shoulder. "She shrank and wept," says Father Pasquerel; but she would not have a charm sung over the wound to stay the bleeding. "I would rather die," she said, "than so sin against the will of God."[39] She prayed, and feeling her strength returning, drew out the arrow with her own hand. Dunois thinks she paid no further attention to the wound, and went on fighting till evening; but Father Pasquerel says she had it dressed with olive oil, and paused long enough to confess to him. The English, seeing the Maid wounded, took heart even as the French lost it. The day was passing; "the place, to all men of the sword, seemed impregnable."[40]