Master John, who also had considerable experience in wounds, confirmed the equerry's opinion--to allow the dart to remain longer in the wound was to expose the heroine's precious life. Indeed, feeling more and more suffocated, Joan believed her last hour had struck, still she did not wish as yet to die. Her mission was not yet fulfilled. She invoked her saints, gathered strength from the mental prayer and mustered up the necessary resolution to submit to a necessity that cruelly wounded her modesty. Before, however, allowing her wound to be attended, Joan ordered the assault to be suspended in order to give the troops some rest. She ordered Dunois, who ran to her, together with Lahire and Xaintrailles, to send one of their orderlies into Orleans on the spot, in order to ascertain the cause of the fatal inaction of the other chiefs, and to enjoin them to commence the attack from the side of the town within an hour, or else to order the barges with combustibles to be set on fire and pushed against the Tournelles. Again the belfry was to give the signal for a general attack. The trumpets sounded a retreat amidst the triumphant cheers of the English, who were intoxicated with their first triumph. Thanks, however, to the exaltation that the heroine had produced in her soldiers, they clamored to be allowed to return to the assault. A cordon of sentinels, placed at a little distance from the tree at whose base Joan had been laid, kept back the alarmed, trembling and desolate crowd of soldiers. Blushing with confusion, the warrior maid allowed her equerry to unfasten her cuirass, and with a steady hand herself extracted the dart from her breast, emitting, however, in doing so, a piercing cry of pain. Dunois and the other captains wished to have her transported to Orleans, where, said they, she would receive the best of care, and they proposed to adjourn the battle for the next day. Joan opposed both propositions, and maintained that, even then, if the captains would support her from the side of Orleans, success was certain. "Let our people take some food," she said to Dunois; "we shall return to the assault; the Tournelles will be ours!"[98] Once the dart was extracted from the wound, the warrior maid allowed herself to be tended. The mental tortures that she underwent at the moment by far exceeded her physical pain. When, her cuirass and padded jacket having been taken off, she felt her linen shirt, wet with blood and the sole cover on her shoulder and breast, respectfully removed by her equerry, a shudder ran through Joan's body and she involuntarily closed her eyes. She seemed to wish to close her eyes to the looks that she feared might be cast at her. But so sacred was the nation's virgin to all the troops that not even the shadow of an improper thought stained the purity of the pious offices of any of the men who saw the beautiful warrior maid thus semi-nude.[99]