D’Aulon heard her say this, and no doubt he wondered what she meant. He
understood her, at night.
So Joan caused the gate to be thrown open, and the town’s people, who
were very eager, rushed to the river bank, and crossed in boats. The
regular soldiers followed, and all day long they attacked the walls,
carrying ladders to climb then? with, while Joan stood under the wall,
waving her banner, and crying “Forward!” But from behind the battlement,
the English kept shooting with arrows and muskets, so that many of the
French were killed, and a strong Englishman threw down the ladders as
they were pushed to the top of the walls. There were five or six hundred
of the best of the English in this castle, under two leaders whom the
French call “Bumus” and “Glasidas.” The name of “Glasidas” was Glasdaie;
we do not know who “Bumus” was! So all day companies of the French and
Scots, carrying ladders, and with banners flying, went down into the
deep ditch below the wall, and were shot or driven out.
Now the great Dunois, the most famous of the French leaders, tells us
what Joan did. It was about one o’clock in the afternoon, when the
thing that she had prophesied happened to her. A bolt from an English
cross-bow passed through her armour between the collar-bone and the
shoulder-blade, and stood out six inches behind her shoulder. She was
carried out of range, and the arrow was drawn out. Another witness says
that a soldier wished to sing a magical song over the wound, to heal it,
but she would not allow this to be done, and went back into the battle,
hurt as she was. She cried a little.
They fought on: they had begun in the early morning, and it was eight
o’clock, and past sunset, when Dunois said that they could not take the
fort that day, and wished to call off the soldiers from the ditch. But
Joan came to him, and asked him to wait a little while. She mounted her
horse, and rode to a vineyard, and there she prayed, “for half a quarter
of an hour.” Then she rode back, and went through the hail of shot and
arrows to the edge of the ditch, while d’Aulon covered her, he says,
with his shield. She saw that a soldier had taken her standard into the
ditch. She seized the standard, and it waved so that all her men saw it,
and rushed up; “we shall take the fort,” said Joan, “when my standard
touches the wall.” The wind blew the banner fringe against the wall, and
the French made one more rush, they climbed the ladders, they tumbled
into the fort, and the English were slain or taken, and Glasdale, their
leader, who tried to cross to another tower by a plank, fell into the
river and was drowned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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