The superstitions of the times are no doubt responsible to a great extent for the success which was attained by this Maid of Orleans.  “The English believed in her supernatural mission as firmly as the French did, but they thought her a sorceress who had come to overthrow them by her enchantments,” and so on.  The fact remains that this innocent peasant girl of eighteen years of age freed France from the English and accomplished things which no man of France at that time was able to do.  Either the French generalship of the times was very incompetent or the army was very much demoralized—­at all events they had been awaiting the advent of a leader who was both determined and fearless, for skill does not seem to have been a requisite—­and this appeared in the person of Joan of Arc.

It is difficult to believe that an entirely inexperienced person of this kind could take charge of an army of ten thousand men and lead them to victory when the best trained generals of the time could do nothing and suffered defeat at every turn.

With the coronation of the King the Maid felt that her errand was over.  “Oh, gentle king, the pleasure of God is done,” she cried, as she flung herself at the feet of Charles, and asked leave to go home.  “Would it were His good will,” she pleaded with the archbishop, as he forced her to remain, “that I might go and keep sheep once more with my sisters and my brothers; they would be glad to see me again.”

But the policy of the French court detained her.  France was depending on one of its peasant girls for its very national existence.  The humiliation of the thing should make all good Frenchmen blush with shame.  So she fought on with the conviction that she was superfluous in the army, and a slave to the French court.  It does not appear that she was even placed upon the payroll, or that she received reward of any kind for her services—­and there were no “Victoria crosses” in those days.  She fought on without pay; rendered all her services for nothing—­perhaps for the love of the thing.  During the defence of Compiegne in May, 1430, she fell into the hands of one Vendome, who sold her to the Duke of Burgundy.  Burgundy sold her to the English—­her remuneration for her self-sacrificing, voluntarily-given services.

And now comes the tragic part of a most pathetic story enacted out at a time when the name civilization, applied to the French and English, is a mockery.  “In December she was carried to Rouen, the headquarters of the English, heavily fettered, and flung into a gloomy prison, and at length, arraigned before the spiritual tribunal of the Bishop of Beauvais, a wretched creature of the English, as a sorceress and a heretic, while the dastard she had crowned king left her to die.”  She was not even granted a legal, judicial trial.

Some say that her sentence was at one time commuted to perpetual imprisonment, which proves that there was a glimmer of humanity hid away in some corner of the world, knocking hysterically in its imprisonment for admission.  “But the English found a pretext to treat her as a criminal and condemned her to be burned.”  And at this juncture it may be well to say that we have good reason to be proud of ourselves to-day, and ashamed of our ancestors.