The English, on the other hand, knew that if they were beaten out of the Tournelles their defeat would be complete, and they too fought with desperate courage.

Down into the ditches rushed the French, and up the sides of the glacis; scaling-ladders were placed against the walls, to which the men upon them clung like a swarm of bees.  The defenders met them with showers of arrows and shot, and hurled them back with lance and hatchets.  Constantly beaten back, they returned as constantly to the charge.  For six hours this fight lasted, and weariness and discouragement fell on the French.  Joan, who had been all these hours in the thick of the engagement, seeing her men were losing heart, redoubled her efforts; and, helping to raise a scaling-ladder, she placed it against the parapet of one of the towers.  While thus engaged she was struck by a bolt from a cross-bow, between her shoulder and neck.  The wound was a severe one; she fell, and was carried out of the press.  Although she suffered acutely, she had the nerve to draw the arrow from the wound.  She refused to have the wound ‘charmed,’ as some of those standing around her suggested, saying she would sooner die than do anything that might be displeasing in the sight of Heaven.  A compress, steeped in oil, was then applied, and it staunched the bleeding.  She was faint and unnerved, and, as she seemed to feel her death was near, made her confession to her priest.

Still the Tournelles held out in spite of these repeated attacks, and Dunois, as the shadows lengthened, was on the point of calling back his forces and sounding the retreat.  Joan, in the meanwhile, had been withdrawn from the fighting, and placed in a meadow at some distance from the carnage; but when she heard that the troops were about to be recalled from their attack on the Tournelles, she seemed to forget her wound, and, making her way to Dunois, implored him not to give up the fight.  She assured him that she was certain they would even yet be victorious.  In a few stirring sentences she rallied the men to fresh efforts, and told them that now or never would they conquer; the English, she declared, could not hold out much longer.  Mounting her horse, and with flag unfurled, she again led the van; to those near her she said, ’Watch my standard; when it reaches the walls the place will be ours.’

The struggle that ensued was fierce and decisive.  Inspired by the valour of Joan, the French, who appeared as fresh as before her wound, stormed the bastions and towers of the Tournelles with tremendous energy.  Reinforcements had meanwhile arrived from the town, and these attacked the Tournelles in the rear.  Passing over the broken arches of the bridge by means of ladders thrown across the masonry, the first man to reach the other bank was a knight of Rhodes, Nicolas de Giresme.  Attacked from two sides, the English still held the Tournelles with bull-dog tenacity; but the sight of the witch and sorceress, as they considered Joan, and who they thought had met with a mortal hurt, leading the soldiers with unabated courage, caused a panic to spread through their ranks; and when a sudden shout of victory proclaimed that the white and golden banner had at length struck the walls of the fortress, the doom of the Tournelles had arrived.