Joan mounted her horse now, with her staff about her, and when our people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at once eager for another assault on the boulevard.  Joan rode straight to the fosse where she had received her wound, and standing there in the rain of bolts and arrows, she ordered the Paladin to let her long standard blow free, and to note when its fringes should touch the fortress.  Presently he said: 

“It touches.”

“Now, then,” said Joan to the waiting battalions, “the place is yours—­enter in!  Bugles, sound the assault!  Now, then—­all together—­go!”

And go it was.  You never saw anything like it.  We swarmed up the ladders and over the battlements like a wave—­and the place was our property.  Why, one might live a thousand years and never see so gorgeous a thing as that again.  There, hand to hand, we fought like wild beasts, for there was no give-up to those English—­there was no way to convince one of those people but to kill him, and even then he doubted.  At least so it was thought, in those days, and maintained by many.

We were busy and never heard the five cannon-shots fired, but they were fired a moment after Joan had ordered the assault; and so, while we were hammering and being hammered in the smaller fortress, the reserve on the Orleans side poured across the bridge and attacked the Tourelles from that side.  A fire-boat was brought down and moored under the drawbridge which connected the Tourelles with our boulevard; wherefore, when at last we drove our English ahead of us and they tried to cross that drawbridge and join their friends in the Tourelles, the burning timbers gave way under them and emptied them in a mass into the river in their heavy armor—­and a pitiful sight it was to see brave men die such a death as that.

“Ah, God pity them!” said Joan, and wept to see that sorrowful spectacle.  She said those gentle words and wept those compassionate tears although one of those perishing men had grossly insulted her with a coarse name three days before, when she had sent him a message asking him to surrender.  That was their leader, Sir Williams Glasdale, a most valorous knight.  He was clothed all in steel; so he plunged under water like a lance, and of course came up no more.

We soon patched a sort of bridge together and threw ourselves against the last stronghold of the English power that barred Orleans from friends and supplies.  Before the sun was quite down, Joan’s forever memorable day’s work was finished, her banner floated from the fortress of the Tourelles, her promise was fulfilled, she had raised the siege of Orleans!

The seven months’ beleaguerment was ended, the thing which the first generals of France had called impossible was accomplished; in spite of all that the King’s ministers and war-councils could do to prevent it, this little country-maid at seventeen had carried her immortal task through, and had done it in four days!