The English asked fifteen days’ armistice to consider the proposal in.  And Fastolfe coming with five thousand men!  Joan said no.  But she offered another grace:  they might take both their horses and their side-arms—­but they must go within the hour.

Well, those bronzed English veterans were pretty hard-headed folk.  They declined again.  Then Joan gave command that her army be made ready to move to the assault at nine in the morning.  Considering the deal of marching and fighting which the men had done that day, D’Alencon thought the hour rather early; but Joan said it was best so, and so must be obeyed.  Then she burst out with one of those enthusiasms which were always burning in her when battle was imminent, and said: 

“Work! work! and God will work with us!”

Yes, one might say that her motto was “Work! stick to it; keep on working!” for in war she never knew what indolence was.  And whoever will take that motto and live by it will likely to succeed.  There’s many a way to win in this world, but none of them is worth much without good hard work back out of it.

I think we should have lost our big Standard-Bearer that day, if our bigger Dwarf had not been at hand to bring him out of the melee when he was wounded.  He was unconscious, and would have been trampled to death by our own horse, if the Dwarf had not promptly rescued him and haled him to the rear and safety.  He recovered, and was himself again after two or three hours; and then he was happy and proud, and made the most of his wound, and went swaggering around in his bandages showing off like an innocent big-child—­which was just what he was.  He was prouder of being wounded than a really modest person would be of being killed.  But there was no harm in his vanity, and nobody minded it.  He said he was hit by a stone from a catapult—­a stone the size of a man’s head.  But the stone grew, of course.  Before he got through with it he was claiming that the enemy had flung a building at him.

“Let him alone,” said Noel Rainguesson.  “Don’t interrupt his processes.  To-morrow it will be a cathedral.”

He said that privately.  And, sure enough, to-morrow it was a cathedral.  I never saw anybody with such an abandoned imagination.

Joan was abroad at the crack of dawn, galloping here and there and yonder, examining the situation minutely, and choosing what she considered the most effective positions for her artillery; and with such accurate judgment did she place her guns that her Lieutenant-General’s admiration of it still survived in his memory when his testimony was taken at the Rehabilitation, a quarter of a century later.

In this testimony the Duke d’Alencon said that at Jargeau that morning of the 12th of June she made her dispositions not like a novice, but “with the sure and clear judgment of a trained general of twenty or thirty years’ experience.”

The veteran captains of the armies of France said she was great in war in all ways, but greatest of all in her genius for posting and handling artillery.