Who taught the shepherd-girl to do these marvels—­she who could not read, and had had no opportunity to study the complex arts of war?  I do not know any way to solve such a baffling riddle as that, there being no precedent for it, nothing in history to compare it with and examine it by.  For in history there is no great general, however gifted, who arrived at success otherwise than through able teaching and hard study and some experience.  It is a riddle which will never be guessed.  I think these vast powers and capacities were born in her, and that she applied them by an intuition which could not err.

At eight o’clock all movement ceased, and with it all sounds, all noise.  A mute expectancy reigned.  The stillness was something awful —­because it meant so much.  There was no air stirring.  The flags on the towers and ramparts hung straight down like tassels.  Wherever one saw a person, that person had stopped what he was doing, and was in a waiting attitude, a listening attitude.  We were on a commanding spot, clustered around Joan.  Not far from us, on every hand, were the lanes and humble dwellings of these outlying suburbs.  Many people were visible—­all were listening, not one was moving.  A man had placed a nail; he was about to fasten something with it to the door-post of his shop—­but he had stopped.  There was his hand reaching up holding the nail; and there was his other hand n the act of striking with the hammer; but he had forgotten everything—­his head was turned aside listening.  Even children unconsciously stopped in their play; I saw a little boy with his hoop-stick pointed slanting toward the ground in the act of steering the hoop around the corner; and so he had stopped and was listening—­the hoop was rolling away, doing its own steering.  I saw a young girl prettily framed in an open window, a watering-pot in her hand and window-boxes of red flowers under its spout—­but the water had ceased to flow; the girl was listening.  Everywhere were these impressive petrified forms; and everywhere was suspended movement and that awful stillness.

Joan of Arc raised her sword in the air.  At the signal, the silence was torn to rags; cannon after cannon vomited flames and smoke and delivered its quaking thunders; and we saw answering tongues of fire dart from the towers and walls of the city, accompanied by answering deep thunders, and in a minute the walls and the towers disappeared, and in their place stood vast banks and pyramids of snowy smoke, motionless in the dead air.  The startled girl dropped her watering-pot and clasped her hands together, and at that moment a stone cannon-ball crashed through her fair body.

The great artillery duel went on, each side hammering away with all its might; and it was splendid for smoke and noise, and most exalting to one’s spirits.  The poor little town around about us suffered cruelly.  The cannon-balls tore through its slight buildings, wrecking them as if they had been built of cards; and every moment or two one would see a huge rock come curving through the upper air above the smoke-clouds and go plunging down through the roofs.  Fire broke out, and columns of flame and smoke rose toward the sky.