St. Joan of Arc, shot at Paris, refuses to leave the ditch

PARIS, France, September 8, 1429 AD — Saint Joan of Arc was shot through the thigh with a crossbow bolt at the wall of Paris this week, and she refused to be taken out of the ditch. She had gone down into the moat below the Porte Saint-Honoré (the Saint-Honoré gate) to sound the depth of the water with her lance, under fire, so that her men could get across and put their ladders against the wall. The bolt went through her leg. The same archer then shot and killed her standard-bearer beside her, a man the record does not name.

St. Joan is seventeen, and she has been in the field since the spring. In May she led the relief of Orléans, and in June the English army was destroyed at Patay. On July 17, 1429 AD she stood beside Charles VII at Reims, holding her standard, while he was anointed and crowned King of France. That was seven weeks ago, and his capital is held for the English. John, Duke of Bedford, is Regent of France for the child king Henry VI, and he governs Normandy, Paris and the north.

An attack on a wall like this one is decided in the ditches at its foot. Two of them run under the wall at the Saint-Honoré gate: an outer trench, dry, and an inner one close under the stonework, full of water. Soldiers have to throw bundles of wood into the dry trench to make a crossing, then get over the water before a single ladder can go up. This week the water in the inner ditch stood high.

Last month the French and English armies came in sight of each other at Montépilloy, north-east of Paris, and neither would attack. St. Joan and the Duke of Alençon moved on anyway. They reached Saint-Denis, a few miles north of the walls, on August 26. Over the following days they sent skirmishers up to the gates. The king stayed behind. St. Joan would tell her judges at Rouen that no revelation sent her before Paris: she went at the request of nobles who wanted a skirmish, and what she meant to do was cross the trenches.

The army did not move until eight on Thursday morning, September 8, the feast of the Nativity of Our Lady. It halted at a hill above the swine-market outside the gate, planted its guns behind the hill at two in the afternoon and opened fire. The outer defence work in front of the Saint-Honoré gate was attacked and taken that afternoon. The main body under Alençon stayed behind the hill, out of gunshot.

Inside the walls, men who wanted the king let in began shouting on both sides of the bridges that all was lost and the enemy was in. People at sermon in the churches ran home frightened and shut their doors. The men posted to the walls and the gates held them and fought hard.

St. Joan took her standard down into the dry moat, crossed it, and climbed the bank under the city wall. She carries the standard in an attack so as not to kill anyone; she has never killed a man. On the bank she put her lance into the water of the inner ditch, over and over, looking for a place shallow enough for her men to wade, with shot coming down on her from above. She called up to the men on the wall to give the city over. “Surrender it to the King of France,” St. Joan said. The chronicles differ on who held that wall: English men-at-arms under the banner of St. George, or Burgundian soldiers and the armed townsmen of Paris with forty or fifty English among them.

Then an archer on the wall shouted insults at her, aimed, and put an arrow through her leg.

She was pulled under what cover there was beside the moat. She could not move. The troops that should have supported her were too far back to be led, so all she could do was call to them, and she went on calling long after nightfall. The French stayed in the outer ditch and at the swine-market until ten or eleven at night, and lost men to gunfire and arrows there. At last the Sieur de Gaucourt sent soldiers who lifted her out of the fire, and she was still saying as they carried her that Paris could be taken if the men would keep at it.

She was up very early the next morning, September 9, wound and all, and asked the Duke of Alençon to sound the trumpets and mount. “For I will never retreat till I have the town,” St. Joan told him. He agreed, and so did the other captains. Then Charles de Bourbon and René, Duke of Bar, rode in from the king with his orders: she was to go back to Saint-Denis.

On the morning of September 10 the captains rode out early, meaning to try a bridge Alençon had thrown over the Seine. Charles VII had had it destroyed in the night. Hundreds of scaling ladders and wheelbarrows are still lying on the ground outside Paris where the army put them down and never used them. It has been forbidden to go back for them.