Into the moat with a lance, to measure the water

A lance in the water

PARIS, France, September 8, 1429 AD — A ditch full of water, right under the wall of Paris. Saint Joan of Arc was seventeen years old, and she was standing in it. She pushed her lance down into the water, over and over, to find out how deep it was. Above her, men on the wall were shooting down.

An arrow went through her leg. She wouldn’t leave the ditch.

Why a ditch could stop an army

Getting over a city wall starts at the bottom, in the ditches at its foot. There were two of them at the Saint-Honoré gate. The outer one was dry, and soldiers threw bundles of wood into it to make a path across. The inner one, close under the stonework, was full of water. Nobody could put a ladder against the wall until they got over that water. That week the water was high.

The flag she carried so she wouldn’t have to kill

St. Joan carried her standard into an attack so that she would not have to kill anyone. She had never killed a man. She took it down into the dry ditch, crossed, and climbed the bank right under the city wall. Then she called up to the men on top to give the city up. “Surrender it to the King of France,” St. Joan said.

An archer on the wall shouted insults at her, took aim, and shot an arrow through her leg. He shot again and killed the man standing beside her who carried her flag. The old records don’t give that man’s name.

Calling in the dark

She was pulled under what cover there was beside the moat, and she couldn’t move. The rest of the army was too far back for her to lead. All she could do was shout to them, and she kept shouting long after dark. In the end the Sieur de Gaucourt sent soldiers to lift her out of the shooting. While they carried her she was still saying that Paris could be taken if the men kept at it.

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

On the morning of September 10 the captains rode out early. They meant to use a bridge the Duke of Alençon had built over the river Seine. The king had had it pulled down in the night.

Hundreds of ladders for climbing the wall are still lying on the ground outside Paris, with the wheelbarrows. The army put them down there and never used them. It has been forbidden to go back for them.