o was the cause of delay? The forces with Jeanne were not
very large, a great proportion of the army remaining with Charles no one
seems to know where, either at St. Denis or at some intermediate spot,
possibly to form a reserve force which could be brought up when wanted.
The best informed historian only knows that Charles was not with the
active force. But Alencon was at the head of the troops, along with
many other names well known to us, La Hire, and young Guy de Laval, and
Xantrailles, all mighty men of valour and the devoted friends of Jeanne.
There is a something, a mist, an incertitude in the beginning of the
assault which was unlike the previous achievements of Jeanne, a certain
want of precaution or knowledge of the difficulties which does not
reflect honour upon the generals with her. Absolutely new to warfare as
she was before Orleans she had ridden out at once on her arrival
there to inspect the fortifications of the besiegers. But probably the
continual skirmishing of which we are told made this impossible here,
so that, though the Maid studied the situation of the town in order to
choose the best point for attack, it was only when already engaged that
the army discovered a double ditch round the walls, the inner one of
which was full of water. By sheer impetuosity the French took the gate
of St. Honore and its "boulevard" or tower, driving its defenders
back into the city: but their further progress was arrested by that
discovery. It was on this occasion that Jeanne is supposed to have
seized from a Burgundian in the melee, a sword, of which she boasted
afterwards that it was a good sword capable of good blows, though we
have no certain record that in all her battles she ever gave one blow,
or shed blood at all.

It would seem to have been only after the taking of this gate that the
discovery was made as to the two deep ditches, one dry, the other filled
with water. Jeanne, whose place had always been with her standard at
the immediate foot of the wall, from whence to direct and cheer on her
soldiers, pressed forward to this point of peril, descending into the
first fosse, and climbing up again on the second, the _dos d'ane_, which
separated them, where she stood in the midst of a rain of arrows, fully
exposed to all the enraged crowd of archers and gunners on the ramparts
above, testing with her lance the depth of the water. We seem in the
story to see her all alone or with her standard-bearer only by her