ch. There he stood as if he had been stone, and she mounted.
Then she turned to the church, and said, in her girlish voice, "You
priests and churchmen, make prayers and processions to God." Then she
cried, "Forwards, Forwards!" and on she rode, a pretty page carrying her
banner, and with her little axe in her hand.' And so Joan went to
war.[11] She led, she says, ten or twelve thousand soldiers.[12] Among the
other generals were Xaintrailles and La Hire. Joan made her soldiers
confess themselves; as for La Hire, a brave rough soldier, she forbade
him to swear, as he used to do, but, for his weakness, she permitted him
to say, _By my baton!_ This army was to defend a great convoy of
provisions, of which the people of Orleans stood in sore need. Since
November they had been besieged, and now it was late April. The people
in Orleans were not yet starving, but food came in slowly, and in small
quantities. From the first the citizens had behaved well; a Scottish
priest describes their noble conduct. They had burned all the outlying
suburbs, beyond the wall, that they might not give shelter to the
English. They had plenty of cannon, which carried large rough stone
balls, and usually did little harm. But a gun was fired, it is said by a
small boy, which killed Salisbury, the English general, as he looked out
of an arrow-slit in a fort that the English had taken.

The French general-in-chief was the famous Dunois, then called the
Bastard of Orleans. On the English side was the brave Talbot, who fought
under arms for sixty years, and died fighting when he was over eighty.
There were also Suffolk, Pole, and Glasdale, whom the French called
'Classidas.' The English had not soldiers enough to surround and take so
large a town, of 30,000 people, in ordinary war. But as Dunois said,
'two hundred English could then beat a thousand French'--that is, as the
French were before the coming of the Maid.

The position of Orleans was this; it may be most easily understood from
the map.

Looking _down_ the river Loire, Orleans lies on your right hand. It had
strong walls in an irregular square; it had towers on the wall, and a
bridge of many arches crossing to the left side of the river. At the
further end of this bridge were a fort and rampart called Les Tourelles,
and this fort had already been taken by the English, so that no French
army could cross the bridge to help Orleans. Indeed, the bridge was
broken. The rampart and the fort of Les