7 was Joan’s great day of destiny, it was on this day that she played the decisive role in capturing the most important of the English forts that encircled Orléans --the Tourelles. According to the testimony of Simon Charles, the official French commanders in Orléans had decided against launching any attack that day. Joan achieved her ascendancy over them by forcing events to unfold her way. In his testimony. Simon Charles repeated the story that had been told to him by Raoul de Gaucourt, one of the highest ranking warrior nobles serving France. De Gaucourt had positioned himself at one of the gates of the city to prevent any French troops from going out to make an unauthorized attack. Then Joan showed up, cased in her armor, astride her horse, and with a throng of soldiers, both noble and common, behind her. By de Gaucourt’s own account, Joan upbraided him as "a wicked man" and angrily told him "Whether you like it or not, the soldiers will charge, and they will win as they have done in other places." In the modem idiom, an armed peasant girl with the people behind her told a mighty noble of the realm to lead, follow, or get out of the way. Fearing for his life, de Gaucourt stood aside and Joan led the army out of the city.46
D’Aulon testified that once she was outside the city, she summoned the French leadership to come to her for a war council .47 The decision of this council was to attack the Tourelles immediately. It was during this attack that Joan famously took an English arrow through her shoulder -- and after the arrow was pulled out, returned to the fight to lead the final frenzied assault that stormed the Tourelles. (Dunois related that he had wanted to break off the attack, but that Joan persuaded him to make one more supreme effort.48) Joan returned in triumph to Orléans with an army that was truly on its way to becoming her army.
Dunois testified about what happened the next day. His testimony is amplified by the accounts in the Journal of the Siege of Orléans and in the Chronicle of the Maid.49 The English abandoned their remaining forts around Orléans and drew their now reunified army up in battle order to fight a climactic struggle in the open field. Joan and Dunois led the French army out of the city and drew it up in battle order facing the English. According to all the accounts, Joan forbade the French from making an attack to initiate battle because it was Sunday. The English also refrained from attacking. The two armies glared at each other from opposite sides of the field for an hour without coming to blows. Eventually, the English turned about and marched away. The French let them go with some harassing pursuit by a small force under La Hire.
Edward Lucie-Smith, in his book Joan of Arc, rightly suggests that there was more than piety to Joan’s and Dunois’ decision to forgo a final clash of arms at Orléans.50 The English army in front of them was a unified whole that was no longer split up into small detachments in forts ringing the city. The English were completely ready to meet a French attack. They were drawn up in their favorite formation of rows of longbowmen fronted with a barrier of sharpened stakes planted in the ground. This was the fighting technique with which the English had slaughtered French armies at Crécy, Agincourt, and other places over the years. The great weakness of this technique was that it was purely defensive in nature. The success of this standard English formation depended totally on the French being bold enough (read "arrogantly stupid enough") to charge straight into it. For decades, the French had been precisely so bold. But Dunois was an intelligent man with recent and hideous memories of what it was like to charge such a position and Joan was a fast and intuitive learner.51 Between them, Joan and Dunois would have none of it. Between them, they must have known that the English, with a long supply line behind them and a formed French army in front of them, could not have their rows of longbowmen stand there forever. Dunois and Joan did what they needed to do to win. T