 lands if need be to raise troops for the cause.33 Clearly, Joan’s moral inspiration turned an army of sullen professional mercenaries into a cross-social class army of crusaders.
Joan’s moral impact, both in arousing the will of the French soldiers -- of all social ranks -- to fight, and in igniting the first blaze of patriotic national feeling in the French people, was the one quality of hers that did the most to change history. In a few days at Orléans, she inverted what had been the established moral order on the battlefields of the Hundred Years’ War. She made an army of habitual losers believe in themselves as winners. For the French army with Joan, the belief in victory and the fact of victory became mutually reinforcing. Renewed belief in victory brought with it a new will to fight and the will to fight brought the first victories -- and those victories stoked ever hotter will to fight. Only the folly of Charles in freezing his victorious army in place while he carried on fruitless negotiations, only his shortsightedness in disbanding his army at the height of its power, broke the cycle of belief and victory that Joan had started.
Joan’s military role as an inspirational creator of the will to fight is obvious and indisputable. Establishing to what degree she was more than just a "super cheerleader" --to what degree she was a true commander who made decisions and gave orders concerning the strategic and tactical conduct of the war -- is much more problematic. What complicates this question is that the French army of Joan’s day had nothing that modem military professionals would call a chain of command. Whether it was a case of strategic decisions made at the royal court, or of tactical decisions made in a tent in the field, decisions seem to have been made in an extremely loose committee fashion with the most forceful speaker present able to make his or her view carry the others along.34 These ad hoc "committees," to use a modern term, could consist of the Dauphin-King and a mix of more or less coequal court nobles, warrior nobles, captains of independent bands -- and a new, unprecedented, explosive factor in the person of Joan. As before, the testimony given in Joan’s retrial must be the foundation of any effort to grasp the truth of the situation.
In the retrial, Simon Charles, who served as President of the Chamber of Accounts to Dauphin and King Charles VII, and who accompanied the army in the field, testified that "Joan was very simple in all her actions, except in the conduct of war, in which she was altogether an expert."35 A knight named Thibault d’Armagnac stated
Except in matters of war, she was simple and innocent. But in the leading and drawing up of armies and in the conduct of war, in disposing an army for battle and haranguing the soldiers, she behaved like the most experienced captain in all the world, like one with a whole lifetime of experience. 36
In everything that she did, apart from the conduct of the war, Joan was young and simple; but in the conduct of war she was most skillful, both in carrying a lance herself, in drawing up the army in battle order, and in placing the artillery. And everyone was astonished that she acted with such prudence and clear-sightedness in military matters, as cleverly as some great captain with twenty or thirty years experience; and especially in the placing of artillery, for in that she acquitted herself magnificently.37
These general comments find backing in specific instances of Joan’s words and deeds. During the series of battles that Joan participated in to break the English siege of Orléans, it was Dunois who held the ultimate authority of command. Nonetheless, Joan made herself into a loud and forceful voice in the conduct of operations. When she arrived outside the city with the relief army behind her on April 28, 1429, Dunois rode out from the city, passed through the gap in the still incomplete English encirclement, and met Joan face to face. Dunois testified that Joan became livid when she realized that, following Dunois’ orders, she and the relief ar