ered her a saint, "99 It is no great stretch to suggest that: When young men encounter a beautiful woman who has won their respect to an extraordinary degree, their usual sexual lust may become sublimated into a devotion and loyalty that is passionate but chaste. Joan had the power to make thousands of armed men love her, not as an object of romantic desire but as the living focus of their hunger to serve a higher cause. Whenever Joan rose in her stirrups to shout "Let all who love me -- follow me!"100 over all the din, she was exploiting a special relationship between leader and led that is unique in all history. Ultimately, it was this astonishing ability of Joan’s to make an army of soldiers chastely love her-- to the point that they would willingly face death in battle for her -- that empowered her to bodily shove history into a new path.
Finally, it must be admitted, there were more prosaic reasons for Joan winning her ascendancy over people and events. It was a simple matter of the cliché about being in the right place at the right time coming true. Joan was lucky in that the conditions of her time and place gave her the opening to do what she did.
After years of one humiliating defeat after another, both the military and civil leadership of France were demoralized and discredited. When the Dauphin Charles granted Joan’s urgent request to be equipped for war and placed at the head of his army, his decision must have been based in large part on the knowledge that every orthodox, every rational, option had been tried and had failed. Only a regime in the final straits of desperation would pay any heed to an illiterate farm girl who claimed that voices from God were instructing her to take charge of her country’s army and lead it to victory.
Many French people of the time believed that the legendary Merlin had prophesied that a maiden from Lorraine would one day save France in its most desperate hour. This belief, sincerely held by the masses of people Joan was coming to help, strengthened her cause.101
Joan was lucky in that the nature of armies and war in her time helped to magnify the effect of her style of inspirational leadership. The army she led contained only a few thousand men, not hundreds of thousands or millions as became the rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her soldiers went into battle standing shoulder to shoulder in packed masses, not spread out to mitigate the effects of modern machine guns and high explosive. Her battles were fought out on battlefields that could be covered by a few football fields -- as opposed to modem battles being fought across dozens of miles of Normandy beaches or hundreds of miles of Iraqi desert. All this meant that Joan’s heroic inspirational exertions -- her charging ahead brandishing her huge banner, her shouting encouragement -- were seen and heard by the majority of her men at the exact instant that she was charging and shouting. The effect of her inspirational conduct was both palpable and instantaneous for her men. A modern-day general can only make inspirational speeches to his entire army via an assortment of electronic media -- and most of his soldiers will probably only hear recorded versions of the speech after the battle is over. Any modem-day general who leaves his headquarters to put on a display of physical courage will be seen by only a tiny and insignificant percentage of his men. The story of his brave display will only seep slowly through the rest of his army. Joan was fortunate that the nature of armies and the nature of battle in her day ensured that her style of leadership would have the greatest possible impact.
Just as the conditions of her time magnified Joan’s acts and words of inspiration, so too did existing conditions help her overcome her lack of formal military training. Armies of her day were vastly simpler than what they have become today. The war machine of the early fifteenth century contained far fewer and far simpler moving parts than the war machine of any subsequent century. Moving and placing units of a few hundred foot-m