 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. They waited.
Regardless of what form her tactical reasoning took on the final day at Orléans, Joan "had done it." Orléans was saved. The myth of English invincibility was shattered. The fortunes of the Hundred Years’ War would tip back and forth for years to come, but the decisive and irrevocable turning point was Joan’s week of glory at Orléans.
The French high command was almost as discomfited by Joan’s sudden and astounding reversal of the course of the war as the English. In the days immediately following Joan’s unexpected success, the Dauphin Charles dithered at the royal castle at Loches, holding interminable discussions with his civilian advisors about what to do next -- and frittering away precious time as he did so. Dunois arrived at Loches with Joan to urge immediate and aggressive action. Dunois testified about what happened. Joan knocked on the door of the Dauphin’s council chamber, then bust through the door, got on her knees before the Dauphin, and exhorted him to march on Rheims with her to receive his crown. When one of the civilian advisors asked her about the source of her opinion, she went into a rapture describing how voices from God were urging her on. Dunois went on to say that the military leadership of France favored re-conquering Normandy before making the extremely risky thrust deep into English-held territory to get to Rheims. Joan countered saying that it was essential to crown Charles as quickly as possible, because, once he was thus symbolically legitimized as the true king of France, "the power of his enemies would decline continually until finally they would be powerless.. " In taking this position, Joan displayed an intuitive but sure grasp of how politics, public symbolism, and military action had to be integrated in formulating grand strategy. Dunois affirmed in his testimony that the leadership embraced Joan’s opinion.52 An illiterate seventeen-year-old peasant girl was now dominating the national policy decisions of France.53
Joan and the army set off for their next campaign. T