 -- only now, she was just one independent captain among many, commanding a little army of mostly non-French mercenaries. Her influence on grand strategy had sunk to nil, but her tactical autonomy increased.68 She continued to manifest the skills of a true military commander. For example, just before she laid siege to the town of La Cherité that November, she dictated a letter to the citizens of the town of Riom that contained thoroughly practical requests for various kinds of supplies. (The authentic original letter is still held in an archive in France.)69 But the old magic was gone for Joan. Her mercenary band could not give her the same loving loyalty that her great army, drawn from the best of all France, once had. Ahead of Joan lay the ever-darkening road to capture, torment, and martyrdom.
The cumulative testimony of her comrades-in-arms shows that Joan was no mere inspirational figurehead. She was repeatedly present when key decisions were being made in councils of war and she repeatedly forced those decisions to reflect her expressed will. To what extent her strategic and tactical opinions were the product of her own rational military calculations or were the product of her belief in otherworldly inspiration can never be known. Still... One may attempt to draw the organizational chart of the French high command however one chooses but the fact is that Joan was the ultimate driving power behind every aggressive move the French army made.
Given that so much of our understanding of Joan is based on the testimony given at her retrial, it is necessary to address the question of just how truthful the testimony was. Charles VII had a vested interest in the Church clearing the name of the girl to whom, in the prevailing view, he owed his crown. Thus, there would have been pressure on those testifying at Joan’s retrial to remember her in a favorable light. However, it probably was beyond the means of a king to forcibly yet covertly orchestrate the testimony of 115 witnesses who represented all social classes and who were questioned over a period of several years in widely separated regions of France. There is just enough variation in overlapping pieces of testimony to show that while the people testifying saw the same events, they were not reciting some contrived scenario that had been forced on them.
D’Alençon and Dunois were the two most important witnesses so far as establishing Joan’s role as a military leader was concerned. Significantly, d’Alençon detested Charles and was in fact involved in a failed plot against him some years after Joan died. D’Alençon would be arrested for treason less than a month after he gave his testimony about Joan. (Sadly, d’Alençon and Dunois would be on opposite sides of this failed coup attempt -- it would be Dunois who would arrest d’Alençon on Charles’ orders.)70 D’Alençon’s hatred for Charles meant that he was hardly in a mood to cooperate with Charles by saying good things about Joan just to enhance Charles’ legitimacy as king. D’Alençon must have been motivated to praise Joan’s skills as a military leader by a sincere sense of admiration for his long-dead friend.
Finally, it is a standard characteristic of the warrior nobility of any culture to possess a large measure of egotism. Dunois, d’Alençon, and all the rest would not have been exceptions to this rule. Why would men such as that have made up stories that exaggerated the role of a seventeen-year-old peasant girl telling them what to do? The very improbability of them saying what they did leads one to believe that they were saying things that were remarkable but true.
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Making herself the guiding torch of inspiration for the army and the people and, in her own way, commanding the army in war -- this is what Joan did. But how did she do it? What was it about her that enabled her to do what she did?
First of all, Joan had to possess an innate genius that enabled her, an illiterate teenage farm girl, to quickly learn what she had to learn to deal as an equal with royalty, bookish clerics, and trained soldiers of high rank. Ju