obile pikemen and archers and a few hundred horse-mounted knights, plus a few very simple cannons -- all of them supplied from horse-drawn wagons -- is one thing. Moving and placing units of tens of thousands of soldiers equipped with dozens of different types of complex rifles, machine guns, cannons, tanks, personnel carriers, helicopters, mines, antiaircraft missiles, radar sets, and so forth -- all of it sustained by computer-based logistical systems of staggering size and complexity -- is quite another matter. In Joan’s day, a brilliant military amateur did not have an impossible amount of ground to cover in order to catch up with her professional comrades-in-arms. Today, a brilliant military amateur is merely someone who has the potential to do well as he or she progresses through the intense and protracted technical training required to turn him or her into a military professional. So far as mastering even the rudiments of the art of war is concerned, Joan could only have done what she did in the medieval period in which she lived.
Joan was also lucky in the men who became her intimate comrades in leading the army. Her coterie of co-commanders -- d’Alençon, Dunois, La Hire, de Xaintrailles -- represented a younger generation of French military leaders who realized that they had to do something different to overturn years of French battlefield defeat and humiliation. They were men who had already won some minor successes before Joan arrived.102 They were men who were willing to give her a chance whereas the previous generation of French military leaders, whose arrogance and incompetence had led to ruin at English hands, might well have scorned her. Joan’s moral inspiration, force of will, and peasant outsider’s pragmatic drive to do what worked were the catalyst these men needed to make their efforts attain their fullest effect.
It was in her first battles around the besieged French city of Orléans that Joan worked her first seeming miracles of military leadership. These miracles seem a bit less miraculous in that the English inadvertently helped Joan at Orléans by the faulty way in which they deployed their forces. The English grouped their men at Orléans in small packets in forts -- the Augustins, the Tourelles, and others -- that were spread around the city out of supporting distance of each other. This left the English vulnerable to a French counteroffensive. The English took up such a deployment simply because they did not have enough men to set up a continuous line of troops completely encircling the city. They were willing to employ this less than ideal method because of their confidence in their own invincibility and their confidence that the French lacked the will to come out of the walls of Orléans to fight them.103 The French high command and soldiers at Orléans could have done what Joan did at any time before she arrived but, as the English knew, they lacked the will to do so. Joan had to give the French the will to fight before they did make the attacks that they always could have made.
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Genius, force of will, the ability to make thousands of soldiers follow her out of love, fortuitous circumstances -- all these things enabled Joan to do what she did. And yet. .. Every analysis of Joan must end with the admission that there is something about her that will be forever beyond our grasp. The facts of what she did seem beyond dispute. The how of what she did can never quite be adequately explained in purely rational terms. It is insurmountably true that there are some things about her that we can contemplate in awe, but that we cannot fully comprehend. She is the greatest "go figure" case in all of history. As Katherine Anne Porter wrote in her foreword to Régine Pernoud’s The Retrial of loan of Arc, "She is unique, and a mystery, and as you read about her and think about her life, you are led up to a threshold beyond which she eludes you, you cannot cross it"104 Whether Joan’s leadership role was that of an inspirational mascot or a true battle commander or something in between, whether she was propel