s 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-mobile 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 i