make the attempt; it is too desperate. Let me order the forces back."

Joan's heart was overflowing with the joys and enthusiasms of war, and it
made her impatient to hear such talk. She cried out:

"Bastard, Bastard, will ye play always with these English? Now verily I
tell you we will not budge until this place is ours. We will carry it by
storm. Sound the charge!"

"Ah, my General--"

"Waste no more time, man--let the bugles sound the assault!" and we saw
that strange deep light in her eye which we named the battle-light, and
learned to know so well in later fields.

The martial notes pealed out, the troops answered with a yell, and down
they came against that formidable work, whose outlines were lost in its
own cannon-smoke, and whose sides were spouting flame and thunder.

We suffered repulse after repulse, but Joan was here and there and
everywhere encouraging the men, and she kept them to their work. During
three hours the tide ebbed and flowed, flowed and ebbed; but at last La
Hire, who was now come, made a final and resistless charge, and the
bastille St. Loup was ours. We gutted it, taking all its stores and
artillery, and then destroyed it.

When all our host was shouting itself hoarse with rejoicings, and there
went up a cry for the General, for they wanted to praise her and glorify
her and do her homage for her victory, we had trouble to find her; and
when we did find her, she was off by herself, sitting among a ruck of
corpses, with her face in her hands, crying--for she was a young girl,
you know, and her hero heart was a young girl's heart too, with the pity
and the tenderness that are natural to it. She was thinking of the
mothers of those dead friends and enemies.

Among the prisoners were a number of priests, and Joan took these under
her protection and saved their lives. It was urged that they were most
probably combatants in disguise, but she said:

"As to that, how can any tell? They wear the livery of God, and if even
one of these wears it rightfully, surely it were better that all the
guilty should escape than that we have upon our hands the blood of that
innocent man. I will lodge them where I lodge, and feed them, and sent
them away in safety."

We marched back to the city with our crop of cannon and prisoners on view
and our banners displayed. Here was the first substantial bit of war-work
the imprisoned people had seen in the seven months that the siege had
endured, the first chanc