For we have been like men beneath a spell--a spell too
strong for us to break. You come to snap the spell, to break the
yoke, and therefore I bid you great welcome on the part of myself
and the citizens and soldiers of Orleans. Without your counsels to
His Majesty, and the aid you have persuaded him to send, the city
must assuredly have fallen ere this. Only the knowledge that help
was surely coming has kept us from surrender."
"I would the help had come sooner, my General," spoke the Maid;
"but soon or late it is one with my Lord, who will give us the
promised victory."
From that moment friendship, warm and true, was established betwixt
the bronzed warrior and the gentle Maid, who took up, as by natural
right, her position of equal--indeed, of superior--in command, not
with any haughty assumption, not with any arrogant words or looks,
but sweetly and simply, as though there were no question but that
the place was hers; that to her belonged the ordering of the
forces, the overlooking of all. Again and again, even we, who had
come to believe so truly in her divine commission, were astonished
at the insight she showed, the sagacity of her counsels, the
wonderful authority she was able to exert over the soldiers brought
together, a rude, untrained, insubordinate mass of men, collected
from all ranks and classes of the people, some being little better
than bands of marauders, living on prey and plunder, since of
regular fighting there had been little of late; others, mercenaries
hired by the nobles to swell their own retinues; many raw recruits,
fired by ardour at the thought of the promised deliverance; a few
regular trained bands, with their own officers in command, but
forming altogether a heterogeneous company, by no means easy to
drill into order, and swelled by another contingent at Blois, of
very much the same material.
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