JOAN OF ARC, a village girl from the Vosges, was born about I412 ;

burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431 ; rehabilitated after

a fashion in I456; designated Venerable in I9O4; declared Blessed

in 19o8; and finally canonized in 192o. She is the most notable

Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish

among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a

professed and most pious Catholic, and the projector of a Crusade

against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant

martyrs. She was also one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and

the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare as

distinguished from the sporting ransom-gambling chivalry of her

time. She was the pioneer of rational dressing for women, and, like

Queen Christina of Sweden two centuries later, to say nothing of

Catalina de Erauso and innumerable obscure heroines who have

disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers and sailors, she

refused to accept the specific woman s lot, and dressed and fought

and lived as men did.

As she contrived to assert herself in all these ways with such force

that she was famous throughout western Europe before she was out

of her teens (indeed she never got out of them), it is hardly surprising

that she was judicially burnt, ostensibly for a number of capital

crimes which we no longer punish as such, but essentially for what

we call unwomanly and insufferable presumption. At eighteen

Joan s pretensions were beyond those of the proudest Pope or the

haughtiest emperor. She claimed to be the ambassador and pleni-

potentiary of God, and to be, in effect, a member of the Church

Triumphant whilst still in the flesh on earth. She patronized her

own king, and summoned the English king to repentance and obedi-

ence to her commands. She lectured, talked down, and overruled

statesmen and prelates. She pooh-poohed the plans of generals,

leading their troops to victory on plans of her own. She had an

unbounded and quite unconcealed contempt for official opinion,

judgment, and authority, and for War Office tactics and strategy.

Had she been a sage and monarch in whom the most venerable

hierarchy and the most illustrious dynasty converged, her preten-

sions and proceedings would have been as trying to the official

mind as the pretensions of Caesar were to Cassius. As her actual

condition was pure upstart, there were only two opinions about her.

One was that she was miraculous: the other that she was unbearable.