Evening Post. SATURDAY, JULY 16, 1921. A SAINTLY MEMORY

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 14, 16 July 1921, Page 4

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JULY 16, 1921. A SAINTLY MEMORY

On the sth May the French celebrated with great enthusiasm the centenary of the death of Napoleon. Three days later they were honouring the memory of one who died nearly four centuries before Napoleon, and is.perhaps the only person worthy to dispute, his right to be regarded as the greatest miracle in profane history. It was on the Bth May, 1429, that, at the age of eighteen, Joan of Arc fought what Creasy included among his " Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World," raised the siege of Orleans, and so rallied a divided and demoralised nation that it did not rest till it threw off the English yoke. For centuries the city which she thus delivered had celebrated the anniversary, and in view presumably of her canonisation last year special arrangements were made by the French Government for its celebration this year throughout the country as a national event. Very unfortunately these arrangements excited a considerable amount of opposition, which was based partly on political and religious grounds, and partly on the score of the expense involved. The emphasis laid on the military aspect of the occasion may perhaps have been a contributing cause, but it would be unjust to blame the Government merely because the Communists found it convenient to organise Ked Flag parades in opposition. Whatever the causes for these deplorable disturbances may have been, the contrast between the dishonour thus done to a saintly memory and the unity which appears to have prevailed three days before at the demonstrations in honour of a man who was hardly less eminent as a despot and a criminal than he was in many higher capacities must be added to the ironies of history.

It may be reasonably hoped that the further honour which had been arranged for the Maid of Orleans was duly paid on Thursday without any jarring note. Reims is hardly leas intimately associated with Joan of Arc than Orleans, and the fact was commemorated by the erection or a statue in front of the main door of the city's great cathedral. What the cathedral itself suffered from German Kultur during the Great War.is familiar to everybody, but the Maid's statue was removed in the nick of time when the bombardment was at its worst. Her sword had been hit by a splinter from a German shell, but no further damage had been done when a British motor lorry took the statue out of harm's way. A place of safety was found for it in the Louvre, but the Paris correspondent of the Morning Post reported some two months ago that the statue was to be restored to its pedestal in front of Reims Cathedral in time for the French national festival on 'the 14th. July- On that day the formal restoration ceremony was to be performed by, a

number of French men of letters and journalists who had served in the war.

An argument that might with some plausibility be urged against giving Joan of Arci priority over Napoleon among the miracles of profane history is that what Green describes as " the one pure figure which rises out of the greed, the selfishness, the scepticism of the time " rises above tile level of ordinary humanity to such a height that the term " profane " seems hardly applicable to it. Not merely in the abnormal degree to which such normal virtues as courage and faith and self-sacrifice were developed in her, but in her special powers of communication with the unseen, of prophecy, of apprehension without the ordinary processes of learning, we seem to be face to face with something more than human. When this country girl of seventeen came forward without training or apparent preparation of any kind, but with an alleged commission from her "Voices," to advise the Dauphin, to crown him King, and to turn the English out of France, it was natural to test her sanity, her character, and her credentials very severely. A tribunal of ecclesiastics was first appointed to conduct the examination, and thuh, we are told, she was " sent for the same purpose to Poitiers, a great, law-school, that the doctors of both faculties might solemnly docide whether Joan's mission was from heaven or from the devil; for none believed it to be merely human." The English soldiers took much the same view. It was to them, as has been well observed, a matter of indifference whether it was by a limb of Satan or by an angel that they were confronted, but they were quite certain that she was. one or the 1 other.

The Poitiers Commission rejected the Satanic theory, and found nothing in the Maid but " goodness, humility, frank maidenhood, piety, honesty, and simplicity." She was accordingly passed on- to the Dauphin, and by driving the English from Orleans within a week, and enabling Charles to be shortly afterwards crowned at Beims, she showed that she had the virtues of a soldier as well as of a saint. Anything more'unlike the conventional saint it would be difficult to ii*igine. Mr. Andrew Lang thus describes some of her qualities:

We have noted her gay disdain of the learned Doctors; her otherwise undeviating distinction of manners; her frankness ; her skill in horsemanship. Her ways were those of a. clean, honest, public schoolboy. While in so .much she represents the. swift, glad courage of France, in her manner, as when she slapped Thibault on the shonldei and replied to Sequin, she was like an English boy, and her dress made that aspect of her nature more conspicuous. In her was as much of chivalry as of sanctity. Gay and gaily clad, whether in. armour or hi rich colours and gold embroidered doublets, now riding like a young knight, now leading in the deadly breach, Jeanne was not the beguine, or pious prude, of her latest French biographer!

Such was the girl who in a public career which, if we exclude the period of her captivity, only exceeded a year by a few weeks, saved her country by her courage and her genius, and was then burnt as a witch because she was too good and too wonderful even for those she had saved to understand. Her work was completed at the age of nineteen—an age at which even Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon were unknown quantities. Those who deny her inspiration surely only increase the miracle.