societies, disposed to treat any military impulse among their sons as
mere vagabondism and love of adventure and idleness.

Nothing, so far as anyone knows, came near the most unlikely volunteer
of all, to lead her thoughts to that art of war of which she knew
nothing, and of which her little experience could only have shown her
the horrors and miseries, the sufferings of wounded fugitives and the
ruin of sacked houses. Of all people in the world, the little daughter
of a peasant was the last who could have been expected to respond to the
appeal of the wretched country. She had three brothers who might have
served the King, and there was no doubt many a stout clodhopper
about, of that kind which in every country is the fittest material for
fighting, and "food for powder." But to none of these did the call come.
Every detail goes to increase the profound impression of peacefulness
which fills the atmosphere--the slow river floating by, the roofs
clustered together, the church bells tinkling their continual summons,
the girl with her work at the cottage door in the shadow of the apple
trees. To pack the little knapsack of a brother or a lover, and to
convoy him weeping a little way on his road to the army, coming back to
the silent church to pray there, with the soft natural tears which the
uses of common life must soon dry--that is all that imagination could
have demanded of Jeanne. She was even too young for any interposition
of the lover, too undeveloped, the French historians tell us with their
astonishing frankness, to the end of her short life, to have been moved
by any such thought. She might have poured forth a song, a prayer, a
rude but sweet lament for her country, out of the still bosom of that
rustic existence. Such things have been, the trouble of the age forcing
an utterance from the very depths of its inarticulate life. But it was
not for this that Jeanne d'Arc was born.