Sparrow by Michael Morpurgo

command. Joan and her army went out to find them, but in such thickly wooded country their task was not so easy. The English were marching through the forest near Patay in search of the French. In spite of their scouts each army was blind to the proximity of the other. “Make sure,” said Joan to d’Alençon, as they rode through the trees in themorning mist, “that you all have good spurs when the Godoms see us.”
    “You think, then, we’re going to turn and run when we meet them?” the Duc d’Alençon replied, more than a little hurt at the suggestion.
    “Of course not, my fair duke,” said Joan, smiling. “I tell you, it will be the English who will turn their backs. By this very afternoon they will be defeated and you will need spurs to pursue them.”
    At about noon, the French scouts accidentally put up a stag who bounded out of cover. The English saw it and gave chase, with great hue and cry, and so betrayed their position. The French were up on them and amongst them before they knew it. In the vicious mêlée of the battle, the glades of Patay rang with the screams of the dying, the hideous neighing of terrified horses, the clash of steel on steel. Within an hour or so it was all over. Fourthousand slaughtered English lay bleeding in the mud, and the rest were prisoners, including the great Talbot himself. Here was sweet revenge for the defeat at Agincourt all those years before.
    But in the din and confusion of battle Joan had been lost and was nowhere to be found. They scoured the forest calling for her. It was Louis who came across her first. At first he thought she had been wounded, for she was lying up against a tree trunk, and there was blood on her face and on her hands too. When he came closer though, he saw she was cradling the head of an English soldier in her lap. “He is dead, Louis,” she whispered as he crouched down beside her. “He died, and without confessing his sins too.” She looked down into the soldier’s face. “There’s a boy in my village who looks just like him. Can all this be necessary, Louis? Can God really have meant this?” And when she wept,she wept like a child. That was how the Duc d’Alençon and La Hire found her some time later, her head on her page’s shoulder, and wracked with sobbing.
    She looked up at them and brushed away her tears. “I did not want this, and I will have no more of it. I shall go now to Reims and see the Dauphin crowned. Perhaps now the English will have learnt. Perhaps now they will go home and leave us in peace. Then I can go back home to my mother and father, back to my village where I belong.” They helped her to her feet. “See there is no looting, that all the Englishmen are buried with honour, and the wounded cared for,” she said. “Dead or living, French or English, we are all God’s people.”
    There were those marshals, La Hire amongst them, who argued that with the English so weakened, so demoralised, they should at once attack Parisand then drive the English out of Normandy once and for all. But Joan would not hear of it. “We go to Reims,” she said. “Let us have our Dauphin crowned the rightful King of France, as my voices said he must be. Paris can wait.”
    It was one thing to want the Dauphin to be crowned, but quite another to achieve it. He was grateful to Joan for her victories on his behalf, and heaped upon her great favours and honours. At court she wanted for nothing. He made a solemn declaration that no one living in her village of Domrémy would ever again have to pay taxes, but he would not yet go to Reims. He liked his creature comforts. He was happy enough where he was. Some who had his ear – his scheming adviser, La Trémoille, for one – thought it too risky a venture and told him so. To get to Reims an army would still have to pass through enemy country. “Whydon’t you rest a while, Joan?” the Dauphin told her. “You’ve done so much.”
    In the privacy of her rooms, Joan fumed with