7 Quotes by Peter Darcy

The curmudgeonly Mark Twain was enamored of Joan. So great was his esteem for her life and accomplishments that he once said that it took six thousand years to produce a Joan of Arc, and the world would need another 50,000 before anyone of her stature would ever appear again. That is high praise from a man who did not dole out compliments lightly.

In her first major clash with the English before the walls of Orléans, Joan was injured by an arrow that penetrated the seams of her armor and drove through her chest so far that the point protruded out of her back. When the battlefield medics were debating how to best help her, she simply pulled the arrow out with her own hand. (Now there’s a leadership challenge!)

Symbols tell others who the symbol-bearers are in subtle or overt ways. I once sat in an aisle seat on an airplane next to a cello strapped into the middle seat. Its owner sat by the window, and I didn’t need to ask him what he did for a living. Some symbols literally shout identity.

It is hard to overestimate the fervor with which the men of her day greeted the Maid and embraced her mission. When Joan set out to lift the siege of Orléans, the dauphin could barely muster 2,000 straggling recruits to accompany her. When she rode into the city of Reims for the king’s coronation less than three months later, more than 11,000 soldiers rode with her.

Joan of Arc’s feminine magnetism had an overwhelming motivating power over the demoralized men – and nation – of her day. It is unlikely that even a handsome young man in the vigor of his youth could have had the same effect. Joan’s feminine beauty and virtue simply won over the hearts of her countrymen.

A leader’s movement is dynamic, purposeful, and ordered. The very perception of movement often gives vitality to a leader’s mission and engenders dynamism in one’s co-workers. Joan of Arc seemed to have an intuitive grasp of this when she traversed the entire length of Northern France on horseback several times in a few months. This was six hundred years before modern transportation made that an easy feat. Prior to that, Joan had never left the confines of her local community.

When asked by a skeptical bishop if St. Michael the Archangel spoke English when he appeared to her, Joan retorted: “Do you think the angels speak the language of our enemies?!” Spirited rhetoric like that always captures hearts and imaginations!