Brown winter leaves strewed the path.  The grass was bleached and dead.  At our approach an old sheep-dog rattled his chain and looked out of his kennel.  He was shaggy and matted with years.  His bark was so weak that it broke in the middle.  He was a Rip Van Winkle of a sheep-dog—­the kind of dog you would picture in a fairy-tale.  One couldn’t help feeling that he had accompanied the shepherd girl and had kept the flock from straying while she spoke with her visions.  All those centuries ago he had seen her ride away—­ride away to save France—­and she had not come back.  All through the centuries he had waited; at every footstep on the path he had come hopefully out from his kennel, wagging his tail and barking ever more weakly.  He would not believe that she was dead.  And it was difficult to believe it in that ancient quiet.  If ever France needed her, it was now.

Across my memory flashed the words of a dreamer, prophetic in the light of recent events, “Daughter of Domremy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead.  Call her, King of France, but she will not hear thee.  Cite her by the apparitors to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will not be found.  When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up her all for her country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been deaf five centuries.”

Quite illogically it seemed to me that January evening that this American soldier was the symbol of the power that had come in her stead.

The barking of the dog had awakened a bowed old Mother Hubbard lady.  She opened the door of her diminutive castle and peered across the threshold, jingling her keys.

Would we come in?  Ah, Monsieur from America was there!  He was always there when he was not training, playing with the children and rolling cigarettes.  And Monsieur, the English officer, perhaps he did not know that she was descended from Joan’s family.  Oh, yes, there was no mistake about it; that was why she had been made custodian.  She must light the lamp.  There!  That was better.  There was not much to see, but if we would follow....

We stepped down into a flagged room like a cellar—­cold, ascetic and bare.  There was a big open fire-place, with a chimney hooded by massive masonry and blackened by the fires of immemorial winters.  This was where Joan’s parents had lived.  She had probably been born here.  The picture that formed in my mind was not of Joan, but that other woman unknown to history—­her mother, who after Joan had left the village and rumours of her battles and banquets drifted back, must have sat there staring into the blazing logs, her peasant’s hands folded in her lap, brooding, wondering, hoping, fearing—­fearing as the mothers of soldiers have throughout the ages.

And this was Joan’s brother’s room—­a cheerless place of hewn stone.  What kind of a man could he have been?  What were his reflections as he went about his farm-work and thought of his sister at the head of armies?  Was he merely a lout or something worse—­the prototype of our Conscientious Objector:  a coward who disguised his cowardice with moral scruples?