Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield Page A

will give the order.
    I will wipe Thebes from the earth.
    â€œSpare those citizens,” I direct, “who have taken our cause. Save the house of the poet Pindar and those of his heirs, and all shrines and altars of the gods. Take no action until I have sacrificed to Heracles and received token of his assent.”
    Thebes is forty thousand. The roundup and slaughter take all night. The Thebans fight in the squares and the alleys. When companies become too decimated to resist as units, they break apart, each man seeking to save his own. Families bolt themselves within doors. When these are broken in, the citizens punch through the party walls with axes and make their way house to house, fleeing the Phocians and Plataeans and Orchomenians (whose cities Thebes has razed in the past) who hunt them along lanes gone to fire. From atop the walls, Hephaestion, Telamon, and I can see the dead ends where scores are trapped and butchered.
    More perish by fire than sword. Within the houses, paint catches first. Roof timbers, desiccated over decades, go up like tinder. Mud bricks shatter from the heat, sending walls crashing. Plumes shoot from flues; firestorms ignite. The inferno leaps across rooftops from quarter to quarter, while the hive of tenements that is the central city funnels the blaze like a blacksmith’s bellows, incinerating all in its path.
    Hephaestion cannot endure the holocaust. He rides out alone onto the plain. You can see the conflagration from sixty miles and smell it from twenty. At intervals throughout the night, chiefs of the pillagers come before me. Shall we spare the tomb of Antigone? The Thebiad? The Cadmea?
    Mid-second watch, I am shown the body of Coroneus, the gentle knight of Chaeronea, whose lion’s crest I wear affixed to my breastplate. He has fallen leading the attack upon our garrison, one-armed, taking two of our own.
    Spare nothing, I tell them.
    Destroy everything.
    With the dawn, Hephaestion, Telamon, and I enter the city proper. Six thousand have been slain, thirty thousand will be sold as slaves. On the Street of the Saddlers, bodies are piled as high as a man’s waist. Our horses tread upon charred flesh and step over severed limbs. Women and children have been herded into the squares, awaiting the slavers’ auction. Their captors have scrawled their names on them in their own blood, handier than paint, so the slave masters will know whom to pay. We pass corpses, burst by the inferno. Even Telamon is appalled. “This must have been,” he says, “what Troy looked like.”
    I do not believe it. “This is worse.”
    Antipater rides up. “Well, that’s that.” He claps my shoulder like a father. “Now all Greece will fear you.”
    We have not spoken all night, Hephaestion and I, beyond commands passed through him and Telamon to the colonels manning the cordon. I have directed the slave dealers to separate no mother from her children, but to hold all families intact for sale. Now with dawn, the innocents have been herded to the Five Ways outside the Proetis Gate. The slavers are collecting the best-looking women to sell as concubines. They tear the dames’ infants from their grasp, while other matrons, in compassion, take the babes among their own. “Shall I see your orders enforced?” Telamon asks.
    I meet his eyes. Well-intentioned gesture seems absurd at this point. The slave masters, compelled to keep dam and pups together, will only unload the young ones out of sight down the road, or dump them dead in a ditch. At least with proxy mothers, the infants will survive.
    â€œLet it pass,” I say.
    Day breaks. I peer northwest toward Chaeronea. Already packs of looters are streaming in from Phocis and Locris; they flood through the gates, mute with avarice, to pick the bones of royal Thebes. Shall I stop them? What for?
    Later Hephaestion and I scrub up in the trickle of the summer Ismenus. The grime of massacre will not