The Captains of the Roman Republic Author:Henry William Herbert Subtitle: As Compared With the Great Modern Strategists; Their Campaigns, Character, and Conduct From the Punic Wars to the Death of Caesar General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1854 Original Publisher: C. Scribner Subjects: Rome Military art and science Military biography Notes: This is a black and white OCR... more » reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THB CONFLAGRATION. 125 the legiouaries ; above forty thousand men were roasted alive, in their blazing tenements, trampled under foot by one another iu the crowded gateways, slaughtered by the unsparing lluumn broadsword. It must have been a very Gehenna upon earth. Thousands of Arab horses, thousands of camels, dromedaries, hundreds perhaps of elephants, bursting their picket ropes, trampling all under foot in mad stamperloe, blazing and shrieking into the desert darkness, so many living comets. Armed men and tender women, helpless babes -- for as the Arabs now, the Numidians then had their city in their camp -- shrieking in hopeless anguish among the relentless flames. The cheers without of the savage legionaries, and the thundering charge of Massinissa's fiery horse on the few wretched fugitives. Meantime, from the other camp, aroused by the roar of the flames, and the shrieks of their perishing allies, out poured the Carthaginians; unarmed, at first, to wonder, to assist, to tremble -- then to rush hastily to arms, to endeavor to form, to be charged home in the darkness, cut down, surrounded, driven back into their quarters, and to find them, too, blazing in a white heat. Of them, thirty thousand men perished. Of the Numidians, sixty thousand strong, all were destroyed, or so utterly dispersed that they never rallied again to arms, Syphax alone, and a handful of ca...« less