reduce to ashes

Our orders were thus: Under cover of a hot fire from the ships, we were to land, that we might burn and reduce to ashes the warehouses and stores closest to the water all along the wharves of the town, depriving the shirtmen of their wonted lairs, their posts for the commission of continued defiance.

To recover from the embarrassment of the failed missile test, Mr. Kim unleashed a bellicose warning to South Korea in late April, threatening that a “special operations action” team would “reduce to ashes the rat-like” leadership of President Lee Myung-bak.

Erect a furnace in some convenient locality, to serve the same purpose as that known as the “Queen’s tobacco-pipe” at the London Docks does or did—i.e., to reduce to ashes all infected or condemned articles.

His companion, perceiving it, asked what was the reason, to which he answered: “The time is at hand when a devouring fire shall reduce to ashes all the buildings which you here behold, both public and private.”

One of them, Johann Joseph Go�res, author of a voluminous work entitled "Christian Mysticism," dared to write in April, 1814: "Destroy, reduce to ashes, this Rheims basilica, where Chlodoric was consecrated, and where was born that empire of the Franks, those turncoat brothers of the noble Germans; burn the Cathedral."