Patrick Romayne Cleburne,—thirty-six years old, but with greying hair above his steel-grey eyes, Irishman of the county of Cork, one time soldier in the English army, then lawyer in the city of Helena and the State of Arkansas, then private in the Confederate army, then captain, then colonel, then brigadier, and now major-general,—Patrick Cleburne commanded a division that, also, had its personality. The division’s heart and his heart beat in unison. “He was not only a commander, but a comrade fighting with his men.” Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Irish regiment adored Cleburne, and Cleburne returned their love. “To my noble division,” he wrote to a lady, “and not to myself, belong the praises for the deeds of gallantry you mention.” Cleburne’s division had its own flags, and on each was worked a device of “crossed cannon inverted,” and the name of the battle-fields over which it had been carried. “Prior to the battle of Shiloh,” says General Hardee, “a blue battle-flag had been adopted by me for this division, and when the Confederate battle-flag became the national colours, Cleburne’s division, at its urgent request, was allowed to retain its own bullet-ridden battle-flags.... Friends and foes soon learned to watch the course of the blue flag that marked where Cleburne was in the battle. Where this division defended, no odds broke its lines where it attacked, no numbers resisted its onslaught—save only once—and there is the grave of Cleburne and his heroic division.” Now at Chickamauga, Cleburne and forty-four hundred bayonets swung into battle to the support of Breckinridge. Before Cleburne, also, at short range, were breastworks, and now from these there burst a tempest of grape and canister, with an undersong of musketry. It was a fire that mowed like a scythe. Wood’s brigade had to cross an old field bordering the Chattanooga road, an old field marked by a burning house. Crossing, there burst against it, from hidden batteries to right and left, a blast as from a furnace seven times heated. Five hundred men fell here, killed and wounded. On the left Lucius Polk’s brigade came against breastworks cresting a hill covered with scrub oak. Blue and grey engaged with fury. Down poured the blast from the ridge, canister and grape and musketry. Lucius Polk’s men lay down behind the crest of a lower ridge, and kept up the fight, losing in no great time three hundred and fifty officers and men. Deshler’s brigade moved forward. A shell came shrieking, struck Deshler in the breast, and killed him. Cleburne shook his head. “Too much loss of good life!”—and withdrawing the division four hundred yards, took up a strong defensive position.