Of this brigade of five regiments the Twenty-Eighth Massachusetts Volunteers, Colonel Richard Byrnes, was the second Irish regiment raised in Massachusetts in defence of the Union in 1861. The tribute above quoted is the testimony of the war correspondent of the _London Times_, the files of which are to be found in our Boston Athenæum. He was the famous Dr. Russell, the Crimean and other wars' correspondent of the _London Thunderer_. He should surely be a judge of heroic service and undaunted bravery. He was an eye-witness, as was the writer of these lines, of what he speaks, and could with great truth form a personal knowledge of the facts, and with ocular proof depict the thrilling and tragic drama enacted on the bloody slopes of Fredericksburg, Va., on that midwinter day. The nature of the ground on the left bank of the Rappahannock afforded ample views of the scenes being enacted on the other side, and it requires no difficult stretch of the imagination or of the sympathies of humanity to enter into the feelings of men, who, seeing this fearful havoc of their Federal comrades, awaited their turn for Burnside to order them, "his latest chance to try," across the ensanguined river. When the order did come for the fresh Irish troops, it was only to find themselves mingled in the slaughter with their prone dead and dying comrades from the old Bay State, the Twenty-Eighth Massachusetts, distinguishable by the fresh and natural sprigs of green with which they had on that fateful morning decorated their military caps, but which were now in too, too many cases, crimsoned with blood and brains, or embedded in the crushed skulls of the gallant heroes, who, only a few short hours before, so jauntily wore them. [Illustration: COL. RICHARD BYRNES.] "Why should we be sad, boys, whose business it is to die!" sung Wolfe at Quebec. The strain was melancholy and its vein mercenary. It was not the business of these gallant citizen soldiers to die. They should have lived to see a country restored to peace and greatness as a proof of their patriotism, valor and sacrifices. "But," says Dr. Russell in another part of his Fredericksburg letter to the _London Times_, "that any mortal men could have carried the position before which they were wantonly sacrificed, defended as it was, it seems to me idle for a moment to believe." And these valiant, adopted citizens of the Republic hesitated not to obey the cruel order to charge and charge again and again up to those impregnable works with a fortitude and persistence that could not possibly be expected from troops who adopted the trade of soldier and "whose business it was to die."[2]