Late that night, rising from the blankets which he shared with a Chaplain, Jackson wrote some orders. While he was doing this, an orderly came and standing at the tent flap, said, "General Gregg is dying, General, and sent me to say to you that he wrote you a letter recently in which he used expressions he is sorry for. He says he meant no disrespect by that letter and was only doing what he thought was his duty. He hopes you will forgive him." Without hesitation, Jackson, who was deeply stirred, answered, "Tell General Gregg I will be with him directly." He rode through the woods back to where the brave Georgian was dying, and day was about to break when he came back to his troops. General Maxey Gregg, of Georgia, was killed in action here, as were a number of other gallant officers. Jackson held the right of the Confederate lines all day with 26,000 men against 55,000. His losses were about 3,415, while Hooker and Franklin lost 4,447. Meanwhile, against Marye's Heights, the left center of the line, almost two miles away, General Burnside sent again and again terrific infantry charges. [Sidenote: _The Charge at Marye's Heights_] The hills just back of Fredericksburg are fronted by an upward sloping plane, and at the foot of that part of the hills called Marye's Heights is a stone wall and the "Sunken Road"--as fatal here for Burnside as was the Sunken Road at Waterloo for Napoleon. On Marye's Heights was the Washington Artillery, and a number of guns--a veritable fortress, ready, as General Pegram said, "to sweep the plans in front as close as a fine-tooth comb." At the foot of the heights behind the stone wall were Cobb's Georgians, Kershaw's South Carolinians, and Ransom's and Cobb's North Carolinas--nine thousand riflemen, six deep, firing over the front lines' shoulders, so that, so one officer wrote "they literally sent bullets in sheets." Against this impregnable place, Burnside launched charge after charge, and never did men go more bravely and certainly to death. This was simultaneous with the fighting at Hamilton's Crossing. Meagher's Irish Brigade went first across the plain. Detouring from Hanover street and George street, they formed line of battle on the lowest ground, and with cedar branches waving in their hats, bravely green in memory of "the ould sod" they swept forward until the rifles behind the wall and the cannon on the hill decimated their ranks; and yet again they formed and charged, until over the whole plain lay the dead, with green cedar boughs waving idly in their hats. The Irish Brigade was practically exterminated, and three more charges by larger bodies failed, although one Northern officer fell within twenty-five yards of the wall. The day ended in the utter defeat of the Union Army, which withdrew into Fredericksburg at night. In front of the wall 8,217 Union soldiers were killed or wounded, and in the "Sunken Road" the Confederates lost 1,962.