Eleven Times

The Maryland and Delaware Continentals did not know the left had broken. The battle had been going on for perhaps fifteen minutes when the British infantry began appearing on their flank. De Kalb was 59 years old, had been fighting since before most of his soldiers were born, and understood immediately what the flanking fire meant: the militia was gone, the battle was lost, and the question now was whether anything could be saved.

He did not retreat. He counterattacked. Three times the Continentals pushed forward into the British line, fighting in a shrinking perimeter as the encirclement closed. British accounts written after the battle noted the discipline and fury of the Maryland and Delaware men with something close to professional respect.

De Kalb was shot the first time and kept fighting. He was shot again. The accounts are not precise about the sequence because no one was keeping records under those conditions, but when he finally went down he had been struck eleven times by musket balls and once by a sword blow to the head. His adjutant, caught in the fighting around him, wrote afterward that de Kalb had been unhorsed — his horse shot from under him — and continued fighting on foot.

He died three days later, on August 19, lucid enough at the end to dictate a letter. British officers who attended him during those three days described him with genuine respect. Cornwallis arranged a military funeral.

What de Kalb's performance at Camden tells us about the Maryland and Delaware Continentals is as important as what it tells us about de Kalb himself. These were the men who had covered the Brooklyn retreat in 1776, who had wintered at Valley Forge, who had been fighting for four years. They did not break when the militia broke. They fought until their general was dying on the ground around them. That was what a regular army looked like, when you had one.

The monument in Camden carries his name and the date. It does not try to explain what it meant to lose someone like that in a battle that was already lost.