On this day in 1776, about 400 men from Maryland threw themselves, again and again, at an entire British army that outnumbered them roughly twenty to one, knowing they would die, so that the rest of the American army could live. It is one of the greatest acts of sacrifice in American history, and most people have never heard of it. Set the scene, because it followed straight from the trap sprung the night before. The British had marched around the American flank in the dark through the Jamaica Pass, and at dawn on August 27 they came crashing in from front and side at once. The Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the entire Revolution, turned instantly into a rout. The American lines buckled and broke, and thousands of men began running for the safety of the fortifications at Brooklyn, with the East River at their backs. If the British caught that fleeing mob in the open, the war was over. The one thing that could save the army was time, and time had to be bought with blood. On the American right, near a stone farmhouse by the marshy Gowanus Creek, stood General Lord Stirling and a body of Continentals that included the 1st Maryland Regiment, tough, well-drilled young men, many from prominent families. Stirling saw the whole army streaming past behind him toward the one narrow crossing to safety, and he understood what had to happen. Someone had to hold the British long enough for those men to get across. The Marylanders volunteered to be that someone. What followed was almost beyond belief. Roughly 400 Marylanders turned and charged directly into the teeth of a British force of thousands, backed by artillery, dug in around the Old Stone House. They should have been swept away in a single volley. Instead they hit so hard they actually drove the British back and seized the house. Then they were thrown out. So they charged again. And again. Six times these men attacked, into cannon and musket fire, buying minutes with their lives, twice fighting all the way back into the stone house itself before being repulsed. From a hill across the creek, George Washington watched it happen, watched a few hundred men deliberately sacrifice themselves to save his army, and he could not stop it and could not look away. He is said to have wrung his hands and cried out, "Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose!" And lose them he did. Of the roughly 400 Marylanders who made that stand, only a small fraction came back. Something like 256 were killed, wounded, or captured. Many of the dead were buried where they fell, in a mass grave somewhere under what is now the streets of Brooklyn, its exact location lost to this day. But their sacrifice worked. The minutes they bought with their bodies let the bulk of the American army escape the killing ground and reach the Brooklyn defenses, where, two nights later, John Glover's fishermen would row them all to safety. Maryland has never forgotten. The state's old nickname, the Old Line State, is said to honor these men, the Maryland Line who held the line when holding it meant dying. Four hundred young men who looked at a hopeless charge and made it anyway, six times over, so that the army, and the Revolution, could survive to fight another day. Say their name. The Maryland 400.