I had just spent a disappointing 10 minutes trying to get a good photo of the William Wells monument in the woods at Gettysburg, but I forgot my frustration when I walked out on Little Round Top.

Finally I was picturing a battlefield I understood.

The boulders of the site – rain-slickened on the day I was there – are the boulders of the day they became famous. Below me, the fields and trees are changed: That is not the grass trod and bloodied then, but those are the rocks that Confederate sharp shooters hunkered down in, and these are the gaps between the boulders that squeezed the shoulders of the responding Union marksmen.

I had stood where Pickett made his ill-fated charge, and I saw a space. But I liked Little Round Top better, because it seemed like The Place. I could stamp my foot (careful not to slip) and think: Here.

Why do we come to these battlefields? Joshua Chamberlain, who made his name at Little Round Top, believed battlefields become imbued with a spirit, that generations to come would be, as he said, wrapped in a mighty presence when they visited. But I am not a 19^th-century sentimentalist, and though I want to sense those gray and blue ghosts, I do not. I stand where General Armistead fell and feel only the soggy earth and the dripping sky.

Nevertheless, here I am to learn. By coincidence, before I knew that I was going to be in Pennsylvania on a business trip, I was reading Shelby Foote’s narrative of the battle. It’s a lively description, full of fluster and bluster, but I had read this kind of thing before and still felt no closer to the events. Maps move arrows across the page, but they don’t move me, and while Mr. Foote’s words attempt to help me understand attitudes and emotions, I am still distant enough to wonder why the actors bothered at all.

Then I see the rocks and open fields and can imagine, at least, the madness that made men jump into an empty railroad cut that proved to be their undoing. I can see how some of them might believe there was enough shelter in the Slaughter Pen to cover an assault, and I can recreate the mistaken sense of opportunity that came with it.

In a word, I can measure my small frame against the world and see it move there.

That, of course, is only one of the reasons we preserve these places. For some, honor & respect is untainted by personality, but for others of us it is important that we stand where others have stood before us and – if uncaressed by spirits – are nonetheless touched by imagination.