"The thing I sensed was that people had been here before, en masse. At times, I have noted a comparable intimation after a public auction, when the last item of furniture has been carted off and the last pickup truck has driven away. The grass is patterned with tire tracks and footprints. The buzz of the crowd, the auctioneer's warble still echo in my ears. A whiff of humanity lingers, a subtle indefinable something, but it is not an olfactory sensation. It, too, is an echo, a reverberation of the auction-goers who were convened an hour earlier. A similar presence lingered in these pastures a hundred and twenty-three years after the battle. After that length of time, I would not have thought it possible to stand at the heart of a battlefield and pick up its living pulse." Peter Svenson
