GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- The landscape outside this small college town is more farmland than battlefield now. Cows graze on the rolling, wooded acres. But for three days one summer, where a man stood on these contours often meant his life. As usual in war, the high ground was crucial in the Battle of Gettysburg.

Visitors on the free, 18-mile auto trail in Gettysburg National Military Park will learn this as they trace the fighting of 130 years ago. Some will even park, stroll a few yards and read plaques that detail a shifting, three-day conflict. Some will touch a few of the 1,300 monuments, enough monuments to make your stomach churn.

At Little Roundtop

It's too much to absorb in one afternoon, all those numbers, all the names: 50,000 casualties, Pickett's Charge, Little Round Top. And there are too many intrusions, with the the fast food places nearby, and the observation tower that makes the battlefield seem like a World's Fair. Gettysburg becomes real only with a microscope. It becomes real if you find a small remembrance, like the one this day on McPherson Ridge.

The granite marker was 50 steps away, down a slope through knee-high grass. Even if you knew the marker was there, well off the auto trail, it took an effort to find it. There were remnants of a bouquet in the dirt. Words in faded ink on a wrinkled, grit-flecked card read, "In Loving Memory of Major General John Reynolds." It was dated and signed by a high school class from Indiana, and had laid on the northwest outskirts of town for weeks.

There were no similar small homages that day along the trail through peaceful, tilted fields where horses once stirred dust and weapons sparked. The wilted stems of the bouquet were a small testament, but a stark one in contrast to the monuments and cannon. Here was a little mystery among the overt, a mystery that would go unsolved. It was hard to believe anyone remembered John Reynolds, and difficult to understand why a high school class from Indiana left flowers for him.

John Reynolds was arguably the finest soldier in the Union Army in the summer of 1863. He had, using his impeccable manners, declined command of the Union Army. He wanted a free hand, and decided that subordinates of President Abraham Lincoln would certainly meddle from Washington.

He grew to become an unmatched horseman at his home not far from here, from where he died at 42, wearing the ring of his fiance under his uniform on a chain around his neck.

Nobody told Reynolds to fight for Gettysburg. George Meade ‚ commander of the army that Reynolds declined ‚ gave him charge of the three corps here as fighting began on July 1, 1863. Neither Meade nor Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, particularly wanted to fight here. But as Lee's army approached from the north, Reynolds sent the message to Meade: "I will fight them inch by inch."

Reynolds could have fallen back, watched, and waited for Meade to arrive from the south. That would not have prevented the two armies from somewhere engaging in the bloodiest battle fought in North America. And it would not have kept Reynolds, an instinctive fighter, from riding the battle line.

But with any delay that battle would not have started on McPherson Ridge, and a sniper hiding in the old barn that still stands would not have brought him down. "I never saw a man die so quickly in combat as Major Reynolds," a Union soldier said. When an aide reached Reynolds and turned him over, Reynolds smiled quickly, and died.

He was the highest-ranking officer lost in the battle, a fact largely hidden in history. So it seemed odd that students from Indiana, not even Reynolds' home state, would leave flowers here on McPherson Ridge, by the granite that marks his death.

But Reynolds was real to them. They did their homework. They came here with a purpose, with him in mind. Most of the men involved in the Battle of Gettysburg assume no human qualities in the plaques, monuments or tour guides' words. The men are only names, and usually just a few names, the ones endlessly documented: Meade. Lee. Pickett.

So you lose much if you arrive at Gettysburg without knowing about men like Reynolds, or Joshua Chamberlain, whose unorthodox tactic saved the high ground at Little Round Top, who was elected governor of Maine by the largest majority in history, and who taught every subject but one in the curriculum at Bowdoin College. Or men like George Pickett, who unlike 60 percent of his troops survived the famous Confederate charge named for him, only to despise Lee for the strategy and say, "That man destroyed my Division."

You don't need to know the history to enjoy a quiet, summer evening on Little Round Top, when the tourists are gone and the trees throw long shadows with the fading sun in these Appalachian foothills. The history doesn't matter much when you take a meal in the cool, candle-lighted basement of the centuries old Dobbin House Tavern.

But it's too overwhelming to grasp the battle, to understand the elements of romance and horror, to get an 1863 perspective on it, if you arrive unprepared. And even if you are prepared, you'll probably have to return some day. Once you've been here, Gettysburg is not easy to put out of your mind.