It was mid-May, almost the anniversary of the battle. My wife and I wandered through the sweetly fragrant apple orchard, past an opening in an old split-rail fence, and across a damp field north of the Bushong Farm. We walked slowly uphill, toward two abandoned Union cannons now chained to concrete foundations, fixed forever in time, where they watched over the "Field of Lost Shoes." This, I read on the map and brochure from the Museum, is where the VMI cadets slogged through the rain and mud, through a hail of bullets, toward the Union army.

Somewhere at the top of the hill the 1st West Virginia Volunteers and my great-grandfather had stood, firing almost blindly downhill, through the smoke and rain, at the unstoppable Confederate soldiers and cadets.

I wondered as I scanned the grassy ground for any hints left of the battle, where my grandfather actually began his advance downhill to meet the cadets. The light rain had stopped and a warm May sun and a gentle breeze were a comfort, nothing like those soldiers experienced over a hundred and thirty years ago. I knew they all, Union and Confederates alike, had been cold, wet, tired and miserable, perhaps also afraid, of dying that day.

I moved a bit farther west, toward where long-legged gray herons looped gracefully above the bluffs over the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. Moving downhill, the direction the Union troops marched into the flanking fire of Breckinridge's canister shot-firing artillery, a clammy chill enveloped me, despite the sunshine. I was standing in a shallow depression in the middle of the long, gentle slope down to farmer Bushong's wheat fields.

It was not so much a thought, or even like a dream or a vision, but a momentary impression. There were screams and yells, horrific explosions and gunfire, the stench of sulfur and blood, and a pain in my stomach as if someone had hit me with a battering ram. I had the impression that this is where my ancestor fired his musket or rifle, and before he could reload, had his finger shot off by a Confederate bullet. A piece of shrapnel, or perhaps a clod of earth from an artillery shell's explosion hit him in the stomach, knocking him down. There was, however brief but etched into that spot forever, a profound aura of sadness and grief, of parents, wives, and children mourning their lost sons, husbands and fathers.

The lost finger was real, that much I knew from his letter home from camp a week later, after the Union army's retreat from New Market to Mount Jackson and Cedar Creek. He never mentioned the blow to his stomach, I only "felt it" as I stood there in that damp grassy field, now quiet and peaceful.

I've visited New Market several times since that first experience, and I've enjoyed the poignant rural beauty of the Shenandoah Valley, traveling leisurely along the Old Pike Road from town to town. I can sense the sadness and pain so many people must have felt at the horror and destruction of war in that beautiful Valley. For me, nowhere else is the feeling of personal connectedness to a tragic moment in history so strong and vivid as there, on the gently sloping hills, by a small white farmhouse, along the Old Pike Road.