A YOUNG NATION'S INNOCENCE WAS SHATTERED AT MANASSAS.

Byline: Eric Noland Travel Editor

MANASSAS, Va. - Given the four years of blundering, futile tactics and appalling carnage of America's Civil War, it's probably unfathomable that the whole thing started with a spirit of grand adventure and the expectation that it would be over in a few days.

For both sides, First Manassas was the reality check.

That's why the national battlefield park in northern Virginia is such a worthy destination, even for travelers whose eyes have glazed over while sorting out the troop movements, cannon positions - and casualty figures - at such pivotal Civil War battle sites as Gettysburg, Antietam or Shiloh.

It was at Manassas, specifically in the first of two major battles fought here, that the nation's sense of war as a glorious endeavor was irrevocably shattered.

At this first battle of the war (also called First Bull Run), cocky Union forces received a rude awakening, Confederate Gen. Thomas J. Jackson earned the nickname ``Stonewall,'' an 84-year-old widow became the first civilian casualty of the war, the Rebel Yell was heard for the first time in combat, and Washington's social elite discovered that warfare is not the stuff of spectator sport, to be observed from a hillside with a picnic basket strapped to a horse-drawn carriage.

The battlefield is still an easy day trip from Washington, D.C., lying 25 miles to the southeast.

A visitors center stands atop Henry Hill, a delightful place for a 19th- century farm - but also critical high ground in an era before airborne warfare. It was here that some of the fiercest fighting raged, but you'd never know it today. While walking an easy, one-mile loop of the battlefield, stopping here and there to read information boards or listen to audio snippets, we encountered a deer leisurely making its way through the tall grass.

How much this world has changed in 142 years.

Fort Sumter had been shelled in April 1861, signaling the start of the War Between the States. Three months later, the Union army resolved to capture an important rail junction here, in hopes of speeding by train into Richmond, there to capture the Southern capital and, hopefully, crush the secessionist resistance in one swift blow.

But, in a story line that would play out continually in this relentlessly bloody war, Union generals were overcautious, Confederate generals were bold and pre-emptive, outcomes pivoted on wicked twists of fate, and Union troops were ultimately routed here, scurrying back to Washington through a tangle of abandoned equipment and panicked picnickers.

A 45-minute film in the visitors center presents many of these plot lines in impressive fashion, although it's a bit annoying that the cost of seeing it ($4) is tacked onto the fee for entering the park ($3 per person).

Also highly recommended is a ranger-guided walk of part of the battlefield. Our 30-minute tour, led by ranger Allan Buss, was outstanding.

There is a real you-are-there quality to the Manassas battlefield. Demand for housing has become acute in northern Virginia, but this park of 5,000-plus acres is an oasis amid the sprawl, and has been able to maintain the character and contours of the land as they were in the 1860s.

Visitors drive in from Washington on the exact route taken by Union troops (it's Highway 29 today; it was the Warrenton Pike then). That road passes by the double-arch Stone Bridge that crosses Bull Run (``run'' was local nomenclature for stream), and visitors can walk across the span much as the soldiers did. A short distance away stands the Stone House, a tavern at the time that was pressed into service first as a command post and later as a field hospital.

Walking around the battlefield of First Manassas, or taking a 16-mile drive of the sites of the second conflict (including the grade of an unfinished railroad bed that proved strategically significant) might give you a chill. When you climb out of a slight depression in the land and are suddenly confronted with a row of cannons, marking the position of an opposing force, it's hard not to imagine the terror of the foot soldier.

``The timing was all fouled up,'' Buss said at one point on the guided walk. The words can apply to just about every battle fought in the Civil War.

To begin with, the Union commander for the battle, Gen. Irvin McDowell, required three days to get his troops from Washington to Centreville, a distance of 20 miles. This bought the South invaluable time to shore up its forces. Historians even record that Union soldiers, encountering a blackberry bramble along the way, stopped for a considerable period to pick fruit.

Once the battle began, chaos reigned, in part because of the inexperience of the soldiers but also because of the confounding variety of uniforms. The two sides combined to wear 200 different types of uniforms, some of them variations on the elaborate colors of the French army at the time.

``There was one group of blue-coated soldiers that were thought to be Union,'' Buss said, ``so a (Union) cannon battery didn't fire on them. It turned out they were soldiers from Virginia, and they wiped out the battery.''

One of the rows of now-silent cannons marks where Jackson earned his nickname - simply by waiting there impassively for what he judged was the proper moment to enter the fight. A Confederate colleague, retreating toward that position under heavy fire, reportedly called to his men, ``Form! Form! There stands Jackson like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians.'' (Historians are uncertain whether the words were uttered in admiration or exasperation.)

When you walk to the little white frame house atop Henry Hill, you can picture the tragic circumstances under which the first civilian casualty of the war occurred. Judith Henry, 84, was in the wrong place at the wrong time - her bedroom. When Confederate sharpshooters climbed into the house and began picking off members of a Union gun battery, the latter turned their cannons on the house, and Henry was killed when shells ripped through the siding.

Late in the afternoon, the tide of the battle turned when Confederate forces - rallied into such a frenzy by their leaders that the men began howling as they charged - swept forward and caused the inexperienced Union troops to break and retreat.

For many Union soldiers, it became a panic, and on the race back to Washington they simply shed any encumbrances: guns, wagons, cannons, coats, canteens.

As a result of this battle, the Union faced the sobering reality that the Southern cause wouldn't be crushed quickly. The South, on the other hand, was probably lulled into the belief that the North wasn't capable of mounting a formidable threat.

And they were both back at the exact same spot a year later for another go at it - at the cost of 3,300 lives.

By that point in the war, the concept of a grand, glorious and swift adventure had long since been dashed.

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE: Manassas National Battlefield Park is 25 miles southeast of Washington, D.C. Take Highway 29 to Sudley Road and turn left to the visitors center.

HOURS, COSTS: The park is open daily during daylight hours. The visitors center is open from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Park entrance fee is $3 per person. The film at the visitors center costs another $4 per person. Guided ranger walks are free.

INFORMATION: [phone]; www.nps.gov/mana.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- color) Cannons form a precise line on the now-peaceful battlefield at Manassas, Va., where the first major conflict of the Civil War was fought.

(2 -- 3) Park ranger Allan Buss, above, shows visitors where the first major battle of the Civil War was fought in Manassas, Va., The stone bridge, right , that spanned muddy Bull Run during the war can still be across on foot.

Eric Noland/Travel Editor

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IF YOU GO (see text)