It is dangerously close to Independence Day – we’re in Philadelphia, for pity’s sake – patriotic fervor is growing, and my younger brother is disgusted by what he reads at the Valley Forge Visitors Center.

A retired military man, he scoffs at museum displays that dis and play down the legendary suffering of the soldiers at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-1778. It was not much worse here, current historical opinion says, than it was at many another 18^th-century winter encampment. The real importance of Valley Forge, historians now contend, was in the spring training that followed, when George Washington turned his cold but thawing recruits into an effective fighting force.

“Doesn’t that seem a little p.c. to you?” my brother says. “It really bothers me when they do this stuff.”

When I remind him that historians are always refining and revising their points of view, he isn’t buying it. “Yeah, but for the kids,” he says, meaning not only his own children, who are with us, but all the children of the nation. (I guess as a military man he’s predisposed to take a wide and protective view.) “You bring your kids to Valley Forge to remind them of what we went through to make this country.”

Outside of the visitors center, I think he has even more to worry about. If the museum is for adults – and what kids read these display boards anyway, when there’s a flintlock to examine? – the grounds of the park itself seem to be made for idle strollers. In fact, a visit to Valley Forge is as much about our young country’s early deification of Washington as it is about what happened here, and I walk through the park less in touch with the lives of the Colonial fighting men than I am with the attitudes of those Victorian ladies who fought to preserve the site a hundred years later.

Nothing here says war and privation: It’s all marble and manicure, leading up to the big triumphal arch. And because it was never a battlefield, though thousands died here of disease (mostly after the winter snows had melted away), I don’t kneel to press my hand against the blood in the soil that I have saluted at places like Antietam and Pea Ridge. Maybe if I trudged across the parade grounds in a spring slog it would be different, but I doubt if I could escape the feeling that I was just at an otherwise pleasant spot on a sloppy day.

My family drives on around the park, unprepared for the last shock: Washington’s headquarters turns out to be a pretty snug little farm house.

“You always think of him out in the snow with the men,” I say, and now it’s my brother’s turn to laugh at my historical perspective. He’s been in the military long enough, I guess, to know the difference between an officer and a grunt.