I MUST observe, that although in the first year’s campaign, the word
town is often mentioned,—yet there was no town at that time within the
polygon; that addition was not made till the summer following the
spring in which the bridges and sentry-box were painted, which was the
third year of my uncle _Toby_’s campaigns,—when upon his taking
_Amberg, Bonn_, and _Rhinberg_, and _Huy_ and _Limbourg_, one after
another, a thought came into the corporal’s head, that to talk of
taking so many towns, _without one_ TOWN _to shew for it_,—was a very
nonsensical way of going to work, and so proposed to my uncle _Toby_,
that they should have a little model of a town built for them,—to be
run up together of slit deals, and then painted, and clapped within the
interior polygon to serve for all.
My uncle _Toby_ felt the good of the project instantly, and instantly
agreed to it, but with the addition of two singular improvements, of
which he was almost as proud as if he had been the original inventor of
the project itself.
The one was, to have the town built exactly in the style of those of
which it was most likely to be the representative:——with grated
windows, and the gable ends of the houses, facing the streets, &c.
&c.—as those in _Ghent_ and _Bruges_, and the rest of the towns in
_Brabant_ and _Flanders._
The other was, not to have the houses run up together, as the corporal
proposed, but to have every house independent, to hook on, or off, so
as to form into the plan of whatever town they pleased. This was put
directly into hand, and many and many a look of mutual congratulation
was exchanged between my uncle _Toby_ and the corporal, as the
carpenter did the work.
——It answered prodigiously the next summer——the town was a perfect
_Proteus_——It was _Landen_, and _Trerebach_, and _Santvliet_, and
_Drusen_, and _Hagenau_,—and then it was _Ostend_ and _Menin_, and
_Aeth_ and _Dendermond._
——Surely never did any TOWN act so many parts, since _Sodom_ and
_Gomorrah_, as my uncle _Toby_’s town did.
In the fourth year, my uncle _Toby_ thinking a town looked foolishly
without a church, added a very fine one with a steeple.——_Trim_ was for
having bells in it;——my uncle _Toby_ said, the metal had better be cast
into cannon.
This led the way the next campaign for half a dozen brass field-pieces,
to be planted three and three on each side of my uncle _Toby_’s
sentry-box; and in a short time, these led the way for a train of
somewhat larger,—and so on—(as must always be the case in
hobby-horsical affairs) from pieces of half an inch bore, till it came
at last to my father’s jack boots.
The next year, which was that in which _Lisle_ was besieged, and at the
close of which both _Ghent_ and _Bruges_ fell into our hands,—my uncle
_Toby_ was sadly put to it for _proper_ ammunition;——I say proper
ammunition——because his great artillery would not bear powder; and
’twas well for the _Shandy_ family they would not——For so full were the
papers, from the beginning to the end of the siege, of the incessant
firings kept up by the besiegers,——and so heated was my uncle _Toby_’s
imagination with the accounts of them, that he had infallibly shot away
all his estate.
SOMETHING therefore was wanting as a _succedaneum_, especially in one
or two of the more violent paroxysms of the siege, to keep up something
like a continual firing in the imagination,——and this something, the
corporal, whose principal strength lay in invention, supplied by an
entire new system of battering of his own,—without which, this had been
objected to by military critics, to the end of the world, as one of the
great _desiderata_ of my uncle _Toby_’s apparatus.
This will not be explained the worse, for setting off, as I generally
do, at a little distance from the subject.