Demolition of Dunkirk's fortifications

The demolition of Dunkirk’s fortifications, required by the peace settlement, becomes a small campaign in its own right for Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. Its delays, staged operations, and diminishing afterglow expose the contrast between the practical dismantling of a town and the imaginative military world Toby has built around it: the treaty requires the work, but completing it helps close the world that gave his military hobby life.

Treaty Obligation and Delay

After the articles were signed, Toby had little reason to take up his military hobby except to check that Dunkirk’s fortifications and harbour were being demolished as stipulated. The French authorities were slow to begin. Monsieur Tugghe, deputy for Dunkirk’s magistrates, petitioned the queen to spare the harbour mole, even while accepting the destruction of the martial works. The queen and her ministers are depicted as reluctant to see the town dismantled, and the competing petitions and official permissions held the process up.

The delay mattered to Toby because it left him waiting between the construction of the model town and the work of destroying it. More than three months passed after he and Trim had made the town ready for demolition before the commandants, commissioners, deputies, negotiators, and intendants would allow them to proceed. The narrator calls this an interval of inactivity, turning bureaucratic postponement into a loss of momentum for Toby as well as a practical impediment to the treaty’s execution.

A Campaign in Reverse

Trim proposes beginning by breaching the town’s ramparts. Toby rejects the plan: an early breach would leave the English garrison vulnerable to an enemy entering the town. Trim answers that the French would be treacherous and gestures with his pioneer’s spade, but Toby insists that a commandant must act prudently rather than plan around what an enemy may dare to do.

Toby instead lays out a staged retreat. They will demolish the outworks on both the landward and seaward sides, starting with distant Fort Louis; then they will take the remaining works in sequence as they withdraw towards the town. Next come the mole and the filling of the harbour, followed by retirement into the citadel and its destruction. Only then, Toby says, will they embark for England. Trim points out that they are already there. Toby accepts the correction and looks towards the church. The exchange gives the dismantling the order and logic of a campaign, while its final reminder gently punctures the imagined voyage.

The Fading Military Hobby

Toby and Trim hold a consultation or two over the demolition, and for a moment the scheme rallies the pleasures that had been slipping away from him. But the revival is brief: the narrator says that everything continues heavily and that the magic leaves Toby’s mind weaker. Stillness, silence, and listlessness take the place of the military activity that once carried him forward.

The passage marks the loss by recalling the places and operations that had animated Toby’s imagination. The sequence of Amberg, Rhinberg, Limbourg, Huy, and Bonn gives way to the prospect of Landen, Trerebach, Drusen, and Dendermond; saps, mines, blinds, gabions, and palisades no longer keep his imagined enemy at bay. His former leap from supper, by way of the French lines and across the Oyes, towards Paris and glory is no longer available to him. Nor does he dream of planting the royal standard on the Bastille and waking with it still before his mind. The treaty-mandated demolition thus has a double ending: Dunkirk’s defences are to disappear, and Toby’s model campaigns lose the future that had sustained them.