Toby’s artillery

Toby’s artillery is the collection of miniature field-pieces that expands around Toby’s sentry-box as his bowling-green siege play develops. Initially imagined as a practical model of military force, the guns become a means of sustaining an imagined bombardment: Corporal Trim adapts tobacco-pipes to fire all six together, and Toby is drawn from observing the apparatus toward taking part in its staged attack. Their small scale makes the enterprise comic, but the guns matter because they turn military reports and imaginative absorption into an elaborate, repeatable performance.

Growth of the Battery

The artillery appears as part of the accumulating equipment of Toby’s model town. After adding a church and steeple, Toby rejects Trim’s suggestion that the church should have bells, preferring that the metal be cast into cannon. In the following campaign, six brass field-pieces are placed three on each side of the sentry-box. These are the beginning of a sequence of increasingly large pieces, described as growing from half-inch bores until the apparatus reaches the family’s inherited jack-boots. The artillery is therefore not a single finished object but one stage in a hobby that continually generates further equipment.

The next year, while Lisle is besieged and Ghent and Bruges fall, the growing battery confronts a practical limit. Toby lacks suitable ammunition, because the largest pieces cannot bear powder. That limitation is fortunate for the Shandy family: the accounts of continuous firing during the siege so inflame Toby’s imagination that, if he could have reproduced the bombardment with powder, he would have spent his entire estate on it. The model guns thus register both the scale of his military absorption and the material restraint that keeps it from becoming financially ruinous.

Trim’s Firing System

To sustain the impression of continuous fire without ordinary ammunition, Trim devises a substitute system of his own. His initial idea is to smoke tobacco against the town from one of the six field-pieces. He then works out a way to discharge the whole battery together: two Turkish tobacco-pipes are joined to three smaller wash-leather tubes apiece, which connect to tin tubes fitted to the guns’ touch-holes. Clay seals the connections at the cannon, and waxed silk ties the insertions into the Morocco tubes. This arrangement makes it possible, in Trim’s design, to fire the six pieces at once as easily as one.

Trim spends most of the night bringing the apparatus to completion and tests the cannon by filling them with tobacco. The test satisfies him, and he goes to bed content. The following morning, he returns before Toby and positions the six guns close together in front of the sentry-box, leaving a gap of about a yard and a half between the right and left groups for loading and operation. The placement gives the battery a divided, twin arrangement as well as a functional opening through which Trim can work.

The Mock Attack

Trim takes his position behind the opening, with his back to the sentry-box door. He holds an ivory pipe for the right-hand battery and an ebony pipe tipped with silver for the left. With one knee braced on the ground and his Montero cap on his head, he operates the two groups against the counter-guard facing the counterscarp, the point where the attack is to take place. The narrator presents the operation in the terms of a battlefield deployment, even though the artillery’s power comes from tobacco and the scene takes place on Toby’s bowling-green.

Trim had meant only to give the enemy a puff or two before Toby arrived. But the pleasure of the puffs and the act of puffing carry him onward, from one discharge to the next, until he is caught up in the height of the imagined attack. The guns have accordingly acquired a kind of practical force within the game: their arrangement and firing system do not merely represent a battery but organize the participants’ actions and draw Trim deeper into the scene.

Toby Takes the Pipe

When Toby joins him, he takes the ivory pipe from Trim, studies it briefly, and returns it. In less than two minutes he takes it again and raises it halfway to his mouth, only to hand it back. Trim redoubles the attack, while Toby’s expression shifts between a smile and seriousness. He then asks for the ivory pipe, puts it to his lips, draws it back, and looks over the horn-beam hedge toward the imagined engagement.

Toby withdraws into the sentry-box with the pipe in his hand. The episode ends not with a report of what he does inside, but with the narrator’s warning that he should not take it into such a confined corner, where self-command cannot be trusted. That withheld outcome preserves the comic tension: Toby’s artillery has moved from a system he oversees to an invitation to participate, while the narrative leaves his final action unconfirmed.

Function in the Siege Hobby

The artillery connects Toby’s model warfare to accounts of real sieges without reproducing their destructive effects. Newspaper reports of prolonged firing intensify his imagination, but the powderless guns and Trim’s tobacco apparatus let that intensity be acted out within the limits of the model. Their development also follows the expansive logic of Toby’s hobby: six modest field-pieces prompt a new firing system, just as each addition to the apparatus leads toward another.

The scene’s comedy depends on the disparity between the seriousness of its military language and the small, improvised mechanism that sustains the attack. Yet the battery is not merely a joke about miniature weapons. Its two rows, the space left for charging, the paired pipes, and Trim’s carefully arranged position give the imagined battle a concrete procedure. When Toby reaches for the pipe, the model’s equipment begins to govern the action of the people around it; the artillery has become the hinge between representation and participation.