Amberg enters the novel as one of the towns in Uncle Toby’s imagined military campaigns, and its capture helps bring about a change in the miniature world on the bowling green: Corporal Trim proposes that the campaigns should have a town of their own to show for them.

Place in the Campaigns

The narrator distinguishes the campaigns’ language from their constructed setting. Although the word “town” had often been used in accounts of the first year, no town then stood within the polygon. The miniature bridges and sentry-box had been painted in the spring; the following summer, in the third year of Uncle Toby’s campaigns, Amberg was among the places he took, alongside Bonn, Rhinberg, Huy, and Limbourg.

The Model Town

After these successive captures, Corporal Trim observed the incongruity of speaking of taking so many towns without having a town to show for it. He proposed a small model town, assembled from slit deals, painted, and placed inside the polygon so that it could serve for all the campaigns. Uncle Toby immediately saw the merit of the plan and agreed. Amberg’s narrative significance thus lies not in a description of the place itself, but in its role in prompting the miniature landscape to acquire a town.

Later Recollections

Amberg returns in the account of Uncle Toby’s postwar decline. During the years when campaign prospects animated him, the narrator recalls Amberg among the towns taken in one year, followed by the prospect of further campaigns. Later, the names of those places no longer hurry his blood or sustain his military imaginings. Amberg consequently marks both the expansion of the bowling-green project and, in retrospect, the energy that has since ebbed from it.