Drusen is both a town in Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim’s modular military model and one of the campaign settings through which their miniature world repeatedly changes shape. Its recurrence links the ingenuity of their model-making to the later stillness that overtakes Uncle Toby when the military activity that once animated him has passed.

Place in the Model Town

The model town was designed to represent the towns most likely to serve as its real-world counterparts, with grated windows and houses whose gable ends faced the streets, like those in Ghent and Bruges and elsewhere in Brabant and Flanders. But its defining feature was not a fixed resemblance to any single place: at Corporal Trim’s suggestion, each house was made independent, able to hook on or off. Uncle Toby and Trim exchanged looks of mutual congratulation as the carpenter put the plan into effect.

The resulting construction could be rearranged into the plan of whatever town they chose. Drusen appears among the identities the model took on the following summer, alongside Landen, Trerebach, and Santvliet. Its significance lies in that interchangeability: Drusen is not a permanent settlement in the bowling-green landscape but one configuration in a system designed to turn the same pieces into successive military settings.

A Name in the Changing Campaigns

The narration calls the assembled town a perfect Proteus, emphasizing its capacity for transformation. The list of towns extends beyond the first group: the model also becomes Ostend, Menin, Aeth, and Dendermond. Drusen belongs to this serial geography, where each place-name marks another possible arrangement for the miniature works and another occasion for Toby and Trim’s military imagination.

Later, Drusen returns in a contrasting list of remembered campaigns. Uncle Toby’s earlier excitement had moved from Amberg, Rhinberg, Limbourg, Huy, and Bonn in one year to Landen, Trerebach, Drusen, and Dendermond in the next. In that recollection, Drusen is no longer presented as an active new arrangement but as part of the catalogue of scenes that used to hurry his blood.

Recurrence and Decline

The later mention of Drusen occurs as Uncle Toby’s pleasures are slipping away. A consultation with Trim about the demolition of Dunkirk briefly rallies the ideas associated with those pleasures, but the narrator describes the return as temporary: stillness and silence enter the parlour, and listlessness settles beside Toby. The former succession of campaigns and defensive works no longer sustains him.

The contrast gives Drusen a modest but clear narrative role. First, it belongs to the model’s lively capacity for change; later, it survives as a name in memory, set against the quiet that has replaced Toby’s military projects. The town’s repeated appearance thus measures not a change in Drusen itself, but the decline of the imaginative activity that once made it—and the other model towns—feel newly present.