Toby begins planning fortifications on the bowling green

Toby begins planning fortifications on the bowling green when the map that helps him endure a painful groin wound becomes a model for recreating military engineering in the countryside. The project grows from recovery into a shared, absorbing pursuit: study gives way to plans for earthworks, and the private bowling green becomes the imagined ground of campaigns that Toby and Corporal Trim will conduct together.

The wound and the map

Confined by the wound he received at Namur, Toby finds even the fortification terms that describe the ground around him a source of frustration. He cannot retreat from the ravelin without entering the half-moon, leave the covered way without falling down the counterscarp, or cross the dyke without risking the ditch. These small but repeated obstacles fret him, and the narrator connects his inward agitation to the bodily aggravation of the wound. After three months of pain and sorrow, Toby resolves to find a way out of his confinement.

The decisive object is a large map of Namur, its town, citadel, and environs, mounted on a board. The detail matters: Toby wants enough surrounding ground to locate the precise place where the stone struck him, in a traverse about thirty toises from the returning angle of the trench opposite the salient angle of the demi-bastion of St. Roch. A pin can mark the spot. The map thus gives spatial order to an injury that has kept him physically still, allowing him to revisit its circumstances through military geography rather than through bodily movement.

The map succeeds beyond its immediate purpose. It spares Toby repeated explanations of how he was wounded and, more consequentially, becomes the means by which he acquires his military Hobby-Horse. The recovery is therefore not simply a return to ordinary life: the map offers a new field of attention that will eventually draw him beyond the bed and into a sustained imaginative and practical project.

Study becomes a passion

Once he has obtained the map, Toby applies himself to it with unusual diligence. Because his recovery depends, as the narration presents it, on the passions and affections of his mind, he tries to master the subject sufficiently to discuss it without emotion. His first purpose is therapeutic: talking about the fortifications calmly might keep military thought from stirring the wound.

In a fortnight of close study he learns enough to speak with some clarity, using marginal notes and Gobesius’s work on military architecture and artillery. Before two months have passed, he can describe the attack on the advanced counterscarp and range well beyond the gate of St. Nicolas, where he was wounded. He follows operations across the Maes and Sambre, considers diversions as far as Vauban’s line and the abbey of Salsines, and gives visitors distinct accounts of different attacks. The study that was meant to make speech less emotional instead equips him to speak at length and in detail.

Knowledge increases rather than satisfies his appetite. Within the first year of confinement he has obtained plans of nearly every fortified town in Italy and Flanders that he can find, and carefully compares them with histories of sieges, demolitions, improvements, and new works. Absorbed in reading, he forgets his wound, his confinement, and even dinner. In the second year he adds a substantial shelf of military-architecture books, including works by Ramelli, Cataneo, Stevinus, Vauban, and others. By the beginning of the third year, August 1699, he has turned to projectiles and begins with Tartaglia’s argument against the notion that a cannonball travels in a straight line while doing its damage. His original need to discuss Namur without agitation has expanded into a broad technical enthusiasm.

Trim proposes a landscape for war

The transition from books to outdoor fortification comes through Corporal Trim, whose knowledge has grown alongside his master’s. Four years of listening to Toby’s discussions and studying his plans have made Trim a capable student of strongholds; the household’s cook and chambermaid are said to think he knows as much about them as Toby. Their shared expertise is also a form of companionship. Toby loves Trim and treats a faithful servant as a humble friend, allowing him to speak even though Trim’s principal fault is his fondness for advising and hearing himself talk.

Trim presents his proposal while standing erect and pointing with an open hand to a map of Dunkirk pinned against the hangings. Paper works, he argues, are paltry beside the fortifications the two could make together in the country if they had a rood or a rood and a half of ground. Toby could mark out the polygon and its exact lines and angles; Trim would dig the fosse, throw earth toward the town for the scarp and toward the open country for the counterscarp, and shape the glacis. He proposes facing the earthworks with turf, or gazons, and building the walls and parapets the same way. Toby answers with the engineering reason for the choice: a cannonball can enter a gazon without bringing down rubble to fill the fosse and ease an assault.

Trim imagines more than a model to look at. He offers to work under Toby’s direction, constructing batteries, saps, ditches, and palisades, and pictures visitors travelling twenty miles to see the result. His plan turns Toby’s accumulated knowledge into a practical collaboration: Toby supplies measurements, military judgment, and command; Trim supplies labor, initiative, and a scheme for giving the maps a physical counterpart.

The bowling green becomes the chosen ground

As Trim describes the project, Toby blushes, but the narration identifies the blush as joy rather than guilt, modesty, or anger. The proposal has caught fire in his imagination. Trim continues, imagining a campaign beginning when the king and the Allies take the field and towns being demolished in succession. Toby repeatedly urges him to say no more, then gives him a guinea and orders him to bring supper. The interruption does not quiet the plan: Toby cannot eat, cannot sleep, and spends the night turning Trim’s description over in his mind. Two hours before daylight he has settled on their departure and worked out its plan.

The exact site has been waiting within Toby’s family landscape. Behind his small country house in Shandy lies a kitchen garden of about half an acre; beyond it, screened by a tall yew hedge, is a bowling green with just about the rood and a half Trim requested. The narrated connection is immediate: as Trim names the needed acreage, the bowling green presents itself to Toby’s imagination as the very ground for their project. The hedge offers seclusion from the house, while rough holly and dense flowering shrubs screen the other three sides. Toby’s pleasure includes the thought that the work can be enjoyed in private, though the narrator gently punctures that hope: an undertaking occupying so much ground cannot remain unknown.

From convalescence to departure

The bowling-green plan also changes the direction of Toby’s recovery. When the surgeon says the wound is beginning to heal and may dry up in five or six weeks if there is no fresh exfoliation, Toby hears not reassurance but a delay before action. He is impatient to put the design into practice and privately instructs Trim to pack lint and dressings and hire a four-horse carriage for noon, when his brother will be away on the Exchange. He leaves a bank-note for the surgeon and a letter of tender thanks for his brother, packs the maps, fortification books, and instruments, and sets out for Shandy with a crutch on one side and Trim on the other.

The immediate cause of this sudden departure is comic and material as well as imaginative. Toby’s crowded table cannot comfortably contain his maps and instruments. Reaching for his tobacco box, he knocks down his compasses; in stooping to recover them, his sleeve brings down an instrument case and snuffers, and his attempt to catch the falling objects sends books by Blondel and the Count de Pagan tumbling from the table. The mishap helps turn an already formed desire into a decision to leave the cramped room and pursue the project at home.

The narration announces the campaigns of Toby and Trim as a substantial under-plot, but pauses before recounting them and shifts the scene elsewhere. At this point, the decisive change is already clear: the map that located Toby’s wound has led him through years of study to a physical plan, a chosen site, and a journey with Trim. The bowling green promises exercise and fresh air as well as play, and Trim even predicts that the activity will help Toby’s wound heal. Military knowledge, convalescence, and companionship converge in a miniature landscape where Toby can move from following recorded sieges to directing new ones.