H.G. Wells would probably be surprised to learn that his slim volume "Little Wars" has achieved status as the Old Testament of wargaming. In its opening chapter he tells of a far earlier attempt to immortalise a wargame in literature. "There was a Someone", he writes, "Who fought Little Wars in the days of Queen Anne; a garden Napoleon. His game was inaccurately observed and insufficiently recorded by Laurence Sterne". H.G. was referring to Sterne's 18th century classic "Tristram Shandy", a work that was among other things rambling and obscure, and which together with its author's puckish humour and compulsion to record every detail, makes heavy reading at times. This should not deter anyone from keeping it by his bedside however, for one of its major characters; Uncle Toby, is just about the finest pen portrait of the eternal wargamer in English literature. Kreigsspeil was no more than a gleam in an unknown Prussian's monocle when the book was begun in 1759, but as Sterne's father had served as a lieutenant in Marlborough's army, and Sterne himself often accompanied him on his later travels, the writer may well have drawn the characters of Uncle Toby and his faithful servant Corporal Trim from a nucleus of real life eccentrics among his earlier acquaintances. Captain Toby's fetish was siegecraft. This was hardly surprising since at the siege of Namur in 1695 he had suffered a grievous wound in the groin; ("In one of the traverses about thirty toises from the returning angle of the trench opposite to the salient angle of the demi-bastions of St. Roch"). During his four year convalescence he hit upon the idea of pasting a map of the Namur fortifications on to a board so that with macabre attention to detail he could pin-point the precise location on which he was standing when hit. This, Sterne comments, was the first symptom of his new 'Hobby-Horse'. The next step, which may have a ring of familiarity, was a frenetic study of all things martial. Captain Toby read all the military classics from fortifications, through strategy and tactics, until he reached the contemporary ultimate -- ballistics. At this point Corporal Trim enters with a suggestion that led to the sudden and miraculous recover of the captain's unmentionable wound. Marlborough had recently begun his new campaign in Flanders, and Trim's idea was to obtain plans of each successive town besieged and scale it down to the size of the bowling green adjoining Toby's country house. There in seclusion they would simulate the Allied approaches at leisure in accordance with the daily newspaper reports received from the Continent. Every wargamer who has encountered a fresh range of figurines, or set of rules will recognise the delight with which Uncle Toby received this idea. Throughout the first year of the campaign the two warriors contentedly backed their way through their miniaturised earthworks. "There could not have been a greater sight in the world, than on a post morning, in which a practicable breach had been made by the Duke of Marlborough in the main body of the place to have... ...observed the spirit with which my Uncle Toby, with Trim behind him, sallied forth; the one with the Gazette" in his hand, the other with a spade on his shoulder to execute the contents". Captain Toby's siegecraft was exact. He "stood over the corporal, reading the paragraph ten times over to him, as he was at work, peradventure, he should make the breach an inch too wide - or leave it an inch too narrow". Second Year Improvements In the second year of the campaign, when Uncle Toby took Leige and Ruremonde, he, "thought he might afford the expense of four handsome draw-bridges", together with a sentry box "in case of rain". Sophistication brings its problems however; one moonlit night, while Trim was 'showing the fortifications' to his girl friend Bridget, one of the new drawbridges was mysteriously broken. "Believe me". commented Tristrams father, who unlike Toby was not fooled by Trims doubtful excuse; "No bridge, or bastion, or sallying point that ever was constructed in this world, can hold out against such artillery". Trim's ingenuity was responsible for another minor catastrophe; the demise of Tristram's father's boots; heirlooms worn by an ancestor in the battle of Marston Moor. Thinking that they would be useful as a pair of mortars to be employed in the siege of Messina, Trim cut off their tops and bored touch holes in them with a red hot poker. Only the good natures of all concerned prevented a serious family rift. In the third year, when Amberg, Bonn, Rhinburg, Huy and Limbourg were taken, Corporal Trim felt it was high time a model town was incorporated within the interior polygon to serve for the increasing number of towns that were falling to the allies. Toby agreed, suggesting the refinement of individual houses that could belhooked on or off' to form a more exact plan of whichever town they were concerned with. That next summer their town served as Landen, Tearbach; St. Venant; Drusen; Hagenau; Ostend; Menin; Aeth and Dendermond in rapid succession. The fourth year saw the introduction of a hitherto missing ingredient - a church. Trim's idea of hanging miniature bells within the steeple was rejected by Toby who felt that any spare metal would be better employed cast into cannon. They were in fact amassing a considerable armoury. Pewter shaving mugs, monetary crowns and leaden gutters were commissioned as raw material for guns. Trim even climbed illegally on the roof of the village church for "spare ends". Leaden weights from the nursery window supplied two further pieces of redoubt, while the useless sash pullies formed the carriage wheels. A showpiece of half a dozen brass field guns was planted three either side of the sentry box, "leading the way," as Toby remarked droolingly, for a still larger train of half inch bore guns". One can see here a further stage in the development of a wargamer; amassing a collection of infinite size must, as Sterne reasons: "always be the case in hobby-horsical affairs". When in the fifth year the rood and a half of land became too small for their purpose, they were forced to run their first parallel, ("which being correctly at least three hundred toises from the fortress"), along the kitchen garden between two rows of cabbages and cauliflowers. Unhappily their main assault was forestalled by a cow, which broke into the bowling green and ate two and a half rations of dried grass, plus the facings of the hornwork and covered way. Trim had to be restrained from having the animal tried by court martial and shot. That year, with Lisle besieged, and Ghent and Bruges falling into Allied hands, Captain Toby began to feel a nagging desire to feed his cannon with live ammunition. It was just as well that his great artillery would not bear powder, for as Sterne says, so heated was Toby's imagination with the newspaper accounts of the incessant fire kept up by the besiegers, that he would have "shot away all his estate". Here once again Trim rises to the occasion by charging his six sentry box cannon to the brim with tobacco, which, by means of leather tubing attached to a couple of tobacco pipes made it possible to play off the "two cross batteries at the same time against the counter guard which faced the counterscarp where the attack was to be made that morning". Toby, newly arrived and spotting Trim had pressed, seized the other pipe and the rest of that day passed in a silent contented barrage of tobacco smoke. Perfection? It would have been heartwarming if Sterne had felt able to leave them thus in the knowledge that their wargame had achieved perfection. Perhaps in these days of enlightenment, some may feel that Captain Toby's rule system is a little unrefined, even when placed beside Wells' Spring Breech Loader Gun, but as H.G. himself wrote: "Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim were playing Little Wars on a scale and with an elaboration exceeding even the richness and beauty of the contemporary game". Even Tristrams sardonic father was moved to comment that if anyone other than his brother Toby had done such a thing it would have been looked on by the world as one of the most refined satires on the way in which Louis XIV had conducted his war. Sterne then having made his point and hammered it gently home, rounds it off by giving Uncle Toby two sound reasons why he should abandon his great wargame after five years. The signing of the Treaty of Utrecht which saw the cessation of operations on tile Continent, inevitably had similar repercussions on the bowling green also. (Until then only temporary setbacks had occurred when a west wind delayed the Flanders mail). The second reason was Toby's infatuation with the widow Wadman who -- even discounting the not entirely explained nature of Captain Toby's wound -- disarmed him entirely. "The trumpet of war", writes Sterne, "Fell out of his hands"! We are left with Toby's epitaph, surely the finest that any wargamer could wish for: "Peace and comfort rest for evermore upon thy head! - Thou enviedst no man's comforts - insultedst no man's opinions - Thou blackenedst no man's character - devourest - no man's bread; gently, with faithful Trim behind thee, didst thou amble round the little circle of thy pleasures, jostling no creature in thy way:- for each one's sorrows, thou hadst a tear, - for each man's need, thou hadst a shilling; thy fortifications, my dear Uncle Toby, shall never be demolished." Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 152 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1974 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com