Tristram announces a "new scene of events." He is going to leave everything: "the breeches in the taylor's hands," "my mother," "Slop [with] the full profits of all my dishonours," "Le Fever to recover, and get home from Marseilles" as best he can. He would even leave himself, "but 'tis impossible, — I must go along with you to the end of the work."
He takes us back to the beginnings of Toby and Trim's fortifications, showing us what they built and how they went about it. The soil was good, the plans were precise, and Toby and Trim enjoyed it all. They would stake out in exact proportion the town currently under siege; then Trim would dig the ditches and build parapets and towers to scale. As the battle progressed, they moved accordingly: Toby, "with the Gazette in his hand," Trim "with a spade on his shoulder to execute the contents." They destroyed according to the newspaper description, also in exact proportion: "What intense pleasure swimming in his eye as he stood over the corporal, reading the paragraph ten times over to him, as he was at work, lest, peradventure, he should make the breach an inch too wide, — or leave it an inch too narrow."
They continued "in this track of happiness for many years" since it was a long war. Instead of a new suit for Christmas one year, Toby "treated himself with a handsome sentry-box" ("in case of rain"). After that, they had "a little model of a town built for them," and this town served for all the towns successively under siege: "It was Landen, and Trerebach, and Santvliet, and Drusen, and Hagenau, — and then it was Ostend and Menin, and Aeth and Dendermond." The only thing missing was ammunition for the little "brass field pieces." It was just as well, says Tristram, "For so full were the papers . . . of the incessant firings kept up by the besiegers, — and so heated was my uncle Toby's imagination with the accounts of them, that he . . . [would have] infallibly shot away all his estate." Trim supplied a solution, and "this will not be explained the worse, for setting off, as I generally do, at a little distance from the subject."
Trim's unfortunate brother, Tom (his misfortunes are spoken of in Book 2, Chapter 17, and Book 4, Chapter 4), had sent him "a Montero-cap and two Turkish tobacco pipes," and Trim has a plan. Before describing Trim's plan, Tristram eulogizes him — "Tread lightly on his ashes, ye men of genius, — for he was your kinsman" — and wishes that he were alive to share the benefits of Tristram's prosperity. He also looks to the future when, in his book, he must tell about the death of Uncle Toby: "Gracious powers! . . . when I shall arrive at this dreaded page, deal not with me, then, with a stinted hand."
