Drummer Hoff
by Ed Emberley
Summary
Barbara Emberley builds the text as a cumulative rhyme, the kind that keeps stacking one new detail onto the last until the whole thing fires at once. Private Parriage brings the carriage, Corporal Farrell brings the barrel, Sergeant Chowder brings the powder, and on up through a chain of ranks, each one supplying a different part of an enormous cannon called Sultan, until General Border finally gives the order to fire. Drummer Hoff, the lowest ranking soldier of the bunch and the only one who never gets anything to carry, is the one who actually lights the cannon, and the explosion bursts across two full pages in a blast of bright, overlapping color before the book jumps forward in time to show the same cannon rusted quietly in a field, overgrown with wildflowers and perched on by birds, the soldiers all long gone.
Ed Emberley illustrates the whole rhyme in woodcuts, printed in flat, bold blocks of color that mix the loud, saturated palette of 1960s poster art with the stiff, formal posture of old fashioned military engravings, each soldier standing at attention in his own separate block of pattern and color, so that the cast keeps growing across the page in the same orderly, stacked fashion as the rhyme itself. It is short enough to read in one sitting even to the youngest listeners, roughly three to seven, and its cumulative structure, gaining one line and one rank with every page, makes it an easy one for children to start reciting along with an adult well before they can read the words themselves, the eventual bang landing as a genuine payoff after so much careful, orderly buildup.
Historical Context & Significance
Drummer Hoff, published by Prentice Hall in 1967, won Ed Emberley the 1968 Caldecott Medal. That year's Honor books were Leo Lionni's Frederick, Taro Yashima's Seashore Story and Ed Young's The Emperor and the Kite. He had come one step short of it the year before, as the sole runner up for the 1967 medal with One Wide River to Cross, another collaboration with his wife, the librarian and writer Barbara Emberley.
The book's ending, an elaborate war machine reduced to a rusted, flower covered relic, has left its actual meaning open to real disagreement. Some readers take the whole rhyme as gentle anti war commentary building toward that final, overgrown cannon, while Ed Emberley himself said plainly that his primary purpose was to entertain rather than to argue a position, leaving both readings live in a book short enough that most children come back to it long before they are old enough to notice the argument at all.