And in many ways the animal method of doing things was more efficient and saved labour. ![]() The advantage of only having to feed themselves, and not having to support five extravagant human beings as well, was so great that it would have taken a lot of failures to outweigh it. If they had no more food than they had had in Jones's day, at least they did not have less. ![]() The animals were not badly off throughout that summer, in spite of the hardness of their work. And in his spare moments, of which there were not many nowadays, he would go alone to the quarry, collect a load of broken stone, and drag it down to the site of the windmill unassisted. He had made arrangements with the cockerel to call him three-quarters of an hour earlier in the mornings instead of half an hour. His two slogans, "I will work harder" and "Napoleon is always right," seemed to him a sufficient answer to all problems. Clover warned him sometimes to be careful not to overstrain himself, but Boxer would never listen to her. To see him toiling up the slope inch by inch, his breath coming fast, the tips of his hoofs clawing at the ground, and his great sides matted with sweat, filled everyone with admiration. When the boulder began to slip and the animals cried out in despair at finding themselves dragged down the hill, it was always Boxer who strained himself against the rope and brought the boulder to a stop. Nothing could have been achieved without Boxer, whose strength seemed equal to that of all the rest of the animals put together. Frequently it took a whole day of exhausting effort to drag a single boulder to the top of the quarry, and sometimes when it was pushed over the edge it failed to break. By late summer a sufficient store of stone had accumulated, and then the building began, under the superintendence of the pigs.īut it was a slow, laborious process. The horses carried it off in cart-loads, the sheep dragged single blocks, even Muriel and Benjamin yoked themselves into an old governess-cart and did their share. Transporting the stone when it was once broken was comparatively simple. The animals lashed ropes round these, and then all together, cows, horses, sheep, any animal that could lay hold of the rope–even the pigs sometimes joined in at critical moments–they dragged them with desperate slowness up the slope to the top of the quarry, where they were toppled over the edge, to shatter to pieces below. Huge boulders, far too big to be used as they were, were lying all over the bed of the quarry. Only after weeks of vain effort did the right idea occur to somebody–namely, to utilise the force of gravity. There seemed no way of doing this except with picks and crowbars, which no animal could use, because no animal could stand on his hind legs. ![]() But the problem the animals could not at first solve was how to break up the stone into pieces of suitable size. There was a good quarry of limestone on the farm, and plenty of sand and cement had been found in one of the outhouses, so that all the materials for building were at hand. The windmill presented unexpected difficulties. ![]() It was possible to foresee that the coming winter would be a hard one. The harvest was a little less successful than in the previous year, and two fields which should have been sown with roots in the early summer were not sown because the ploughing had not been completed early enough. Even so, it was found necessary to leave certain tasks undone. This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half. Throughout the spring and summer they worked a sixty-hour week, and in August Napoleon announced that there would be work on Sunday afternoons as well. But they were happy in their work they grudged no effort or sacrifice, well aware that everything that they did was for the benefit of themselves and those of their kind who would come after them, and not for a pack of idle, thieving human beings. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story by George Orwell (Chapter 6)Īll that year the animals worked like slaves.
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