Animal Farm

Chapter VI

Chapter VI

All that year the animals worked like slaves. 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.

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. This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented
himself from it would have his rations reduced by half. Even so, it was
found necessary to leave certain tasks undone. 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. It was possible to foresee
that the coming winter would be a hard one.

The windmill presented unexpected difficulties. 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. But
the problem the animals could not at first solve was how to break up the
stone into pieces of suitable size. 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. Only after weeks of vain effort did
the right idea occur to somebody-namely, to utilise the force of gravity.
Huge boulders, far too big to be used as they were, were lying all over
the bed of the quarry. 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. Transporting
the stone when it was once broken was comparatively simple. 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. By late summer a sufficient store of stone had accumulated, and
then the building began, under the superintendence of the pigs.

But it was a slow, laborious process. 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. Nothing
could have been achieved without Boxer, whose strength seemed equal to
that of all the rest of the animals put together. 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. 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.
Clover warned him sometimes to be careful not to overstrain himself, but
Boxer would never listen to her. His two slogans, "I will work harder"
and "Napoleon is always right," seemed to him a sufficient answer to all
problems. He had made arrangements with the cockerel to call him
three-quarters of an hour earlier in the mornings instead of half an hour.
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.

The animals were not badly off throughout that summer, in spite of the
hardness of their work. If they had no more food than they had had in
Jones's day, at least they did not have less. 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. And in many ways the animal method of doing things was more
efficient and saved labour. Such jobs as weeding, for instance, could be
done with a thoroughness impossible to human beings. And again, since no
animal now stole, it was unnecessary to fence off pasture from arable
land, which saved a lot of labour on the upkeep of hedges and gates.
Nevertheless, as the summer wore on, various unforeseen shortages began to
make them selves felt. There was need of paraffin oil, nails, string, dog
biscuits, and iron for the horses' shoes, none of which could be produced
on the farm. Later there would also be need for seeds and artificial
manures, besides various tools and, finally, the machinery for the
windmill. How these were to be procured, no one was able to imagine.