It was also announced that the gun would be fired every year on Napoleon's birthday, as well as on the other two anniversaries. He took his meals alone, with two dogs to wait upon him, and always ate from the Crown Derby dinner service which had been in the glass cupboard in the drawing-room. Even in the farmhouse, it was said, Napoleon inhabited separate apartments from the others. When he did appear, he was attended not only by his retinue of dogs but by a black cockerel who marched in front of him and acted as a kind of trumpeter, letting out a loud "cock-a-doodle-doo" before Napoleon spoke. Napoleon himself was not seen in public as often as once in a fortnight. All the same, there were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more food.Īll orders were now issued through Squealer or one of the other pigs. The animals saw no reason to disbelieve him, especially as they could no longer remember very clearly what conditions had been like before the Rebellion. On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred per cent, three hundred per cent, or five hundred per cent, as the case might be. There were times when it seemed to the animals that they worked longer hours and fed no better than they had done in Jones's day. Throughout the year the animals worked even harder than they had worked in the previous year To rebuild the windmill, with walls twice as thick as before, and to finish it by the appointed date, together with the regular work of the farm, was a tremendous labour. But they saw now that the Commandment had not been violated for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball. It ran: "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause." Somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals' memory. Clover asked Benjamin to read her the Sixth Commandment, and when Benjamin, as usual, said that he refused to meddle in such matters, she fetched Muriel. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story by George Orwell (Chapter 8)Ī few days later, when the terror caused by the executions had died down, some of the animals remembered–or thought they remembered–that the Sixth Commandment decreed "No animal shall kill any other animal." And though no one cared to mention it in the hearing of the pigs or the dogs, it was felt that the killings which had taken place did not square with this.
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