a tingling sensation up and
down the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in
his possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches,
the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the
waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of
marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of
massed planes, the booming of guns -- after six days of this, when the
great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia
had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their
hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on
the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them
to pieces -- at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not
after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia
was an ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place.
Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once,
that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a
demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it
happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were
luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people,
including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the
Spies. On a scar