Tales of the Long Bow is a collection of short stories by G. K. Chesterton.
It begins merely as a series of stories about men who literally enact common figures of speech, but these men's antics soon spiral out of control, until they almost by accident bring their society crashing to the ground.
The collection is in the public domain and can be read here
.
Tropes featured in this work include:
- Hollywood Tactics: Lampshaded and justified. The book points out that under almost any imaginable set of circumstances, a war between the government of a fully industrialized modern country and a group of rebels armed primarily with bows would be a Curb-Stomp Battle in the government's favour. However, the peculiar social conditions prevailing at the time of the rebellion were such as to turn all the normal rules of strategy and logistics on their ear and completely paralyze the government armies. For example, under normal circumstances the government's armies would be well supplied with bullets for their guns while the rebels would have to take the time to make their arrows by hand. However, the workers of the ammunition factories were all on strike due to the government welching on its promises, and as such the government was left without supplies while the rebels were able to purchase what resources they needed.
- Literal Metaphor: The unifying theme of the story.
- Colonel Crane, having sworn to "eat his hat", proceeds to wear a cabbage on his head for the course of several weeks in order that it might qualify as "his hat". He then eats it.
- Robert Hood literally sets the Thames on fire, by throwing a torch into it and touching off the pollution that was fouling the river.
- As the capstone of his campaign to smuggle pigs, Captain Pierce starts airdropping them in from a blimp by parachute. In other words, he makes pigs fly.
- Reverend White acquires a white elephant. Not something useless or burdensome, but a literal albino elephant.
- Enoch Oates devises a special chemical process by which he can literally make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
- Mister Green comes up with a mathematical proof, based on the relativity of motion, that clearly demonstrates that the cow has jumped over the moon.
- Colonel Blair produces a literal "castle in the air": a flying castle-shaped balloon.
- And as for the name of the whole collection: to "draw the long bow" was an English metaphor for telling an exaggerated story, but when they come into conflict with the government the League of the Long Bow use literal longbows as their primary weapon.
