Afghan Regular Army - Artilleryman 1878-85.jpg

6. Artilleryman 1878–85

As early as 1857 Lumsden states that Afghan regular gunners were ‘clothed in our old artillery uniforms’; whether he is alluding to East India Company artillery or British Army artillery uniforms isn’t clear, but since he was an officer of the EIC the former seems more likely. In 1879 the men of a mountain battery accompanying Yakub Beg are recorded wearing blue uniforms and brass helmets, so it is tempting to imagine that these may have been at least based on the dress of the old Bengal Horse Artillery; BHA helmets were certainly worn by a guard cavalry regiment seen by Lord Roberts the same year (see the caption to plate 8).

Mitford describes artillerymen’s helmets abandoned along the Afghan line of retreat after the Battle of Charasiab as being well-made, ‘with plated mounts and a red horsehair plume, the plate in front bearing three guns and a Persian inscription.’ After the Battle of Peiwar Kotal in December 1878 J.A.S. Colquhoun similarly records that in the Afghan artillery camp ‘the gunners had left their silver-mounted brass helmets and forage caps’,(19) while Charles Robertson mentions that ‘black forage-caps, with red tufts, lay strewed about in all directions.’(20)

The main source for the figure in this plate is a picture in the Illustrated London News of 16 May 1885, recording a durbar between Abdur Rahman and the British at Rawalpindi in April that year, at which Abdur Rahman’s escort included an Afghan mountain battery. W.J. Honner, who was present, records the gunners’ dress on this occasion as ‘somewhat similar to our own mountain battery dress, the cap being particularly striking – a dark blue band tipped with a red cap identical in shape and material to an ordinary football or yachtsman’s cap’.(21) The shoulder-strap arrangement securing his sword-scabbard may only have been introduced in the 1880s. The sword itself is a Cossack shashka(for which see the caption to plate 8).

• Источник: Ian Heath. A most villainous-looking cavalcade: The Afghan Regular Army in the 19th Century / Wargames Illustrated №№93 - 95