Afghan Regular Army - Highland Guard 1879.jpg

5. ‘Highland Guard’ 1879

The best description of the uniform worn by this unusual unit is to be found in The Graphic illustrated newspaper of 26 July 1879, which says they were ‘dressed in a dark green tunic, cut after precisely the same fashion as our own Scotch contingent, with a long skirt of the Macgregor tartan reaching below the knee; beneath this white drawers, gaiters, and native shoes. Their head-dress is a felt helmet, of no pretty pattern, covered with drab khakdir.(17) All the men shave their chins, wear short mutton-chop whiskers, and moustache.’ Note in particular that their tunics are here described as green, and not red as might have been expected (and, indeed, as they are portrayed in two volumes of Osprey’s ‘Men-at-Arms’ series, one of which – apparently drawing on an unspecified contemporary source, which I have not myself encountered during my research – states in addition that their facings were yellow).(18) This may be explained by the fact that there was more than one such unit, the so-called ‘Highland Guard’ being one of the three Ardali(or ‘Orderly’) regiments. Mitford, however, gives quite different dress for the latter, categorically stating that a dark brown uniform with red facings, and not a kilt, ‘conclusively proved’ a soldier’s connection with the ‘Orderly’ regiments.

Though variously described by contemporaries as being Mackenzie or Macgregor tartan, the pattern of the kilt was apparently not really (or not always) tartan at all, two Scots officers at Gandamak in 1879, after arguing the point heatedly for some time, eventually agreeing to describe it as ‘Rob Roy’. Nor was it necessarily even a kilt: Yates describes it in 1885 as simply ‘a piece of checked cloth in red and blue squares’ worn round the waist ‘like a towel’, while somewhat later Frank Martin describes the ‘kilts’ worn by an Afghan bagpipe band he saw as ‘represented by a check print shirt, which hangs below the tunic and outside the trousers’. Nor was the check pattern always the same, Gordon Creed recording that the kilts of guardsmen he saw at Gandamak were ‘made of different colours’, while photographs show that some didn’t have a check pattern at all.

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