Afghan Regular Army - Infantryman 1857.jpg

1. Infantryman 1857

This figure is reconstructed from descriptions given by Henry Bellew, who saw several infantry regiments at Kandahar, each distinctively attired in a mixture of British cast-offs and locally-made copies.(6) One wore red jackets, and another a ‘drab-coloured uniform of European pattern’, while a third seems to have had a different uniform for each company – one company wore blue jackets, black trousers and white forage-caps, with white cross-belts so dirty they were almost brown; another wore red jackets, white trousers, cross-belts and ‘old-fashioned shakos’; a third was ‘clothed in a uniform of drab-coloured cloth throughout’.

Bellew several times mentions the Afghans’ preference for red uniforms, stating that ‘the red coat is held in the highest estimation by the Afghan rulers, and is equally dreaded by their subjects’. He claims that in every expedition the army was ‘always furnished with a contingent … dressed in red coats and shakos’ because of the morale effect they had on the enemy. The Central Asian traveller Vambéry, ay Herat shortly after its capture by Dost Mohammed in 1863, also mentions that the Afghan soldier’s ‘favourite garment is the red English coat, from which, even in sleep, he will not part’.(7)

Bellew, Vambéry and, in 1872, Marsh(8) all mention the shortness of Afghan infantrymen’s trousers. ‘The cut of these seemed to be regulated on principles of the strictest economy,’ observed Bellew, ‘for they were, in each instance, some four or five inches too short, and were secured below the foot by long and conspicuous straps of white cloth, to prevent their being drawn too high up the leg.’ Vambéry mentions that the Afghans he saw ‘might have been mistaken for European troops, if most of them had not had on their bare feet the pointed Kabuli shoe, and had not had their short trousers so tightly stretched that they threatened every moment to burst and fly up above the knee.’ Marsh simply says that ‘their trousers were too short, but well strapped down’.

Bellew also describes the uniform of a regimental band seen at Kalat-i-Ghilzai, consisting of ‘dirty yellow trousers, with a broad stripe of bright green down the legs, and drummers’ jackets and shakos. They looked more like a troop of harlequins than military musicians’.

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