Afghan Regular Army - Kabuli Infantryman 1872.jpg

3. Kabuli Infantryman 1872

Both Marsh and Bellew(11) record details of Afghan garrison troops seen in Kandahar in 1872, the most interesting of whom were a Kabuli regiment wearing ‘a tight jacket and trousers, cut on the old English pattern’, which were made from a local striped woollen cloth described as resembling bed-ticking – i.e. the material used at the time for mattresses and pillows (for those to young to remember it, the traditional English bed-ticking that Marsh and Bellew had in mind, which survived in use into the mid-20th century, was traditionally off-white, in fact almost blue-grey, with narrow dark blue stripes and a tendency to look grubby). Cross-belts and pouches were brown leather, while their headdress was a conical, quilted red kullah with a tuft of red or scarlet wool fixed to the point. Marsh considered that the absence of turbans gave their shaved heads ‘a very bare, cold appearance’. Of the other two regiments Bellew saw, one wore red jackets and the other (a Kandahari unit) ‘a uniform of dingy yellow ochre’, perhaps indicating a form of khaki.

The shaven head was characteristic of the Muslim Afghans at this date. Shaving off the beard, however, along with the wearing of side-whiskers and often a moustache too, were imitations of British practice. Lumsden in 1857 considered that shaving off the beard was ‘in order to render the recognition of a deserter more probable’.

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